How I Manage My Time

One thing that I've found with people, I coach a lot of business owners, I've coached thousands of business owners over the past few years, is that one of the things that I hear that's an excuse for not being where you want to be yet is I don't have enough time. And that, I'm just gonna be honest with you, is fully 100% a cop-out. And the reason why is because of the fact that nobody in this earth is gonna get more than 24 hours in a day. We all get exactly the same amount. And so really what it comes down to is if I'm saying I don't have enough time, I'm taking the blame and I'm blaming something externally outside of me. When in reality, for me personally, I want to be able to blame everything on myself because if I can blame it on myself, that means I can also control it. So it's not that you don't have enough time and you're not able to do it, it's just that maybe you haven't been able to effectively manage your time that you do have. I'm not saying that some people don't have a full-time job and kids and all of that, and some people don't have a job and don't have kids and there's a difference in how much time that they have. Time management means that you just need to get better at managing your time. And the amount of important tasks that you get done per day or per week will dictate what becomes of your life. So really what we need to focus on is with every hour of our day, how can we be more productive? Not busy, but productive. Busy is like, I don't know if you've ever been busy all day long and you're working and you're working, you're doing things, you're doing things, doing things, and at the end of the day you're like, God, I feel like I got nothing done. Well, it's usually because you're focusing on busy tasks. But when you're productive, you have the feeling of moving the needle forward. And that's what we're gonna talk about today is how to be more productive. So I'm gonna give you four tips on it. The first one is to, yes, everybody, start scheduling your week on Sunday night. This only takes 15 minutes. I recommend that every person do this. I've been recommending it for years and years and years. You have a date with yourself every single Sunday night. It could be Sunday morning if you want to while you're having your coffee and the kids are still asleep, or Sunday night when you're just sitting there and you're thinking about the week ahead. You take 15 minutes and you look at your calendar and what you have going on, and you look at your to-do list and what you have going on. And then what you wanna do is inside of your calendar, this is something I was taught when I was younger before we actually had our calendars on our phones and everything, we used to have the actual 15-minute calendar from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m., every 15-minute increment was broken out, and we used to take our calendars and we used to have the set things and we used to have the movable things. Set is something that is static, something that cannot be moved. And so what you do is you sit down and you write all of the things that are set in your schedule that have to occur at certain times, and you put those into your schedule first. So it could be like you have a meeting with your boss Tuesday at 3 p.m. Put that in your schedule. That is something that is set, that is something that is static, that is something that is not movable, right? It's like a boulder. You can't move a boulder, you're just gonna have to put that in your schedule. So in those 15 minutes, you put all of your meetings and all the things that cannot be moved in your schedule. Then you look at your to-do list and you start to plan the things that are movable. These are things that will be placed into your schedule after the static things, after the things that are set, after the big, huge boulders, now you can start placing the little rocks. The rocks can be movable if they need to be. But what you're trying to do is you're trying to get a pretty good idea and that your schedule will change multiple times throughout the week, I promise you that. But you're trying to get an overall idea of what the week looks like. Because a lot of times, people are stressed or anxious going into their week or going into their day because they don't have a real solid set schedule that they can look at and says, okay, from this time to this time, from this time to this time, from this time to this time, this is what I'm doing. When you have a schedule that has all of your set things and all of your movable things have been placed into it in the other times, it makes you feel way better. And then, because schedules change and things get done and some things don't get done, you have a morning meeting with yourself for five, maybe 10 minutes every single morning. What you do is you take your to-do list for that day, things that need to be done that day, what you do is you actually start to plan out your day, move around things that need to be moved, and make sure that you get done the things that are the most important. A lot of times, people just wanna check off stuff on their to-do list, but those things on their to-do list are not necessarily important. And so, you're just gonna have a five-minute