Ep 480 | If I Only Had 5 Hours Each Week

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off Podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Here at the No Days Off Podcast, we believe that the better the question, the more powerful the question, the better the answer, the more powerful the answer. And so, what I like to preach to our listeners and those I coach and those I get to work with is before you go and solve for a challenge that you may have, I want you to instead first spend time in structuring the question and determining what you're actually solving for. So, in the spirit of powerful questions, I'd like to ask you one today and then I want to talk to you about how I would consider solving for this or answering this question. Here's the question. As entrepreneurs, by the way, this is a great question you should be considering quite often. Today might be the first day you've ever thought about it though. Here's my question for you. If you only had 5 hours per week to work on your business, what would you work on? What would you do if you only had 5 hours per week? That's it. You're capped at 5. If you only had 5 hours per week to work on your business, what would you do? What would you be working on? Now, clearly it goes without saying that answering this question requires you to focus on the activities that truly drive value and drive impact in your business. How do you go, go about determining that? I want to kind of walk you through what my framework would be or how I'd, how I'd answer that when I ask myself this question. First, I think you've got to identify your business's core value drivers. I would ask myself, what activities within this business generate the most revenue? What activities generate or create the most growth? What activities have the biggest impact on my business? So I'm probably looking at revenue generation or, and/or I'm looking at customer retention, or I'm looking at most important decisions or strategic decisions. I'm looking at these things I'm trying to, again, number one, identify What's my business's core value drivers? So I start there. What matters most in this business? Number 2, I think in answering this question, if you ask me, how would you spend, if you only had 5 hours, how would you spend those 5 hours each week? The next thing I'd probably do is perform some sort of time audit. In other words, I'm gonna look at my calendar, look at my email, look at my business world, and I'm gonna analyze where I'm currently spending my time. I'm probably gonna categorize what it is I'm doing in two different buckets. I'm gonna have the high-impact tasks or high-impact bucket. High impact would be those things that maybe align with some of those core business, core value drivers I just mentioned. So maybe it's high impact, again, drives significant growth or drives revenue or drives progress. And then there's things on my calendar or in my world that I would consider are low impact. They go in the low-impact bucket. The routine, the operational stuff, the administrative tasks, these are the things that can be automated or delegated. So, I'm gonna perform this time audit. I'm gonna really focus on what's high-impact, what am I currently doing right now? And then I'm gonna look at these high-impact activities and I'm gonna ask myself, do these activities need me? Do they truly need me involved? Or can they be delegated? So again, number 1, I'm gonna look at what's really driving my business, what's most important in my business. Then number 2, I'm gonna actually audit where I'm currently spending my time. I'm gonna bucket what's high impact and low impact. And I'm gonna have to ask myself, I'm gonna have to look in the mirror and say, hey, these high impact activities, which of them actually need me, truly need me? Odds are some of those high-impact areas absolutely need you, and some of those high-impact areas probably could be delegated to somebody that is equally, if not more talented than you. Number 3, I think this is critical. They're all critical, but I really like this in terms of thinking through how I would solve for where I'd spend my 5 hours each week. I think you've got to really does define what you're uniquely qualified to do. What, what you can do that no one else in your business can do as effectively. In other words, I would kind of call this my zone of genius. What's my zone of genius? What am I uniquely qualified to do that nobody else can do in the business, or at least do as effectively as me? So maybe that's making certain critical strategic decisions. Maybe that's building relationships with, with key clients or certain stakeholders. Maybe it's just inspiring and motivating the team. Maybe that's your zone of genius. But I'm gonna look at all the things that I'm doing, and I already mentioned the time on it, but in addition to that, I'm gonna say, what, what's my zone of genius? What am I uniquely qualified to do that nobody else in the business can do as effectively? Number 4, I think of course no surprise here, you got to focus on the 80/20 rule, Pareto's principle. You got to identify the 20% of activities that produce 80% of the results in your business. This should be, in my opinion, the foundation for the 5-hour weekly focus. It's got to be the 20% of activities that produce 80% of the results. So just to recap, number 1, identify the core value drivers in the business. What's most important? Number 2, perform a time audit. Look at your time and see what's truly high impact and which of those high impact activities need you. Number 3, define your, your, your zone of genius. What are you uniquely qualified to do that there's nobody else in the business that can, can do it as effectively as you? And then number 4, focus on the 80/20 rule. Identify the 20% of activities that produce 80% of the results. The last thing I would say after I've gone through, gone through that exercise of those 4 steps, and, and I've probably identified or have a good idea what, what the most valuable things are, and therefore where I should be spending just those 5 hours, I'm going to actually plan. The 5 hours. I'm gonna break that time into focused blocks and I'm gonna allocate them to these high-value activities. So maybe it's an hour to 2 hours in just strategy and then an hour to 2 hours in just execution and then maybe an hour to 2 hours in just relationships covering the 5 hours. Or maybe you determine that, hey, my business doesn't need me for relationships. So I'm going to spend 2.5 hours every week on strategy and 2.5 hours on execution. Or maybe it's all eggs in one basket. I'm going to spend all 5 hours on sales or lead generation, whatever it may be. I think the final step here is to plan those 5 hours, break them down in the focus blocks. And then if you really are serious about doing this, again, this is more of a discovery process to see where you really should be spending your time. But hell, maybe test it out. Maybe I would say step 6, go out there, test and refine. Do a— run a trial, 2, 3, 4-week trial of these 5 hours. Now, I know most everybody here is still going to continue to work just as you always have, but let's just call this our focused 5-hour block. Go run it for a few weeks where you're only focusing, like where you've got that 5-hour bucket and, and you could theoretically only focus on that and see your results and reflect like, What, what most moved the needle? What can be improved? What could be improved? What could be adjusted? And then refine your approach based on all that you learned. So this exercise today is just a, just one for you to think around. I think maybe some of you might, might be able to actually put it in practice to its fullest, like literally cut your week down to 5 hours. That wasn't the intent for the vast majority of our audience, but for our audience, for the No Days Off Nation, I want you asking these questions. Again, the question being, if I only had 5 hours this week, that's all I had, I'm capped at 5, where would I be spending my time in my business? And in asking that big question, it's going to allow for you to come up with a big answer. And that big answer should be one that helps you get hyper-focused on the things that are most important in your business world. And eliminates those things that are lower value that could easily be delegated or eliminated altogether. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.