Getting More Accomplished in Less Time
January 17th, 2013 Taxloopholes.com Advisor
Imagine you were able to transform your relationship to time and how you organize and focus your time so that you were able to work less and accomplish more for your business.
Imagine you could consistently free up 6-8 hours per week of discretionary time to grow your company…
How would that impact your business?
It struck me this past week while talking with a new business coaching client how much we as business owners struggle creating the time to focus on what matters most.
Urgent emails; staff issues; customer fires, these all seem to suck up whatever open time we thought we were going to have.
In today’s blog (and yes it’s going to be a long one but I promise you it will be MORE than worth it!) I want to share some tangible ideas to help you upgrade your personal use of time as a business owner so that you can grow your company without working longer hours, nights, or weekends!
I know this sounds too good to be true, but I’ve seen these ideas help our business coaching clients create an average of 6-8 hours per week of discretionary time to reinvest in growing and developing their businesses within the first 90 days of joining the program!
Over the last 20 years I’ve had a passion for learning how to structure my time for maximum results.
It started off back in the days I used to be training to play in the Olympics (for about 8 years I played on the United States National Field Hockey Team). I had to figure out how to balance a rigorous training schedule with being a self-supporting college student.
But my biggest breakthroughs have come in the last five years as I’ve learned that hours worked have no bearing on results accomplished or dollars earned.
Once upon a time I thought that the way to become wealthy and successful was to work hard. But that is a Level One or Level Two reaction, NOT a Level Three solution.
People always seem amazed when they hear that I run three companies, sit on the board of two others, author an average of one book and 5 new workshops per year, and manage my family’s investment portfolio. And I do this working an average of 35 hours per week.
Not only that but I also read over 100 books each year and exercise an average of four times each week, and take a minimum of 10 weeks of vacation time a year.
I’m not trying to impress you with this, far from it. I have no illusions about myself. But there are certain things that I am world class at, and my use of time is one of them.
Hence, I am merely using myself as an example of how much you can accomplish if you leverage your time using some simple yet profoundly powerful strategies.
It’s exactly these strategies and techniques that I want to lay out and discuss with you in this letter. You see, I know you.
You’re overworked, stressed out, feeling at times like you’re having to run just to stay even, let alone get ahead.
You’re drowning in information and struggling to find an effective way to structure and organize that information.
Most of all you’re frustrated. Frustrated that you have too many “small” things that get in your way of focusing on the big stuff that really matters.
You crave a sense of control and balance in your life, and you’ll do just about anything to enjoy them.
You just don’t know how to get that control and balance back.
In the past you’ve chased after results and balance by working harder. You’ve tried working longer hours. You’ve tried working harder for the hours you do work. You’ve brought work home with you, worked while on your “vacation”, multi-tasked while driving, eating, and probably even while sleeping!
And yet it hasn’t helped. The more you do the more you find that is left to be done. It’s a vicious cycle.
A Simple Secret that Holds the Key
I want to let you in on a little secret. Working harder is not the answer.
In fact, the harder you work, chances are the less you’ll accomplish that really matters. I know this sounds easy for me to say, but hang in there with me as I walk through a key concept with you.
Many of you have heard of “Pareto’s Principle” which states that 80 percent of your efforts produce 20 percent of your results, and that 20 percent of your effort produces 80 percent of your results. Well if this is true (and my experience shows me that it is) then let’s apply this concept more rigorously.
If you take that 20 percent of your actions that generate 80 percent of your results and apply the same distinction, then 20 percent of that 20 percent produces 80 percent of 80 percent of your results. That means that 4 percent of your effort (the 20 percent of 20 percent) generates 64 percent of your results.
And if you can bear with me for another math moment, apply this distinction one more time…
This means that 1 percent (20 percent of 20 percent of 20 percent) generates 50 percent of your results! Think about it–1 percent of your highest leverage work produces 50 percent of all your results!
I used this idea to create something called the Time Mastery Pyramid™, which is an actual formula I developed about 12 months ago for you to quickly and accurately quantify the per hour value of four distinct types of time: A Time, B Time, C Time, and D Time.
D time is the 80 percent of unleveraged, wasteful time that only produces 20 percent of your total return. I call this time the “80 Percent Mass”.
C time is the leveraged 20 percent that produces 80 percent of your results. I call this time “Leveraged Time”.
For most people this is the only distinction they have ever made about time. And while it’s better than most people have, if this is your only distinction on time, you are never going to earn what you are capable of earning, both in terms of income or net worth.
Next there is B time. This is the highly focused 4 percent that generates 64 percent of your results. I call this time the “4 percent Sweet Spot”.
