Episode 325: 8,760 hours

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Hey everyone, so you ever heard this saying that a billionaire or a millionaire has the same 24 hours in a day that you do. I've heard that so many times, whether it's on Twitter or X or somewhere else, maybe on YouTube, and it has never once resonated with me where I thought, oh yeah, well, that's true. They have the same amount of time that I do. And so where are they spending their time? Not once has that ever resonated with me. But let me share something with you that has, and maybe it will for you as well. 8,760. That's the number of hours that we have in a year. I spent some time when I came back. We had a little bit of time before we actually kind of jumped back in. Once I got back into the work, uh, for January, had a few days to kind of work on and then work above the business. And so one of the things I was really spending a lot of time with was working on my personal perfect repeatable week. We call it a, for short, a PRW. And so in doing that, I spent the most time I've ever spent in thinking about how am I going to allocate my time to the businesses in 2024. Well, that got me into doing some things which I'm going to talk about in just a second, which is called a time study or a time audit. We'll get there in just a second. But ultimately, I started to have to ask myself questions like, well, how long does it actually take me to prepare for a podcast? How long does it actually take me to record a solo episode? What about a Monday episode? What about preparing for the episodes, etc.? Because I never actually really analyzed how much time I was spending in some of those things. And so that took me down a kind of a rabbit hole. So if some of these numbers— this may end up being a little numbers heavy. So hopefully instead of maybe having to write these numbers down, you can kind of get the general gist of what I'm sharing with you today. And so 8,760 hours, this number of hours that we have in a year. Now, if you're a business owner, you know that, uh, there's a conventional 40-hour week. There's approximately 2080 working hours in a year. That is exactly zero. Surprise to anybody that has processed many different payrolls as your time as a business owner. So if you take 2080 and you divide that by 8760, that is 23.7% of the year. You could almost round that up to be nearly a quarter of your year of all the hours that you have allocated to working. So then I thought, well, what if we added in 8 hours a day of sleep? That's 2,920 hours. That means between working hours and sleep, exactly 5,000 of our hours are already accounted for, which is well over half of the time just to do those two things— work and sleep. And I have to tell you, doing that, for whatever reason, really made me stop and say, wow, I never really kind of saw it that way. And then I began to see, well, how is someone multimillionaire, even all the way up to a billionaire? There are a few things. Maybe I'll do an episode at some point of things that I have picked up. I have personally never met or even been really around a billionaire. So I will never speak to it unless I've been able to have the chance to interview someone, um, that is a billionaire or be around them. But up to this point, I have not. Uh, that said though, I have learned some things from some people that have. So maybe I'll do an episode at some point in the future, um, talking about the things I've learned from those people. Who have had close, close proximity to billionaires. But there's absolutely one thing that is without question, I think we can all agree upon. They don't tolerate very much when it comes to their schedule, and it's not the number of hours that they do or that they allocate to things. It's what they do with that time. And it was doing this math for me that really resonated. There was a few of the things that made me kind of rethink or think about some things. Number one, I thought, wow, that's just a lot of time. That is a lot more time than I thought just to those two things, work and sleep. Number two, I have actually no idea how many true hours I've worked in years past. And number three, I would really make a strong bet that I've worked well more, way more than 2,080 hours in a year. And I'm sure many of you as business owners can certainly relate to that. And then number 4, maybe I should actually consider how much time I spend to work-related items and allocating my time. Well, that's exactly the journey that I ultimately went on, and this became— I think I ended up using 19 different pages. And I don't mean that in, in any type of bragging way, it was just how much processing I was doing in my journal, in my notebook, how many different pages I was writing down things and looking at how much time am I going to allocate to the different businesses. And so at the end of the day, I personally have allocated 1,500 hours. Now the reality is it's not going to end up being $1,500— 1,500 hours. I'm sure it will end up being more than that, but at least for the first time I'm going into the year saying this is how many hours I going to allot to work. And then therefore there's 3, uh, companies that I'm going to be allocating that 1,500 hours to. And so what that really made me— and I thought about sharing kind of the hours and the percentages, um, I, I shared that with my community. I think it may be irrelevant to all of you here on the podcast, but what is relevant is even condensing it down to 1,500 hours. It's not the time, it's what I'm going to do with the time. And so that's what I'm actually kind of encouraging all of you today. And that's kind of really the point of today's podcast. How much time have you spent— did you spend in 2023 working in, on, and above your business?

