4 Steps to Having Enough Time
When you own a business, you become intimately familiar with the phrase, “I just wish I had more time.” Whether it’s making time for clients, family, or hobbies, there really never feels like there are enough hours in the day to do it all. Often, when I am speaking with a new client, they say something along the lines of, “I’ve been wanting to do Profit First for a while, but I just haven’t been able to get around to it.” After hearing so many similar sentiments, it struck me—so many of us feel like we don’t have time to even do the things that will eventually save us time (and money). I am no stranger to this phenomenon and once or twice have found myself wishing that the day was made up of more than just 24 hours. But along the way I have picked up some practices that I wanted to share here, in hopes that they will be useful to you as well.
1. Define Your Desired Outcomes
The first step to taking control of your time is understanding what your priorities are. These “desired outcomes” are not goals, but are high-level, personal ideas about what you want to achieve. Something important to remember when deciding your desired outcomes is that they can and will change depending on your season of life. While fame and fortune might be the top priority during the first few years of scaling your company, building a happy family might become a desired outcome when you start to have kids. It all depends on the season you are currently in, so it’s important to be honest with yourself about what outcomes are most important to you right now.
2. Identify and Order Your Priorities
Once you have your Desired Outcomes, it is time to identify and order your priorities as they relate to your desired outcomes. For instance, if your desired outcomes are to be a top business owner in your city and to have a close-knit family, your priorities might look like the following:
- Business
- Family Time
- Exercise
- Philanthropy
As with your Desired Outcomes, these priorities will shift as your move through each season of life. Be sure to give yourself time to reconsider these priorities periodically, and figure out how to rearrange or strengthen them.
3. Create a Time Budget
If you’re like me, you have tried and failed at time blocking in the past. Chances are you made at least one of these mistakes: you put too much on your plate while having extremely high expectations of your future self, or you tried to transpose your to-do list onto your calendar. But when it came time to get tasks done, you didn’t seem to stay on track and things started to fall through the cracks. I suggest making a spreadsheet to budget your time. On the top row put each day of the week, and on the left side write the time of day by half hour increments. Fill out the entire day with tasks, starting with your top priority and moving down to your last priority. The biggest mistake I see people make when they aim to be top performers is that they do not allocate for emergency time in their time budget. Be sure to allocate time throughout your day to take care of emergencies, or tasks that you have underestimated.
4.Protect Your Time
Now that you know your priorities and have structured your days, this last step is perhaps the most imperative. You must protect your time. I’m sure you’ve had an experience similar to this: one moment you are knee-deep in an important project when someone sends you a Slack asking to set up a meeting, so you check your calendar and realize that you need to rearrange a dinner plan, so you open your phone to text your friend and see five missed calls from your top client. Even by the time I finished writing that sentence, I had forgotten all about the original project. Protecting your time means stopping those moments from adding up into hours. If you have a hard time saying no to pop-up requests, try only allowing your clients (and even yourself) to schedule on your calendar by using a scheduling app like Calendly or ScheduleOnce. That way you can avoid the temptation to schedule over your time blocks. You may also need to practice the phrase, “I can’t address that right now, but I will have time later this afternoon during my emergency time block.” While you don’t want to make your employees, or family, feel like they are unimportant, they will soon realize that when they wait for your availability to open up, they will have your whole focus instead of a fraction of it. Soon enough, they will be your greatest cheerleaders for protecting your time, and you can rest easy knowing that you’re managing your time just as well as you can manage your cash flow with Profit First.