It’s story time!
A client came to me with the best calendar I’d ever seen. It was colour-coded and time-blocked, with 5am starts and a morning routine you could put on Instagram (which I say is impressive but I am not a morning person).
She was working 55ish hours a week.
She’d spent the previous year getting seriously good at time management. Every new system bought her a few weeks of relief, and then the business grew a bit more and swallowed the gains.
So we pulled up her last two weeks and went through it line by line. Of the 100 hours she was working, about 30 of those hours were approvals and follow-ups her Operations Manager (think office manage) could have owned from day one. Another chunk of time was spent answering the same-ish question, coming from three different people. She’d answered it beautifully every time (I got to see her emails). That’s why it kept coming back. Nobody else was allowed to decide it.
After a little more discussion around HOW she was spending her time, the realization hit her.
She didn’t need a better calendar or to optimize her time anymore. She needed fewer things on it that belonged to her.
Over the next 90 days she handed off as much as possible. The things that she didn’t need to own and someone else could own after some expectations and training. The approvals, the renewals, the same decisions over and over. Her calendar got emptier, and she got to spend it on the work only an owner and leader of an organization can do.
There were a few things that happened by creating the intentional structure:
-She got more of her time back, and actually worked less hours.
-She was less frustrated and exhausted from owning and answering questions that someone else could.
-Revenue actually increased because she was no longer the holding up certain decisions.
-She took a vacation and was only needed twice for emergency type situations (and she hadn’t taken a vacation in over a year without working).
I’m sure there are others, but those were the big ones.
I see this pattern constantly. Owners who work hard and get really good at using their time efficiently end up stuck the longest, because their effort hides the real problem.
Here is your homework this week:
- Look at your calendar-write down any meeting you don’t have to be a part of.
- Write down everything you did last week that you can remember. If someone else can do it, highlight.
- Pick one item that you do over and over again that someone else can do.
- Train and hand that off this week.
Odds are you didn’t start a business just to work another job. Maybe its time to change that.
Cheers!
PS: Want to find out where your hours are going? Check out the 20Hr WorkWeek™ checklist to see where your time is going.