“How do you manage your time?”
That is probably the question I am most asked during my bootcamps, workshops, and during individual coaching sessions. My guess is, that since I’m constantly giving a lot of ideas on how to improve skills and habits, people think, “Maybe she knows how to get more done in a day.”?
I’m not an expert in time management by any means but I can provide some tips that have worked for me, and other ideas I have picked up along the way:
Getting Up Early
As of today, I am at day 29 of a 30-day personal challenge. Hal Elrod, author of the book The Miracle Morning, recommends getting up an hour earlier than you normally do every morning and complete six things that will contribute to your personal development and future success. In his book, he recommends we do six things every morning: (1) meditation, (2) affirmation, (3) visualization, (4) exercise, (5) reading positive material, and (6) journaling.
Since I haven’t seen any obvious impactful results yet, I’ve decided I’m going to do it until the end of the year. I want to make sure I give it my all. I don’t want to be like the people who say, “Oh, canvassing doesn’t work,” after doing it only once, so I’m going to double down and look forward to seeing the benefits.
Gary Vaynerchuk said he’s been waking up 30 minutes earlier than normal in the last few months and can’t believe how much more he’s getting done.
When you get an extra 30 minutes to an hour in the day, you want to do something with that time you think would be beneficial to you. I’m not sure the visualization or the affirmations are working for me just yet, so I may substitute it with planning my day or more writing. You can also educate yourself by listening to a podcast or reading a book.
Time Blocking
What is “time blocking”?
If there is a specific time-consuming task I need to get done, I will allot time to it and plow through. For example, if I need to work on Pipedrive (my CRM- which is something you should all have because certainly, that helps with time management!) I will “block time” to input notes. I will set an alarm on my phone for 20 minutes and then you can guess what happens when the 20 minutes is up… Yep! I’m so engaged in the task that I’ll do it for another 30 minutes, which is fabulous. It’s a little mind trick that works for me.
VERY IMPORTANT: While doing tasks, don’t answer phone calls. I put my phone on airplane mode to keep it from ringing while I’m working on something that requires my attention like an LOI or a lease. If you have an office door, close it. Get rid of the distractions. The time you allocate to a task is for that task only.
Top 3
Another trick that works for me is scheduling my top 3. My goal is to get 3 important things done every day. So, the night before, just before I go to sleep, I will put the 3 important things I want to get done the next day on my calendar
9 times out of 10, those things are follow-up phone calls. If they’re on my calendar for 7:30 or 8:00am, I can usually get them done after I drop Mario off at the bus stop. So, by the time I get to the office, either they’re all done, or I’m 2 out of 3. Not bad!
Find More Time
I highly recommend you do this exercise that I lovingly call the “Exercise of Torture” once a year, where you time log all your activities.
Complete a time log of every activity every 15 minutes for one week, starting at 7:00 AM or 8:00 AM on Monday morning until Friday night at 6:00 PM. I’m sure you will see things you shouldn’t be doing, and you should be able to free up an extra 2 to 3 hours in your schedule. If not, send it to me and we can walk through it together and I promise we will find extra time!
Virtual Assistants
We’re presently looking for a Virtual Assistant to log information into Pipedrive for us. When we go to workshops and we collect business cards or postcards from people who want free giveaways, neither Josee nor myself should be doing data entry into Pipedrive. We would rather pay a VA $10.00 per hour to do this. Our hourly rate is too high for that activity.
Are there any tasks that you are doing that you could pay someone a lower hourly rate to do for you?
If you’re washing your car on the weekends and you don’t like it, can you hire someone? Are you still cleaning your house? If your hourly rate is $100 an hour and you can hire a cleaning person for $20 an hour, shouldn’t you be doing that?
If you want to spend more time with your kids, but you’re busy running to the grocery store every other day, then you should be using Shipt or Instacart. I’ve been using Shipt for two years and it literally has saved me 3 hours a week, not to mention the money it saves me from the lack of impulse buying! 😊
So, wake up earlier, list your top 3, do the Exercise of Torture, time block, shut off distractions and leverage your time with other people. Those are my tips for time management. I’d love for you to share your time management tips with me!
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