I'm Dr. Paul and I'm here to share with you today the top
5 strategies for entrepreneurial time management. This is going to help.
Strategy one, let's get this out of the way right up front because it's a
misnomer. Time management. Strategy 1 is that you
accept that time cannot be managed.
Now, think about what I'm saying. Can you manage time? No.
Time comes and goes whether you do anything or not. You can't manage it, you
can't steer it, you can't direct it. You can't save it. Where would you keep
it? But we use these phrases all the time
when we talk about time. Truth is you can't manage it.
The only thing you can do is spend it. And you get to decide how you spend it
or what you spend it on. But in terms of managing it,
let's just give up on that, shall we? Are you okay with that? And that will get
us more clear about how we're going to spend it.
And that's what the other strategies are. for. Strategy number 2,
pick your economy. There are at least 2 different economies that we need to talk
about here for just a minute. And one of those is the one that most
people are familiar with. I call it the time and effort economy.
This is where employees live. Because they come in and they take
the card and punch it in the clock to start their
time. And then they punch out for lunch or the
break or whatever and then they punch back in and then they punch out
when they go home. They trade their time and their effort
for money. That's why we're calling it the time and effort economy.
Entrepreneurs don't live in a time and effort economy.
Have you noticed? You don't get paid for your time and effort.
You get paid for results. That's the second economy. The results economy
is where you get paid when you create results for
other people. I've lived in this economy my entire adult life.
It's eat what you kill. You can spend all the time and effort in the world as an
entrepreneur and never get paid for it. It's only when you create results
that you get to be paid. That's a whole different economy.
And it creates a different mindset for the entrepreneur.
So, let's acknowledge that and choose our economy carefully.
If you're an entrepreneur, you are in the results economy.
And that matters because of what I'm about to share with you next.
Early on in my entrepreneurial life, I attended a coaching program called
the strategic coach. Dan Sullivan is the founder of the strategic coach.
And this brilliant man made a point about time for
people who are in the results economy. See, time management in a time and effort
economy is pretty simple. You punch your clock, you punch out,
done. In a results economy, it doesn't work that way.
So, Dan suggested that we divide up our time
into a pie. If you can picture a pie and we're going to slice up this pie
into 3 chunks. Let's not worry about the size of those chunks right now. Let's
just label them and get clear about what's
going to happen. For strategy number 3, you are going to
plan and protect your 3 time first. What is free time? As a little
preview, we're going to talk about free focus and buffer. We'll get to those
other 2 in just a minute. Free time is exactly what it sounds like.
Time away from work. In a time and effort economy, that's easy. You punch out, you go
home. You work for the weekend, you work toward
retirement. Entrepreneurs don't have that luxury. So,
we have to plan and protect our free time first.
Dan Sullivan makes a big deal about this in the strategic coach.
Because entrepreneurs have a really hard time doing that.
Think about it. The reason is we are our business. It lives in
side of us. So, it's hard to leave it alone.
And you'll notice this. You go home and you're still thinking about your
business. Maybe your business is based in your
home. That makes it even harder because we have a hard time separating
all of the stuff that's business from the stuff that is personal.
Sometimes we even blend the money together and we only have one bank
account. Probably not a good idea but that's not
the purpose of this particular video. We have to have some way of separating
all of that. And one of the most important ways
is in how we choose to spend our time. Now, free time is completely separate
from business activity. You don't get to think
about it during free time. The purpose of free
time is twofold. It's rejuvenation
and focusing on our key relationships. Rejuvenation, the roots of that word are
the same as the roots for the word juvenile. Rejuvenation
actually means to make young again. This is why free time is so important
and we have psychological studies that prove this.
When you pay attention to your free time, you actually give yourself more
energy to do the focus time which we're going to come up on in just a minute.
Time away empowers your time on the job. But we don't often get it as an
entrepreneur because we're busy doing everything and handling all of the
details of our business. So, plan and protect your free time
first. A little warning before I leave this point:
Some entrepreneurs think, "Okay. I'm going to go off for the weekend
with my family. I'm going to take some free time and I'm going to throw the
briefcase in the trunk. Just in case i get a chance to get to
that report or to check on those emails." No.
Foul. You don't get to go there. In order for this to truly be free time for you
not to spoil this for yourself, leave the briefcase home. You're not
going to check the emails. I know. You're going to feel pressured to do it.
It is really important to completely separate yourself
from the business activities. And I know because I'm with you.
It's hard to do that. It's also really important. Let's go to the next strategy.
Strategy 4, power up your focus time. Remember we're cutting up our time
pie into 3 chunks. We've got 3 focus
and buffer. Focus time is revenue generating activity.
This is not everything you do in your business. This is
exclusively the things you get paid for. And you'll notice most of
the stuff you do in your business is not focus time. A good example of this
might be the NBA. I love following basketball
especially the Utah Jazz. Go Jazz! The NBA does a lot of things
that are not related to generating revenue. Practice, for example.
That's not what brings in the dollars. What brings in the dollars is those
games, the events, the playoffs, the times when they're playing the game
--game time. So, think of focus as game time. Everything else that you do
to prepare for the game, to get ready for the game, all the administrative stuff.
That's buffer time and that's for the next strategy.
So, when we're powering up our focus time, we create a time and a space in which we
can do it at a high level. When it's game
time, you bring your sweet skills. Show up
without all of the distractions that come from
everything else that we have to do. And be in your game when it's focus time.
That's really important. Now, for the final strategy,
we got to talk about buffer time. Everything else is buffer. All right, now
we've defined free time, we've defined focus time.
Everything else is buffer. The primary purpose of
buffer time is to plan and protect your free time and your
focus time. So, this is all of the administrative
stuff that you have to handle. These are all of the things that need to
be done that you don't get paid for but that are
necessary to your business. This is also everything that distracts
you. So, if your mind is wandering or if
you're off doing something that's not even related,
but it's not planned and protected free time, it's buffer.
If we don't plan and protect our free time first
and our focus time second, then everything becomes buffer. And buffer
becomes consuming. Free focus and buffer. Got that from Dan
Sullivan and the strategic coach. And I think it's a powerful way to think about
how we choose to spend our time as entrepreneurs. I hope that's been
helpful to you. You've got this and you don't have to
take this on alone. Have you considered coaching? Professional coaching is one
way to really up your game. And we offer that at Live
On Purpose Central. Come over and see what resources are
available to you as an entrepreneur. Go.liveonpurposecentral.com
There's a link in the description. I'll see you there.