Boost Your Productivity: Eliminate, Automate, and Delegate for Success!

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael and welcome to a special video edition of Ask Evan. Today we're going to look at one of the most common questions that I get asked by entrepreneurs: How can I be more productive? So we're going to look at how you can eliminate, automate, and delegate your way to success.

Here we go. Getting started. The first thing you need to do is make a list of all the tasks that you do on a regular basis. This means everything from selling to customers, working with suppliers, invoicing, managing your cash flow, and so on. The second step is to bundle all your tasks into common themes. For example, making cold calls, attending networking events, and doing your email campaigns can all be under sales and marketing. Paying your staff, billing your clients, and keeping track of your expenses can all be called admin. Continue classifying all your tasks until you have 5 to 7 main categories. The third step is to figure out how much time you're spending in each category. For example, you might spend 20 hours a week on sales and marketing, 10 hours a week on admin, and so on. It's easy to improve your performance once you start measuring it, so make sure you go through this exercise to determine where your time is currently being spent. Once you know how your week is broken up, we can work on freeing up your time for the CEO tasks. From doing this exercise with many entrepreneurs, I usually find that the one area we find that we spend too much time on is admin. I've never met an entrepreneur who loves doing the admin side of their business. We tend to want to focus on tasks that we like, we find interesting, and that make us money. Who wants to spend time figuring out your tax calculations? I'm going to show you how you can eliminate, automate, and delegate to reduce your time wearing the admin hat so you can focus on your business growth. You can use these same steps for any of your business areas, but I'm going to focus on admin because it seems to be the biggest area of concern for most entrepreneurs. Step 1: Eliminate. As business owners, we never seem to have enough time in the day to get everything done, and yet other entrepreneurs seem to rocket to superstardom. How does that happen when we all have the same 24 hours in the day? The answer starts with elimination. Elimination is at the core of every successful business. You have to focus on what you're really good at, what drives your business forward, and what you're legally required to do in order to stay in business. Everything else should be eliminated. Spending too much time on admin? Look at the tasks that you do on a regular basis. Do you actually need to do them? Yes, we need to pay our staff, balance our books, invoice customers, etc. But are there other tasks that you're doing that aren't absolutely necessary? We tend to do things because it's supposed to be done that way, or because someone showed us how they do it. But that's not always the best way. Sometimes the best option is to do nothing. Here's an example: I used to take detailed notes at all my meetings and then send a nicely formatted summary of the meeting minutes to everyone. It took me almost as much time to create the minutes as it did to actually be in the meeting, but I thought it was a high-value-add thing to do. After a particularly long meeting, I decided not to send the minutes. You know what happened? Nothing. Nobody asked about them. After swallowing my pride, I realized that most people didn't even open my minutes, and if they did, they only took a quick glance at them. They kept their own notes, wrote down what was important to them. How many hours did I waste on these minutes thinking I was providing a high-value service when nobody really cared? Too many to count, but I don't do it anymore. I instantly had less admin work and I could spend more time growing my business. Take a look at your list and see what you can eliminate. Just because everyone else does it or because you've always done it that way, it doesn't mean you have to continue doing it. Step 2: Automate. If you want to squeeze more hours out of your day without coming into the office any earlier, the answer lies in automation. We've already eliminated the non-essential tasks, but if you're like most entrepreneurs, there are still a lot of tasks left on your admin to-do list that have to get done. What we've gotta do now is find you the tools that can get the same quality results or better in far less time. A great example is accounting software. Depending on what study you believe, between 65 and 80% of entrepreneurs do don't use accounting software. That number blows my mind. Instead, entrepreneurs do all their accounting on a spreadsheet or by hand. Want a quick way to boost your productivity and save you hours of frustration? Buy an accounting software package. For starters, check out Simply Accounting. Using this software, you can prepare bill payments and invoices, track your cash flow, revenue and expenses, track customers and suppliers, automatically calculate government sales tax, write checks, generate reports, it even supports multilingual functions. How much time do you waste doing any of those tasks when it can all be done easily for you? My favorite feature is that my bank allows me to download my bank and Visa statements directly into the software from their website. No more manually typing in each expense into an Excel spreadsheet. It downloads everything in, categorizes everything for me, and I'm done. Less time spent on admin and more time to focus on growing my business. I now put everything I possibly can on my Visa instead of paying cash, just so that the accounting process is so much easier. Simply Accounting starts at $69, and it's one of the best investments you can make into your business. You can even get a free trial that's risk-free for 30 days if you want to test it out. And that's just one example. Look through all your admin tasks and see what software and tools you can use to make the tasks more automated. You need to raise your standards and value your time properly if you want to be a successful entrepreneur. Making a $69 purchase isn't an expense. It's an investment into your business to give you better results and free up your time. Step 3: Delegate. The last step to successful time management for entrepreneurs is to delegate. Even after you've eliminated the non-essential tasks and automated the other tasks through software tools, you still got those final nagging tasks that have to get done. What you need to ask yourself is, am I the best person to do this? For admin tasks, the answer is usually no. If something takes 5 hours away from your month every month, then why not delegate that function so you can focus on your business growth? Yes, it's an expense, but now you're a CEO and you need to be doing CEO tasks, not admin tasks. If you only focus on the cost and try to do everything yourself, you'll always be limited in how much you can grow because you only have so many hours in the day. You can gain more hours by leveraging the time of other people. That's the secret. You don't have to do everything yourself. Look at your admin task list and see what's left. Some of them might be things that require a specific skill set. For example, you might hire an accountant or bookkeeper for some of your financial tasks. Other tasks you might be able to hire a part-time worker to help you. The first person I hired in my first software company worked for 1 hour per day for me on admin tasks. It was boring work that I didn't enjoy, but more importantly, it took up an hour off my time so I can focus on other projects. I didn't have the budget to hire someone full-time, but I could afford 1 hour per day. That freedom gave me the extra hour to spend growing my business, which is exactly what I did. And then I could afford to hire him for more hours to take even more admin tasks from my plate. You don't have to start with full-time staff. I've had great success by using interns from various colleges and even high schools. I've also used oDesk.com and Elance.com for work that can be done by someone who doesn't physically have to be in my office. Both are excellent resources and you can hire skilled labor for highly competitive wages on an hourly or contract basis. Effective delegation is the final step to freeing up your time to focus on the opportunities that are ahead of you and help you reach your full potential as an entrepreneur. The order of eliminate, automate, delegate is really important. Eliminate is first. You don't want to automate or delegate something that can be eliminated because it's a non-productive task. Automate is next. You don't want to delegate something that can be automated because it's more expensive and more prone to error. Follow the steps I laid out to put your regular tasks into groups and then eliminate, automate, and delegate everything away until you're working only on the top priority CEO tasks. It all starts with the first little step.

Thank you for joining me for this special video edition of Ask Evan. If you like the video, please give it a thumbs up. I'd also love to hear your thoughts and comments if you want to leave a comment below, and stay tuned for the next episode.