And finally, there is the top of the pyramid–A time–the “Magic 1 Percent”. Fully 50 percent of your results comes from these activities.
Did you know that most people not only have no idea what activities of theirs fall into the above four categories, but they don’t even know they exist? How in the world can you create more A and B time if you don’t know what activities constitute A and B time for you?
Here is the real question for you: What activities do you do that fit into each of the four time categories above? What are your D activities? What are your C activities? What are your B activities? What are you’re A activities?
When you really get this distinction and shift your focus from “putting in hours” to upgrading the type of work you do (more A and B time, and less D time) in the hours you do work, the results are amazing.
Let me share an example with you. Imagine you are an attorney who charges $300 an hour. What would your D time activities be? Things like fixing a computer glitch, or making copies, or sorting out mail, or any of the things you do that you cannot bill a client for! What should you do with these activities? Delay them, delegate them, or dump them. You simply cannot afford to do them yourself.
What would your “C time” activities be? Anything that is a billable time for you. This could include working on a legal brief, or reviewing a contract, or updating a client. Understand this: C time can provide you with a great income, but you will always have to work exceptionally hard to earn it. This is the trap that catches most high income professionals. They seek to increase their earnings by cranking out more hours. MISTAKE! More hours will only take you so far. Plus when you get there you’ll be exhausted from all that work, and you’ll be a stranger to your family!
The answer lies in A and B time. B time for this attorney might include building relationships with other professionals who refer over business. Or putting systems in place in their law firm so that their staff can get better results without needing so much of our fictional attorney’s time. It might also include creating an accounts receivable system that increases the collection on all the firms billings by 10 percent. You get the idea.
What would A time look like? This could be speaking at a large conference where this attorney is able to generate new client relationships for his or her firm that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars of billable services. Or it could be writing a book that can be used to generate new business for the firm.
See the difference yet? D time is by definition something that you should get off your plate. C time is time that you do your work more effectively. A and B time, however, are when you step out of the “doingness” of the work and do something that improves your capacity to create results, or significantly pushes back your limiting factor (e.g. generating new clients, improving a critical system, etc.)
In fact, by focusing on upgrading your USE of time instead of focusing on increasing your hours worked, you can often double or triple your income, while at the same time lowering your working hours.
It’s worked for me. Fifteen years ago I worked 65-75 hour weeks. I now earn more than double what I earned back then and work less than half the hours.
So now here comes the big question: How can you have more A and B time?
You won’t get it by “trying harder”. And you won’t get it by sitting down and saying, “Okay, let’s have A time right now.”
Sorry, it just doesn’t work that way. That would be like a parent saying to their three year old, “Right, let’s have an hour of quality time right now Junior.” How well do you think that would work?
What I’ve discovered is that to get more A and B time you have to fundamentally alter the way you structure your day and your week.
In fact, when you learn and master the ways to structure your time you will automatically enjoy more A and B time.
Focus Days and Push Days
Let me share with you a powerful concept to help you get more A and B time, and to minimize the D time that gets in the way.
I call this technique “Focus Days” and “Push Days.”
Here’s how I use it in my own life.
Mondays and Wednesdays are my Push Days. These are the days that I “push” key projects and the “work” I do forward–step-by-step. These are the days I am accessible by phone and email. These are the days I hold many of my phone meetings.
On these days I “get stuff done”.
I have set aside my Tuesdays and Thursdays as my Focus Days. These days I turn off the phones and email for the majority of the day, and focus on doing the highest value activities I can for my businesses. For me that usually means I am writing on these days. I’m writing new books; I’m writing sales copy; I’m writing business plans for my teams to implement.
In fact, I often leave the office and work remotely these days. I go to a library and write there. Or I go to a café and work there. (I find that removes the temptation to do C and D work that seems to live in every corner of my office.)
Here’s the most amazing part–I can accomplish HUGE results in 3 to 4 hours on my Focus Days that I never would have accomplished if I stayed in the office “doing” the work all day long.
(In case you’re wondering, I often will check in at the end of the day for 30-45 minutes to answer the most important phone messages or email.)
Now maybe you can’t set aside two full days a week as Focus Days, but you can find one day a week, or at the very least HALF a day a week as your Focus Day.
There are so many other ideas I want to share with you about how to master your use of time. Ideas like creating “Prime Time” blocks to get more B and C things done on your Push Days. Or, how to leverage a personal assistant so that you accomplish more with much less effort. Or, how to handle the infoload of email, project notes, to do’s, etc that threatens to drown most people.