meeting with yourself. And just visualize what your day's gonna look like, you put it on paper, you start to plan it out, okay, I'm gonna cross off this on my to-do list at 2 p.m., I'm gonna cross this on my to-do list at 11 a.m., and you start to get an idea of how to actually start crossing stuff off. Because a lot of times, people, we just get stressed when we have open time and we know we have a lot of things to do, but we don't know exactly what to do right now. We're trying to mitigate that by just making sure that we can look at our schedule and just go, okay, I gotta do this, and we just take action. Now, that goes into number two. Number two is actually how to prioritize your to-do list. And so, there's a thing called the Eisenhower Box. It is also called the Urgent Important Matrix, and it was created by the 34th President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower. And the matrix really helps you make decisions to prioritize tasks based on their urgency and their importance. And so, it's basically if you just imagine a box and you imagine a cross through the middle of it so it looks like a window, this is what it really is. There's four separate quadrants of the box. Quadrant one, which is in the top left, is the urgent and important things. This is called the Do It Now section, the things that have to be done today. And you do these tasks immediately if possible. These are tasks that need immediate attention. You either do them immediately or you make sure 100% that they're gonna be crossed off today. These require your immediate attention. So, then maybe a crisis comes up or a pressing problem or a deadline is really approaching. These are the things that are gonna be in that box. So, like an example would be, let's say you have a work deadline and you have a presentation that's coming up tomorrow, but you haven't finished the slides for it. Well then, obviously, this is gonna be in quadrant one. This is urgent and this is important. Finalizing this becomes your top priority for the day. And so, you look at your schedule and you actually put it in there, how you're going to get this top priority done. So, that is quadrant one. Next to that in the top is, to the top right, is not urgent but important. This is what they call the Decide part of the box. You decide when to do it. So, what you do is you start to schedule these things out. So, things that are like super urgent, you're probably gonna do right now. Quadrant one is, hey, this is definitely something that needs to be done. It's not urgent, it doesn't have to be done at this exact second, but it is very important. And you're also gonna schedule those into your schedule to make sure that they get done. You wanna cross off as many important things, whether it's urgent and important, or not urgent but also important. You wanna try to schedule those into your day today. These are really, really critical for your long-term success. These can be tasks that are like related to your long-term goals, your planning, whatever it might be. But spending more time here reduces the chances of the tasks falling into quadrant one, which is like, holy ----, I gotta get this done immediately, right now. So, it could be like, for instance, personal development. Setting aside time, like this is not urgent, it doesn't have to be done right now, but it's really important for me to get this done. Or my workout, it doesn't have to be done at this exact moment, but it is really important that it gets done today. So, you set aside time each week just to learn a new skill or to get better at your personal development or to make sure that you work out or to learn a foreign language or get better at digital marketing. Things that can enhance your professional and personal life could be in this. Another thing could be your relationships, for instance. Planning a date night with your spouse is probably not urgent, but it's important. This is something that definitely you want to make sure that you do, because I don't know if you're like the average person that I speak to, but the average person I speak to is like, man, yeah, my wife and I, we've been talking about going on date nights every single week, and then this happens, and we have the kids, and then we have work, and we end up just pushing it to the next week, and then we forget about it, we push it on to the next week. So, it's like, it doesn't have to be done immediately, but it's important, so maybe look at your schedule and say, okay, Friday, 6 p.m., I'm gonna make sure I take my wife out, we're gonna go to this place, okay, so I'm gonna get reservations here, and I also need to make sure that we schedule a babysitter. So, therefore, you're planning ahead in these things that are not urgent, they don't have to get done right this second, but they're still important, we make sure our schedule. Okay, so that's quadrant two. Quadrant three is in the bottom left of this little box, and quadrant three is the delegate section, the question, who can do it for you? So, one of the things I think is really, has been really eye-opening for me, and will be eye-opening to a lot of people listening to this, read the book that was written by Tim Ferriss called Four Hour Workweek. He completely