How do you manage your day? Ask Evan

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm answering a question from one of my newsletter readers, Momo Sani, who wrote in saying, uh, dear Evan, with respect, could you please share with me how you manage your 24 hours between reading, researching, writings, client needs, visitation, sleeping, and eating. I would sincerely be grateful should this inquiry meet your kindness and speedy response. I remain sincerely and respectfully your loving fan. Thank you. This is a great question, and I think time management is one of the biggest challenges a lot of entrepreneurs face because we're trying to do too many things, right? You're always short-staffed, you don't have enough resources, and so you have to be creative and manage your time really, really, really effectively. Now, I've created an entire worksheet series on this that if you want, you can go step by step to help you manage your time, but kind of a quick high-level overview of what I do. Uh, first thing is eliminate all the things that are not essential. So you gotta look at everything that you do in your day and see, do they really add value to your business or not? Then you try to automate as much as you can through computer programs, software, your own algorithms, and then you try to delegate as much as possible of what's left over. So you're focusing on what you bring the highest value to every day. And one of the things that I think about on my way to work is What can I do today that brings the highest value to my business? And if I find myself doing the same things either repeatedly, then I'll try to find a way to automate it, or things that I really shouldn't be doing, it's important for my business to do but it shouldn't be me, then I'll delegate that away for somebody else to do so I can focus in on the things that I add the most value to my business on. And that's a constant battle because you're always chasing new opportunities and looking for new ways to grow, and so I'm constantly facing that myself even as I grow my business. In terms of how I spend my day, I'm a big believer in chunking your time. And I think a lot of people get distracted, and I was too, by new things coming in, emails, tweets, Facebook updates, and you spend so much time reacting to these things and putting out fires that you don't actually get to spend any time, what I call CEO time, where you're building your business and working on it instead of in it. So I like chunking my time, and basically that concept is finding things that you do on a regular basis and doing them all at once. So if you do something multiple times a day, like check email for example, then do that once a day. If you do things multiple times a week, like maybe meet people, then try to do that once a week. And if you do things multiple times per month, then try to do it once a month. And try to apply that to your business because you get in the zone a little bit. So say I'm checking email and an email comes in. If I'm working on something else and I then check my email, it takes me another, you know, 15 minutes to get back into what I was doing before, or longer. So it's a big distraction. Where if you can just go through all your email all at once, you're in that mode, you're answering things quickly, you're ready to go on to the next one, you're not being distracted by anything else, and you become a lot more productive. So you can get a lot more done in less time by focusing your energies on one thing and one task at a time. So my typical day, I'm usually breaking my day down into 3 1.5-hour chunks. And I find that 1.5 hours is enough time for me to kind of get something completely done, work really hard, and then take a break, because after that my brain starts to fry a little bit. So I'll break my day into 3 1.5-hour chunks, usually from Monday to Thursday, and that's what I'll be in the office. And then one of those chunks will be email, so email and everything related to email. So if I need to answer the email, obviously, but also look at a proposal or get back to staff members or whatever it is, anything related to email is 1.5 hours per day, Monday to Thursday. And I find that really helpful because It forces me to focus. You know, you only have an hour and a half, you gotta get it done. When you have that fixed timeline, you know you have to actually, you know, buckle down, get to work, not get distracted by anything else. And what it does is that this whole system allows you to free up extra time to either do more work if you want to, or also have a better work-life balance and go out and do other things that can help you grow personally and professionally. So my 1.5 hours email Monday to Thursday, then from there Each day looks a little bit different, at least for me. My Monday is usually my big work day, so I try to get everything done as much as I can for the week on Monday. So, you know, I may not get to all the emails that come in on Monday if I don't have time in that 1.5 hours because I haven't checked since Thursday afternoon. But then I'm doing all— sorry, cough attack. If I have client work or things that are done, that are due during the week, creating my newsletter, creating a blog post, All of that is done on Monday as much as possible. So I'll use the two 1.5-hour chunks that are remaining on Monday to do that. I try to get everything done as much as I can so I have the rest of the week to focus on things I want to focus on. Tuesday is usually what I call my CEO day, and so that's when I work on projects that are undefined. So every month is something different. I'm working on things that I'm trying to use to grow my business, and as much as possible you want to make sure you have CEO time built into every week. So that you have time to focus on the growth part, right? So you're not just putting out fires and reacting, but you're able to grow your business. On Wednesday, it's my video day. So this is Wednesday, I'm filming all my videos. I look at everything that's come in for the past week, and I usually write back to people, say, "I'll create a video reply to you, and I'll let you know when it comes up." And so on Wednesday, I stay at home, and I create my videos, and then I send them off to my editor who'll put all the visuals and music and all that fancy stuff in. And so that's what I do on Wednesdays. And then Thursday is my meeting day. And on Thursdays I'll have calls and meetings and basically get in the zone for that. It's usually at my office or I call people and I set everything up kind of back to back for one day to do that. And then Friday is usually off or I'm, you know, writing my worksheets or, you know, don't check email, don't book anything off. And then Friday, Saturday, Sunday is off for the weekend. So that's kind of my typical week, and why I find it really helpful to chunk your time. So say our meeting, for example, if you're doing phone calls or you're meeting people, there's always a little bit of prep time in advance, right? Like the 15 minutes or 20 minutes before a meeting or before a phone call usually is not very productive, right? If you know you have a meeting coming up, or especially if somebody is late on a phone call, you can't really get anything really productive done in that time because you're thinking about what's coming up. So you can't really do anything high-level just before that. Often just after that you get ideas that come from the meeting, and so you can't really focus on anything else afterwards as well. I find if you have too many meetings spread out over various days, you just spent that time in meetings or on phone calls and not spending time growing your business. I find that I book the meetings back to back to back to back, or phone calls as well, and I find that gets me in the zone. I wake up on Thursday, I know I'm going to have lots of meetings today. It's my meeting day. Have a shower, get changed, you know, dress up, get ready to go, and basically be in the mindset of going out and talking to people, being friendly, outgoing, and that's my mindset for the day. And then after Thursday, I kind of decompress, take all the information, and figure out what my next steps are going to be with all the people that I met. Where on a day like Monday, it's my admin day, it's my get everything done that I need to get done for the week day, I find that it's a different mindset, right? I don't have to worry about going out and talking to people. I'm more introverted on a Monday because I just have to buckle down and work. You know, I don't have to dress up if I don't want to, I don't have to shave if I don't want to. And so having those different days I find really helps get me in the zone for each particular task and allows me to be a lot more productive. I get a lot more done in that time, in those, you know, 3 1.5-hour chunks a day than I did before during regular 9-to-5 or plus work hours. So it frees up more time that you can then use if you want to add another chunk or to do your kind of personal life stuff as well. So hopefully that helps. Maybe too much information in the video, I don't know. Hopefully you guys liked it. The worksheets explain a lot more, but I wanted to try to give you as much info as I could through that video. It's a great question, something I'm really passionate about is trying to improve your productivity. So if you guys liked the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It makes me want to do more of these videos for you. And if you have a question about my schedule or about this video or a different question about your business, feel free to leave in the comments below. I always read those, I always reply. So thank you, and I'll see you in the next episode.