How many times have you heard the saying, “You have the same number of hours in a day as Beyonce”? That’s great to light a fire under your booty, but what that line doesn’t mention is her team, her systems, and how she’s learned to delegate all that she does.
(I’m assuming. I have no idea for sure, yet I have a feeling that Beyonce has a team of folks buzzing around her. I seriously doubt she’s folding her socks.)
Regardless of whether you have a team or you’re a one-person show, the more thoughtful you are with your time, the more you’ll have to invest in things you love.
Throughout the years, I’ve learned a few tips about maximizing my time. They’ve helped me scale my business, bring on a team, and work less hours than ever while still remaining profitable and steadily growing. These tips have also helped me find time in my day to do the things I enjoy. I don’t want to say I have my cake and I eat it, too… but I totally do. It’s fantastic and here’s how you can do the same in your life and business!
1. Batch Everything
Batching is a fantastic way to ensure you’re using your time wisely. When you batch tasks, you keep your energy focused in one area, so you’re not jumping around from task to task (and having to refocus your brain each time).
Think about it like hosting a dinner party. Do you make one dish from start to finish, then move on to the next one? No! That would be incredibly stressful. Instead, you look at the recipes and you might see that you need to mince garlic for a few of them, so you mince all the garlic you need at once. After all, you’re already doing it, why not do it for everything at the same time?
The key here is to plan ahead. Jumping around is a huge waste of time. It takes about 25 minutes to refocus on the task at hand after an interruption. If you’re distracted by switching tasks just three times, you’re losing more than an hour of dedicated, focused time from your day.
When you think about your week from start to finish and group together tasks that require the same tools or energy, you’ll no longer lose time refocusing on a new type of task.
For example: because you planned ahead, you can decide to do all of your marketing tasks on one day rather than scatter your energy around throughout the week (like mincing garlic three separate times in the preparation of one meal).
WHAT CAN YOU BATCH?
I group my tasks together based on the energy output it requires. The energy is either internal or external. All of my client work gets grouped together over the space of a few days. That’s external work because it requires me to be “on” and outwardly thinking. While I’m in this zone, I don’t break and do something else, like an internal task, because it requires me to turn on another area of my brain.
You can batch your client work days, sales call days, content creation, marketing, research, admin work, the list goes on.
2. Plan Out Your Day
Have you ever heard that UPS trucks almost always turn right instead of left? It’s to maximize time and resources by ensuring they’re not caught up making left-hand turns. Since I learned that, I’ve taken an extra 20 seconds at home to plot out my route for the day to be as efficient as possible and eliminate turning left.
You can do that for your business, too. Plan out your day ahead of time. By batching like tasks together and creating a non-negotiable schedule that you stick to every week, you will remove the left-hand turns in your day.
Think… no more duplicating efforts because you can’t recall whether you replied to that email, not waking up in the middle of the night soaked in panic-sweat that you didn’t send in an important document, or wasting time driving around because you didn’t take the time to notice where you were going in the day.
Like batching, planning out your day helps you save so much time by eliminating unnecessary steps, repeating yourself, and backtracking.
3. Find a System that Works For You
One of the reasons I was always successful is because I always had a schedule. Okay, that isn’t totally true. I spent a brief time believing that I had to sit in front of my desk no matter what for eight hours a day. And girlfriend, those were not successful hours.
That time was painful because I didn’t have a system to support me. I’d do a little of this, forget I had to do that, and spent way more time writing copy than I should have because I didn’t give myself a set limit of how long to spend on one task.
As soon as I scrapped that belief and implemented a system to tell me what to work on and when, I was able to find more flow in my business and ideas came to me easily. I also got everything done I needed to and then I could go play or do more work… whatever interested me.
Time is relative. You can continue to struggle, perform redundant tasks, and let time dribble through your fingers. Or you can have more time when you learn how to work efficiently and get the most out of every minute. The choice is yours. I hope these tips help you find the latter!