changed my mind on time management, he changed my mind on emails, he changed my mind on delegation. Some of you guys are like, well, I work a job, and I work for someone else. A lot of times, you could hire a virtual assistant for six to $10 an hour, they could work 10 hours a week for you, and they can get done the little tasks almost as well as you can, but now you can just pay them to do it so that you can focus on the more important things. You can hire somebody to do it. Maybe if you have things that are urgent, but not important, and they need to be done today, maybe you can delegate them to your children if they're old enough, if they're teenagers and they can get that thing done for you, hey, honey, can you do this thing for me and make sure they do it? Sometimes you can delegate it to your spouse. Maybe they can do it, oh, this thing has to be done today, but it's not the most important thing. So it might be like, it's really important that we, it's urgent that we get everything figured out, all the clothes washed for our kids before their soccer practice tonight, their soccer game tonight, but it's not like the most important thing in your life to make sure that your kids have a clean jersey, but it's important. I'm sorry, it's not important, but it is urgent. And so you can either hire someone to do certain things for you, you can have the children do it for you, you can have your spouse do it for you. The question really is in this section, can somebody else do it for you? If you cannot delegate it, then set specific times in your schedule to handle them. So if like, you say, okay, well, I'm looking ahead on my schedule, Tommy has his soccer game Thursday at 6 p.m., he's got a bunch of dirty clothes, he's 16 years old, he can do it himself. Figure it out. Either that or you're just gonna wear some dirty, smelly clothes to your next game. You could do that if you wanted to, or you could say, hey, he's only six, he's not able to do his clothes, so I'm gonna make sure that I do it at 7 p.m. tomorrow, so therefore I know it's gonna be done on time. And so that way, you can use these tasks and make sure they get done, but you can, hopefully, if you can get better at this, like delegation is not an easy thing for a lot of people, but if you can delegate all these things that are not important, it'd be really good. Another good example of this would be like emails, right? Emails, sure, maybe sometimes emails are urgent, but 95% of the time, emails are not really urgent, they don't have to be done immediately. And so emails can be an example of this. When you're being interrupted by constant email notifications that aren't really related to pressing issues and things that have to be done in your life, like right now, where your primary objectives are like your biggest things on your to-do list, those can get in the way. Can you talk to your boss, if you're a manager, and say, hey, listen, I really need an assistant. Can we talk about maybe me getting an assistant so that I can start focusing on the higher level things that are to my pay grade, so therefore I'm not doing these tasks that really aren't important for us making more revenue in the business. See if that's possible. It might be, it might not be. But really what it comes down to is starting to actually look ahead and plan these things out. And then quadrant four is in the bottom right, and it's not urgent, not important. And this is what they call the delete section. You want to try to eliminate as many of these things as possible. These activities that are in this quadrant have very little value for in your life. It could be time-wasting tasks, or it would be nice to get this thing done. But examples of this could be like mindlessly scrolling on social media. That's not urgent. That's not important. Can you just cancel those things out of your life? Delete Instagram. See how much better your life becomes. Or it could be watching random TV shows. Maybe you do love a TV show, but you know that thing's not gonna completely change your life by watching the next reality TV show. And so if you could start to think about your to-do list that you make every single Sunday, and then you go through every single and change around and create every single Monday, then you start to put them into these four different quadrants and start to see what's urgent, what's important, what's not urgent, what's not important, and start to actually figure out how you can get better at these. That's number two. Number three is time-blocking and batching. Time-blocking just basically involves saying, hey, from this time to this time, I'm gonna be doing this, which we've kind of been talking about a little bit. But really what it comes down to is time-blocking. I really need to get this thing done, from this time to this time, I'm focusing. Don't talk to me. I'm not doing anything. I'm not talking to anybody. I'm focusing on one task and one task only, which we're gonna talk about in step number four. But really what it comes down to is how can I make sure that I am time-blocking to get my things done when they need to be done? And in time-blocking is really holding that time sacred to make sure that what needs to be done is actually done. Because I don't know