How do you decide where to spend your time when you have so many competing things to do in your business?
There are two major resources that you can invest in your business: time and money. So how you spend your time is just as important (if not more important) than how you allocate your money.
I see my time in this business as an investment, and the different activities that I do as different aspects of my portfolio.
Thinking in terms of an investment portfolio, you can see that different activities have different returns.
Writing this post provides a certain amount of value, and allows me to connect with you (woohoo!). Creating a new paid program that I can sell over and over again provides a different amount of value, but both are a necessary part of my balanced time investment portfolio.
The time you put into your business is like a time investment portfolio, make it work for you.
I hope I didn’t lose you with all the financial metaphors, because time is one of our most precious resources and I want to make sure you know the best ways to allocate your time…
So that you’re not just building an amazing business, but you’re also able to take time away and rejuvenate, too!
I’m answering a question in today’s video that specifically asked about balancing daily and weekly tasks, big projects and education.
The Time You Spend Running Your Business: Education
I’ll tackle how I like to focus on my education: consistently and sometimes as a means of relaxation.
I read roughly one book per week on average every year, and more recently I’ve started to listen to podcasts while I’m out walking around the city. Those are both great ways to get educated on interesting business topics, and they’re both pretty relaxing for me.
I’m also continually learning through online courses and attending workshops and events. For these types of education, I usually set aside a chunk of time when I know I need to work on this area of my business.
Setting Time Aside For Big Projects
This brings me to the big projects allocation of my time.
I like to set no more than one major project or focus per quarter as the main priority for me and my team. You can think of this as the seasons of your business… in the fall you can focus on one project, in the winter on another, and so on.
Now to look at how these bigger projects show up on my weekly or daily task list, we need to see how I structure the more ongoing things that keep my business humming.
Keeping The Business Running
I allocate about 20% of my time creating new content for the Off The Charts video show, doing guest posts, and other “regular content”.
The difference is that I tend to batch these activities so I’m usually writing scripts or guest posts all in one week. This saves time between context switching, and if you write a lot you know that it’s easier to write when you’ve been doing it regularly.
Then, one week per month I’m coaching my clients through the Daring Business Cultivator. That leaves about 2 weeks per month where I’m working on those bigger projects or priorities for the quarter, like a launch or other initiative.
On an ongoing basis I’m available to my clients through our insiders groups and I’m coordinating with my team to make sure we’re all on the same page.
I like to slot in the activities that are core to my business first so that I can know exactly how much unscheduled time I have to devote to other activities like big creative projects or networking with new business friends.
I also want to mention that before I created the Daring Business Cultivator program, I was spending a lot more time talking to potential clients, following up, and so on.
One great piece of advice from my friend Nisha Moodley is that if you don’t have the number of clients you’d like to have on a weekly basis, you should still set time aside in your calendar as if they were there.
If there is nothing scheduled in a spot because you don’t have a client there, use that time as your marketing and sales conversation time. So you have built-in time in your calendar marked off for getting more clients.
Be really diligent and honest with yourself about this time in your calendar, it’s not to be wasted on tasks other than those that will lead to new clients!
The important thing is to do your own check-in about how you use your time right now, and see if you are spending your time on the right things and reaching the goals that you’re going after.
What’s does your time breakdown look like?
Leave a comment and let me know what is the #1 thing that takes up most of your time in your business. Is it in your zone of genius?!
