My Time Management Practices as an Entrepreneur
As mentioned in episode 71, the pillars behind this podcast are mind, body, heart, and healing. This week I’m bringing you a BODY focused episode where I talk about some best practices when it comes to managing my time as an entrepreneur!
Identifying Your North Star to Better Create Your Priorities
Having a hard time managing your time means you don’t know your North Star. Take a moment to close your eyes and imagine yourself at your funeral (sounds morbid, but stick with me because there is a point to this!) You see your loved ones speaking about you as each of them present their eulogies; what do you want them to be saying about you? What do you want to be remembered for? What impact did you make? What is the legacy you want to leave? -- THIS is your North Star. Overall, the mission statement for your life is your North Star.
Another exercise I’d like for you to try is based on Pareto’s Principle. This principle will help you take a deeper look at your priorities as it states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions. This means there is an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. On a piece of paper draw a line down the middle. On the left side of the line, write down all your achievements and on the right side write down where each achievement comes from. Doing this activity will narrow your focus down on the areas of your life that are producing results.
Do, Delegate or Delete
After assessing your priority list, you are able to see what you can do, delegate, and delete. The secret sauce involves doing less with more intention to get bigger results; not doing all the things with half-assed efforts resulting in mediocre results. Take a look at your mission statement and understand that this can better serve you as a filter when figuring out the things you get to do. The things that you are working toward need to be brought back home to your mission statement otherwise what are you really doing and for what purpose?
The cool thing about this work and our journeys is that as you grow, you can inevitably outgrow yourself meaning your mission statement is going to change and you are allowed to pivot. (Shoutout to last week’s podcast episode regarding knowing when to pivot in life!) It’s important to always align your current priorities with your current mission statement/vision and what you want to achieve for your life.
Unpopular opinion: You can probably DELETE at least 50% of what’s on your priority list. Most of the women I work with need to do less. Less as in the things that they are currently doing could either be delegated or overall just completely let go. Here are a couple of examples of things that could be DELEGATED:
Hiring a house cleaner
Hiring someone to do your laundry
Hiring someone to do your grocery shopping/meal prep
Buying custom meal prepped foods
Hiring a VA
Training/teaching your family/kids to pitch in
It’s okay to ask for help! As women, we always believe that we have to do everything and be everything/everywhere when that shouldn’t always be the case. Delegating doesn’t make you a bad woman. Time and energy are important assets. If you can delegate a task, what do you get back from doing so? You get back your time and energy. What can you do with the time and energy given back to you from delegating? You can reinvest that time in your personal life or your business. Time and energy are valuable and not renewable.
DELETING examples look like:
Focusing on ONE social media platform (for all my online entrepreneurs!)
Focus on one coaching program/client to serve
Focus on one new habit at a time
Here are things I personally DELEGATE:
I have a house cleaner
Meals are simple and easy and my husband does 80% of the cooking
Podcast editing, graphic creation, blog writing
Try and see how your life changes by doing less with more intention.
How I Use Time Batching & Systems in my Business and Life
Time batching is the way you schedule your time. It is doing one task for an extensive period of time. For example, I time batch my podcast episodes by filming multiple episodes in one sitting rather than recording a new episode each week. Within a time batch, we have a system. A system is the actual steps that happen to ensure your time batching is effective.
For example, one of my home systems is grocery shopping getting done every Saturday so meals are always easy to grab and make. If I don’t get a chance to fulfill this system, the delegation of my husband cooking becomes skewed for a myriad of reasons. One of my business systems is podcast editing and content creation. I create show notes and record the episode while my assistant goes behind the scenes with editing the podcast, creating the graphics and content, and repurposing on social media.
My main focus for my business is the podcast and you now understand that as I do the necessary steps to move my business forward, I delegate what to repurpose to ensure my assistant and I are doing less with more intention. As a business owner, we are allowed to have businesses that support US. It’s important to have a restful lifestyle. Be okay with saying no. You are worthy of doing, delegating, and deleting.