about you, there's nothing more stressful than being busy all day, not productive, not getting the things done that are really urgent and really important, and then having to push them to another day. That's the type of stuff that's in your head. When you wake up in the morning to go to the bathroom, and you go to the bathroom and your brain immediately goes to that thing, and then you're up for like two hours. You're like, oh ----, I didn't get that thing done. I didn't plan it as well as I should have. And so that's really what it comes down to is time-blocking. And then with batching is can you get, if you do something consistently throughout the week, multiple times throughout the week, can you get all of that done in one section where you time-block that? So for instance, I've used this example many times. When I record the podcast, I sit down and record the podcast. So Wednesday morning, I plan two podcast episodes, do all of my research, everything I need to do, I put all the bullet points together, and then I record those two on Wednesday afternoon. Then on Thursday, I do the exact same thing as Wednesday. So Thursday morning, I plan them out, I figure it all out, and then I record two of them. So that way I execute four every single week. And I don't do like one on Monday and one on Tuesday and one on Wednesday and one on Thursday. It's batching all of the things that I could do. So if you maybe create content on social media for your business, you have a flower business and you wanna start putting up promotional stuff and make sure that you get as many pictures and videos and reels done and stories and all of that. Well, maybe you could just batch all of that content on Monday morning, take a two-hour block and get the entire week done. And now all you have to do is just post it and not actually have to worry about creating it every single day. And so that's what batching looks like. Something that you do multiple times throughout the day is impossible to have as few segments of your schedule that are longer to get all of those things done. So that's number three. And number four, if you've listened to this podcast for a while, you know I'm the biggest fan of the world on this. Not only am I the biggest fan and I use it every single day, like this is how I live my life and get stuff done, but it's also in my book. Like I literally have a section in my book where I teach this. What is it called everybody? The Pomodoro Technique. The Pomodoro Technique was developed in the 1980s and it works really well. And there's actually a whole lot of science and neuroscience behind why this works so well. And what you do is you take one task and one task only and you do it over 25 minutes. So you do 25 minutes on, five minutes off, 25 minutes on, five minutes off. And in that time, you do nothing at all except for that one thing. So you don't check your emails, you don't check your phone, you don't send text messages. For me, when I'm sitting down to do like a Pomodoro 25 minutes, what I do is I will sit down at my computer. If that's like, for instance, planning out the podcast, I'll sit at my computer, I'll put on noise canceling headphones so I literally can't be distracted. My brain can't go to anything else. I put on the same song, which is Focus Binarial Beats on YouTube. It's a three hour song and I just let it play. And then for 25 minutes, all I can do, for instance, is research and planning of a podcast episode. My phone is in another room. It is inside of my kitchen drawer and that's where I keep it. My notifications are off of my computer so that there's no way for anyone to get ahold of me. Frankly, even if there was a fire, I wouldn't even know, right? So, because at the end of, people act like there's so many urgent things that happen in their life all the time and really there's not a whole lot of urgent things that really require you right now, right this second. And at the end of a 25 minute session, if there is a fire, you can find out. And so you do 25 minutes of one task, one task only, and you try to bring 100% of your brainpower to this task. Because if you really think about it, why would you want to bring less than 100% of your brainpower to a task? Your best self to this task. And so if I'm sitting there and I'm writing a podcast episode and then I get a notification on my phone, I'm like, oh my gosh, I forgot to do this thing and then I send a text message, that breaks my distraction and usually it actually hurts when I come back in and try to get focused again. So if I'm focused and I break my focus, it can take up to 15 minutes, 15 to 17 minutes psychologists have found for you to get your focus back to where it was before. And so really what it comes down to with anything else is you're not gonna get more time in your day. It's just not going to happen. How can you make sure that with that, you get better at planning ahead for the entire week, you get better at planning every single day in the morning, and then all you have to do is just execute on the task when the tasks need to be done and you are checking off the most important tasks for your day every single day. So that is my tips. To help you get better at time management and get more done and be more productive.