I believe that every entrepreneur needs to have some dedicated focus time in their business to be able to grow it—whether that means getting more clients and making more money or leveraging it and multiplying it by leaps and bounds. I’ve got some very specific strategies to clear the decks and create focus time in your life.
Try to create at least four hours per day for marketing or growth and development. When I recommend this, I often hear lots of shrieks, “Ah, how can I do that? I’m so busy.”
Not only are we busy in our work lives, but also in our personal lives, especially when we’re starting out and oftentimes working from home. One of my favorite mantras that I’ve used for many years is, “A strong focus now creates a different future later.” So, how do you create focus time in YOUR life?
As you know, in your business it’s about delegating and getting other people to do things for you that you’re not that good at doing or that, at this point, should be done by somebody else. But what about all that extra time that is taken up in your life? What about all the non-work related busy-ness that actually eats into your work-related focus time. I’m talking about the time it takes to run your life.
I’m a busy mom of three and I find there’s so much that I need to do outside of work to keep things going. With a house and a husband and three kids and lots going on it would be easy for me to use my work time to do these extra-curricular things. So many personal time wasters are the things that you have to do, but don’t necessarily need to be done by you. For example, buying groceries. A lot of people go to the grocery store two or three times a week but they don’t really have to if they were to use grocery delivery.
Then there are the online drug stores. Why run off to CVS, when you can save time ordering online? Thinking about dry cleaning. So many drycleaners will do pick up and drop off. Consider doing that so you save the time that it takes to schlep over there. Then there’s housecleaning. You shouldn’t be doing your house cleaning yourself, if you can afford it. Sometimes people will charge as little as $50 to $100 to clean your house once a week or maybe once every two weeks. For many years I dropped off the laundry because I thought, “Well, for about $10 or $12 I can have my laundry done—match my socks and fold everything so that I it’s all done for me.
Then there’s online banking. Instead of spending the time to go to the bank you can now do everything online, including paying your bills. Consider using your business and personal credit cards to streamline your purchases. This way at the end of the month, you only have those two credit cards to pay off.
So, I know some of you might be thinking, “Yeah, that’s fine when you’re established in your business.” I started off where most people start off, without a lot of money and on a shoestring budget. But, I thought of it this way, “What if I could just have somebody for $12 once a week do all of my laundry and fold it and it I would only have to put it into the drawers. How much time would I have saved for myself?” That’s about three hours!
You can then use that time to get more clients and make more money by applying more of these client-attraction strategies. So, imagine the more time you create in your day by delegating some of your personal stuff or systematizing it or doing it online instead of going to an actual store, the more time you create for marketing in your day. Between the hours of let’s say 8:30 and 5:30, you’re dedicating that time only to work-related activities.
Now, I’m not assuming that you can run out and have people clean your house and do your food shopping and everything else for you right away. Instead I’m saying to just start with one very little thing. Use the time that you saved to focus on growing your business. It will transform how you live your everyday life.
Your Video Assignment
Identify the time wasters in your day, in your personal life, that are eating up your business time. Write these down and start thinking about how you could do some of these things online or have them done by somebody else—somebody that you could hire at $10 an hour to run a few errands for you so you don’t have to.
Then reapply and reinvest that time back into your business so you get more clients, make more money and multiply your business.
