How many of the following statements can you relate to?
• “I have so many balls in the air, I don’t even know where to focus.”
• “I can’t believe I said THAT to one of my employees the other day—I was just so fed up with nothing being done to my standards!”
• “I’m so tired of being the only one who can get things done around here!”
• “Another year has gone by and I can’t see anything I’ve done anything to make my business better than it was last year.”
If you’re like most business owners, you’ve probably muttered something along these lines recently — if not this morning, then probably it was yesterday.
What do all of these statements have in common? The irony of owning a successful business is that time management becomes a bigger and bigger problem. In fact, the severity of your overwhelm and frustration likely is directly proportional to the success of your business.
Make Your Time Count
The secret to good time management is identifying and focusing your energy on high value activities, while successfully delegating lower value activities to others. Doing so not only frees up your time, but also has a significant impact on your bottom-line.
There are 2 challenges we all run into:
Challenge #1: Determining the most valuable use of our time
Challenge #2: Making sure that lower-value tasks get handled while we focus our time on those high value activities that move our businesses forward.
I love sharing this chart with my clients – it’s a real eye-opener! All of us are easily tempted to do the $10 – $100/hour activities. These tasks tend to feel urgent. These tasks are the ones we kid ourselves by saying, “I can take care of that myself more quickly than I can delegating it.”
Unfortunately, when we spend our time on the $10-$100/hour tasks, it’s the $1,000 – $10,000/hour activities that fall to the wayside. If you—the owner and chief strategist in your business—aren’t doing these $10,000/hour activities, no one is! No wonder you feel like you’ve been spinning your wheels.
$10/hour | $100/hour | $1,00/hour | $10,000/hour |
Running Errands | Solving a problem for a prospective of existing customer | Planning and prioritizing your day | Improving your Area of Innovation |
Talking to unqualified prospects | Talking to a qualified prospect | Negotiating with qualified prospects | Interviewing your top clients or customers to better understand their needs, challenges and frustrations |
Cold-calling (of any variety) | Writing an email to prospects of customers | Building your sales funnel | Creating value-added experiences for your top clients or customers (based on what you learned from interviewing them) |
Building and fixing your website | Creating marketing tests and experiments | Analyzing results of your marketing tests and experiments | Executing “bolt from the blue” brilliant ideas |
Doing Expense reports | Managing pay per click campaigns | Creating pay-per Click campaigns | Negotiating major deals to benefit your top clients or customers |
Working “social media” | Doing Social Media well | Doing social media with extreme competence (this is very rare) | Selling to high-value customers and members |
Cleaning, sorting | Outsourcing simple tasks | Delegating complex tasks | Attracting and selecting top-performing team members |
Attending meetings | Customer follow up | Writing sales copy | Public speaking |
Where to start? Pick a $10,000/hour task that needs your attention. Block out a couple of hours of uninterrupted time next week. Shut your door and don’t allow any interruptions.
Treat that time as you would an appointment with your best client or customer – you wouldn’t cancel it, would you? Do something nice for yourself at the end of that block of time to celebrate the actions you took to move your business forward.
Want to know more about how to make your time worth $10,000 an hour? Catch my webinar here.
Dr. Sabrina Starling, The Business Psychologist™ and author of the How to Hire the Best series is the founder of Tap the Potential.
At Tap the Potential we specialize in transforming small businesses into highly profitable, great places to work and sending business owners on 4 Week Vacations to celebrate that achievement.
Never one to accept the status quo or back down from a challenge, Dr. Sabrina’s How to Hire the Best series grew from her desire to solve the toughest hiring challenges interfering with her clients’ growth and profitability. What sprang from her experience working with entrepreneurs in rural areas catapulted her into becoming the world’s leading expert in attracting top talent in small businesses — no matter what hiring challenges those businesses are facing — and earned Tap the Potential’s reputation as the go-to resource for entrepreneurs committed to creating Great Places to Work with thriving coaching cultures and highly engaged team members working from their strengths.
With her background in psychology, and years of driving profit in small business, Dr. Starling knows what it takes to find, keep and get exceptional performance out of your biggest investment — your team members.