What—

how much time did you spend? For most of you, I'm going to guess you probably don't know, because I certainly had no idea. What do you want that to be in 2024? And then that leads us to a really important concept. Many of you may have heard, but it— and I've heard this before too, but again, until I was able to apply it contextually to doing this work, it just never really made sense. So have you ever heard the concept of Parkinson's Law? Well, Parkinson's Law is the idea that work expands to fill the time allocated for its completion. This may mean you may take longer than necessary to complete a task, or you procrastinate and complete the task right before the due date. This would obviously explain why, for many of us, for me included, if I have a deadline, if there's a vacation that you're going on and you're leaving on Saturday, it's amazing how much work you can get done on that, in that Friday morning. Um, or if you just have a deadline, period, it's amazing how you're able to get it done right before the deadline. Well, I think what is maybe even worse is that the overall volume of work— we just not just think about a task or a project specifically, but just all of the work that you do in your business— will expand to fill the space that you give it, which means that if you put no boundaries on the work time whatsoever, work is likely going to expand to take all of the available time that you will give it. And so that is kind of the real key insight for me personally, and as I've shared with some others, and hopefully this resonates with you as well. This is why one of the reasons why we can be working hard 50 to 60 hours a and the business isn't actually moving forward. In fact, we can sometimes feel that it's spinning in the— or we're spinning our wheels. We'll say that often, or we're just moving sideways, sideways energy. Or if I'll thank Keith Cunningham for giving me the idea of— here it is on a bumper sticker. It's not how much time, but it's what you do with the time. It's what you are working on during the time that you've allocated to the business. A million-dollar or a multi-million-dollar business isn't built on $10 tasks, but it is built on $500-an-hour tasks. So the question then is— maybe this is a good thinking time question for all of you— here's a couple: what are those $500-an-hour tasks in your business? What are those small few handful of things that only you uniquely can do? It's where the real work happens, where the needle actually moves. So how many hours are you going to give your business in 2024? And then how can you go about designing your perfect repeatable week to constrict things. One of the things, as an example, that may be helpful to you is if you have young children. Maybe some of you do, maybe they're in school age. Well, you may even have a hard stop there where work has to stop at 3 o'clock or 3:30 or whatever time your kids get out. But if you don't, what are the other barriers that you can put in? Maybe there's a golf group on a Friday or a tennis group that you're a pickleball group that always plays Fridays at 1, and you say, you know what, I'm going to always shut my, I'm going to shut my work off Fridays at 1 o'clock. I can't tell you how much time I myself and Lauren, my EA, have spent on working, tweaking, improving, navigating, making adjustments to my PRW to be able to accomplish this. I said, this is how much time we allocate it. That was my job to give her the vision of what that is. And so we started to make changes and adjustments to things. Some of them were 15-minute increments here and there. We shave off 15 minutes. Some of them— I've gone to some people that are, um, some meetings that I would normally have, we've shortened those from an hour to 30 minutes. Why? Because the meeting is going to fill the space that's allocated. So we were defaulting, not designing, we were defaulting into a, into a 60-minute meeting when A 30-minute meeting would have been just as good if it was, if it was really laser pointed. Um, other things that we have done is, uh, just simply eliminated, cut out a couple meetings and said, send me a Loom video. Um, this information is important, but it's not worth the constant jumping on a call every single month for 30 minutes. Um, you start looking at the value of your time, you start looking and finding little increments here and there. I think this is where people also get the the idea of like 1% improvements, and we hear that again theoretically, but it's like, what does that actually look like? What does a small percentage improvement look like? And so these are some of our examples that we've had. I'll give you some on podcast recordings. They always defaulted to a 1-hour recording. Well, now they're not, they're 45 minutes, and it's not designed to shorten the episodes to cut any value out for any of you. It's actually to make that episode better. What's the normal things I can read off in the beginning to let the guest know this is how these things work and get on with it so that that 30-minute or 35-minute episode is even better for all of you? So these little things that we've been able to do to carve off time here and there has been incredibly helpful, and we're just a few weeks into all of that. So maybe I'll report to all of you my findings. But for you I hope this helps. How are you going to allocate your time? How many hours are you going to allocate to work? Don't go off of mine. Um, do yours. Maybe yours is 1,000 hours. Maybe yours is going to be 2,000 hours. Maybe it is 2,500 hours, and that's down from maybe what it was before. But directionally, my guess is that you want to be able to do more things, grow the business, accelerate the growth of the business faster. and you want to do it with less time. I think that's pretty universal for all of us as business owners. I hope this episode helped to serve all of you. I've got a gift. If you would like to get access to the time audit, kind of a tool, a resource, uh, that we use, uh, for our members, you can get it completely for free. Just go to blueprintos.com. Blueprintos.com/assets. blueprintos.com/assets. When you go there, if you scroll down, you'll see a number of the different assets that we've given away. You'll see the Time and Energy Audit. It's a completely free download. Just enter your email address in there. We'll send it over to you. And that's the one of the best places. I'll spend some, maybe some more time next week talking a little bit more about that tool. But if you don't really know kind of where you spend your time, the very first place to go is to actually start auditing where you're spending your time currently. And so if you begin to do that over a 2-week period of time, 10 days, 10 working days, uh, plus the weekends, um, I would do your Saturdays and Sundays as well, capturing your time in 15-minute blocks. I would just tell you, we've had some of our members do this. And it is tedious. It is not fun to do. I'm not going to lie. But the insights that you will glean just by doing this will absolutely help you so much in your business. It's one of the things that we try to do once a quarter. I do suggest doing it minimum once a year. I think ideally maybe would be in a perfect world if you could do it for 2 weeks every quarter, but certainly once a year would give you such insights I know it does me as well because I'll design things, things will kind of sneak in there. We'll do an audit. We'll start to carve that down. And ultimately it's helped us to be able to kind of really focus on the things that really move the needle and the things that don't. Hope that served you. Go to blueprintos.com/assets and check out that free demo. All right, everyone, till next episode, lead well.