Evan Carmichael breaks down how a cleaning business owner can reclaim time by eliminating tasks no one uses, automating repetitive work, delegating to a team, and batching similar activities into dedicated days. He also recommends blocking daily CEO time for growth work and protecting your schedule from interruptions.
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If you want to be productive as an entrepreneur, then you need to make sure you're freeing up your time to focus on the highest priority tasks. Otherwise, you're going to be constantly dragged down and sucked into the day-to-day crap that's involved in running the business. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. I believe that hungry entrepreneurs deserve help, and today I'm answering an email from a question— uh, I'm answering a question from an email that came in from one of my readers, Shahed, who wrote a long email Here, basically summing it up, he has a cleaning business. He's watched a lot of videos and channels. He's subscribed to mine. He thanks me a lot. Thank you for subscribing. Anybody watching, you can subscribe too. I love seeing that. Right now he's losing focus. He says he gets distracted easily by minor disturbances. It takes a lot of time to get back into gear. He's living off of energy boosters, barely gets to the gym, and he's not living a healthy lifestyle. Wants to be able to get more stuff done and wanted my advice. So thanks for the question, Shahed. Hey, you know what? Welcome to the club. This is the life as an entrepreneur, right? We're all doing way too much. We're working crazy hours. And the reality is you shouldn't be doing 80% of the things that you are doing. The way to overcome it is one, eliminate. There's probably things in your business that you don't need to do and nobody else should be doing. Take it away. A quick example. I used to host meetings, or I still do, they're mastermind meetings, we meet once a month. I used to write minutes of what everybody talked about and sent off the notes to everybody. One month I forgot, you know what happened? Nobody cared. At first I felt a little sad, you know, I spent all this time every month making these notes, sending them to people, thinking I'm offering a value-add service, and nobody cared. So I stopped doing it. And we all have those things in our businesses. I still look for them now today in mine. Things that you're doing that you should just not do. They are not adding enough value to your business. You need to eliminate them. Second, you need to automate. Find software, tools, systems that you can use to get a lot of things off your plate. If I'm doing something repetitively, if I do it 2 or 3 times, I find a way to make it automatic. I'll have my programmer create a tool or I'll find something off the shelf. I use a web tool, some software, whatever I can find to automate things. Because computers don't take vacations, they don't call in sick, and they take a lot of the crap off of your plate and off of your team. And the third is delegate. You need to get rid of the rest of those tasks. Give them off to somebody who can do it, maybe even better than you, but basically you're trying to free up your time to focus on the high priority projects. If you're stuck doing all the crap all the time in your business, you're never gonna get anywhere. You're gonna level off here. You're never gonna be able to get way higher because your time is spent doing the tasks that you should not be doing. You need to build a team. You need to offload those tasks that have to get done in the business, that can't be eliminated, that can't be automated through software or other tools. That still needs some personal connection to do it, but it doesn't have to be you. And the last bit of advice I have is chunk your time. This has been so helpful for me, where anything that you do multiple times a day, do once a day. If you're checking your email 20 times a day, do it once a day. Anything you do multiple times a week is once a week, multiple times a month, once a month, and so on. It gets you in the zone. I find that when I'm switching gears, you know, if I'm working on something, somebody calls me I help, you know, whatever answer the question is, then I get back to work. I've lost what I was doing. You know, it takes me 20-30 minutes to get back into the flow of what I was doing. So I don't list my phone number anymore. Nobody calls me. Nobody knows my number. It's not on my website, it's not on my business card. I don't even know the number to my cell phone. I needed it once and I had to write to my dad to say, "What's my cell phone number?" Phone calls, incoming unscheduled phone calls, are other people's agenda for your time. You need to protect your time. It's the most important thing you have in your business. I'll chunk things up in the days. So for example, I'm doing these videos. I'm answering your question. I love doing videos. I always do videos on a Wednesday. I block off the afternoon to do videos on a Wednesday. I love it. It's one of the best times I have in the day, but it takes setup time. You know, I gotta set up the cameras, microphone, but more, I have to get in the zone. I have to think about helping people. You know, the first video is not always the best. It takes me a while to get into it, and it takes me a while to get out of it. So it's better to chunk it all together. If I said I'm going to do one video a day, it would take me a lot longer to do each day because there's so much setup, physically with equipment, but more mentally. Where if I do one after another after another after another, it's easier to get in that flow. I'll do my meetings on Thursdays. Anything where I'm interacting with people, it's on Thursdays. My radio show's on Thursdays, my webinars are on Thursdays, my mastermind meetings are on Thursdays. If I have phone calls or meetings, they're on Thursdays. That's my meeting day, that's my talk to other people, get stuff done day. Because I found when I'm getting ready for a phone call or a meeting, the first, you know, half an hour into it, before the meeting, nothing gets done. If I know I'm gonna meet somebody in half an hour, 20 minutes, it's hard to get into a project, right? You fiddle around, you do little things, but nothing major because you know it has to end in 20, 30 minutes. So I put the meetings back to back to back to back to back, and Thursday is full of meetings and phone calls and the webinars and all that stuff. So I'm not wasting my time. Then the very next day, Fridays, I'll do my worksheets. It's my writing day. I won't even come to the office. I usually go to Starbucks, and I'll sit down and I'll write the whole day. I don't take any phone calls, I don't answer email, I just sit and write. Because when I'm writing, I need to get in the zone too, and I don't want to get distracted. One email, one phone call can set me off, and then I forget where I was, and I've lost my train of focus. So chunk up your day and be ferocious about guarding your time. Don't let people waste your time. Force them onto your schedule. And lastly, you need to build up CEO time. You need to have a part of your day every day that you spend on things that are growing your business. Not the tasks that you do in your business. Growth. New opportunities, new projects, hiring people, raising capital, whatever it is. New things that are going to grow your business. You need to make sure you have that time. That has to be built in and you have to safeguard it and protect it. Because if you don't have new opportunities coming into your business, you're always going to be stuck where you are. You're never going to be able to grow and get to that next step. I'll work on a new project, build it up to a certain point, decide if I'm going to keep it or lose it. If I'm keeping it, I give it to somebody to manage, and I'm on to my next project. If I lose it, I lose it. Try something new. You have to make sure you have your CEO time. A lot of information in one video. You got me riled up. But a very important topic because most entrepreneurs suck at time management and people chew their time and you can't afford to have your time wasted. At least I can't. You shouldn't either. Don't accept people walking all over you. You have to set up the barriers. Thank you guys for watching. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up below and I want to hear from you. Please leave a comment with your thoughts under this video or if you have a question for your own business, I'd love to hear it in the comments. I always read those. I really do appreciate them and I love seeing them come in. So thank you guys, and I'll see you soon.
