I Could Complete My To-Do-List if Only There Were 28 Hours in a Day!

For a great many of the business owners I meet they are working really long hours, sometimes more than 60 and yet they still find it a real struggle to complete everything they need to do. This inability to get all their work done tends to lead to an imbalance with other areas suffering, whether it be family, health, fitness, or fun.

When you first start a business it can be hard work and that will almost certainly involve long hours. The challenge is that this becomes the norm and years after starting the business a great many owners still find themselves working way too many hours and the promises they have made to their families, friends and themselves, that someday it would get easier just don’t seem to evolve.

It is possible that what’s happened here is the owner has confused business with busyness.

What can be a problem for all human beings is that we are in fact driven by our reptilian brains. Back in the day when leaving our caves was a really dangerous event our brains came with a ready to use fight or flight response centre. So at the first hint of danger our brains released chemicals that drove us to either stand and fight or run for our lives.

In the past this mechanism served us really well but now in modern days, where once it was your servant it may now have become your master seeing danger everywhere and having you operate in a fear fuelled reactive state instead of a proactive state.

Imagine if your sales are down a little, you receive customer complaint, a supplier puts their prices up, a team member hands their notice in, a job is late or you have to  do some rework the list goes on, during each of these events you will get a blast of the fight or flight chemical cortisol. The hairs on the back on your neck stand on end and you are primed again to react. Your brain is telling you to keep on running and it is no wonder that a great deal of owners get themselves into running a busyness.

What is needed is a change in thinking. Instead of cramming everything you have to do into the number of hours you have in your day, instead, remove from your day the hours you spend doing work you just shouldn’t be doing.

So how do you do that?

                                                                                   

In his brilliant book The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People Stephen Covey introduced us to the idea that we decide how to use our time based on two factors either importance or urgency or a combination of the two. At any moment of the day we will find ourselves working in one of four areas:

1.    Important and urgent this is a Demand on our time.

2.    Important and not urgent – here you find yourself in the Zone your most effective work will be done here.

3.    Not important but urgent – in this area we may become Delusional that we are making progress

4.    Not important and not urgent – these tasks are normally classed as Distractions.

To make the most of this model you will need to identify what is important in your business. The only way I know how to do this is to have a really clear vision of where you are taking your business and that vision has been transformed into a clear plan further broken down into time bound goals.

Once you are clear what is important for your business success you just need to review on a daily basis everything you are doing and asking yourself the question! “is this helping me achieve my goals?”

The aim here is to either stop or delegate anything that falls under the heading of a distraction. Delusional work is where you are spending your time dealing with other people’s important work and the key here is to learn to say NO and encourage people to solve their own problems. There will always be demands on your time, but if you discover patterns forming or the same issues repeating time after time, it may be time to create some systems that solve the issue before they become urgent.

If you do the above what you will find is that you will now have more time to invest doing the important work of your business, and by doing this you will be far more effective.

So the key to taking control of your time is to get really clear about what is important for the success of your business and making that a priority in your diary.

If you would like help identifying what is important in your business, setting goals, developing action plans, or systemising your business, just give us a call.