Focus, Eliminate, Delegate! | 4 Min Guide

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael, and in today's video I wanted to answer a question from one of my readers, Hermione Gilda. I hope I pronounced that properly. She is a mother and an entrepreneur and is having a hard time balancing her career and her family life as well and is wondering if I could give her some advice. So, you are not alone. Time management is one of the biggest issues that entrepreneurs are facing, trying to figure out what to focus on with their business and have it all balance out with their work life as well. So the things that I would try to remind you of, things to focus on, is look at the things that you can do that give the most value to your customers, where you can have the biggest impact, where you can be the most helpful, and try to focus on those things, those things that you're really good at, that you know can help a lot of people or really help your target customer, because that's the unique value that you can bring. So you want to really make sure you're spending time doing that, and everything else you want to slowly eliminate, delegate, and automate away so that, you know, you have time to focus on what you're really good at. So quickly about my story, and I was not that great when I first started up as well with time management, and the first part was eliminating. So look at all the things that you're doing that you might think add a lot of value but don't really. A good story for me was I used to take minute notes. So we had, when we If we had meetings, I would always take notes of the minutes, so what we talked about, a summary of the conversation. It would take me a long time to make these minutes, and then I'd send it off to people and figured, "Oh, this is great value that I'm adding on top." And it turned out people didn't really care about my, my minute notes. So I was spending all this time doing something that wasn't really value-add, so I eliminated it. And there's a lot of other things that you can probably eliminate from your day-to-day that probably isn't that useful or that valuable. The next step you wanna look at is automating. So what are some of the tasks that you do that you can automate to make your life a lot easier? Uh, great story for me was using accounting software. It's so easy to do my annual and quarterly books. Just download all my statements in my accounting software, takes me 20 minutes every quarter, and I'm done. So look at technology as a way to automate some of the things that you're doing that might be really time-consuming that hopefully you can take off the plate and automate over to technology. The last part is delegating, and you want to make sure you go in that order where you're eliminating first, then you're automating, and then you're delegating, because delegating is likely going to be the most expensive part. And that's where you're giving tasks to other people. And it doesn't have to start off doing full-time, you hire somebody, it costs you a lot of money, and you know, you start going bankrupt. But if you can hire somebody even for a short amount of time, the first person I hired was for 1 hour a day, and he would do some data entry for for me, and that saved me 1 hour a day. So now I had an hour to focus on growing my business. So think about some of the tasks you can do that you can delegate away as well. There are great services now like oDesk and Elance where you can find people who may not work, you know, close to you but can be in different countries and spread out and can do a lot of the tasks for you at pretty good wages. And that can really help you grow your business and help you focus on some of the things that you're really good at. Okay, so focus on what your strengths are, where you can add the most value, be the most helpful to your customers, then look at how you can eliminate, automate, and delegate everything else away, and hopefully that will give you the stepping stones you need to build a successful business. I hope that helps. If you like the video, please give it a thumbs up. I'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback if you want to leave a comment below, and stay tuned for the next episode. Thank you.