Master Time Management: The Ultimate Guide for Entrepreneurs

I recently got an email from one of my Zuga customers, Mike, who wrote in having a problem about managing his time. So here's what he said: Evan, I really enjoyed them, talking about the Zugas, but I find the biggest problem is finding the time to read them and work on them, especially when I'm working 60 to 70 hours a week and raising a family at home. Do you have any suggestions? So here are my suggestions, and I used to be the crazy workaholic entrepreneur answering everybody super quickly, jumping on opportunities, and, and was burning out and was barely staying above mediocrity, barely staying above survival mode. And I felt like I was working so hard that I deserved a lot more than the results that I was getting back. And it wasn't until I really changed my schedule that I started getting great results. So here's my 5-step process, okay? The first is eliminate. You have to eliminate the stuff that is not adding value. You are doing work in your business that is not adding any value, and you gotta cut it out. Here's a quick example. I used to run mastermind groups, or I still do, and I used to take meeting notes. I figured I'm gonna record what everybody says and write it down, and then after the meeting, send it to everybody, because that's what professional meetings, that's what they have. And I spent a lot of time on it. I thought, here, I'm adding all this extra value. And one month I forgot to do it, or I was too busy, I had too much on my plate and I couldn't do it. And you know what happened? Nothing. Nobody cared. Are you serious? I spent all this time and effort working on this thing and nobody cares? And then I just stopped doing it and nobody commented on it. And it just freed up an extra, you know, couple hours every month because I was doing this that I thought added so much value, but it really didn't. So you got to eliminate the stuff in your life. Think about what you're doing every day, every week, every month, and eliminate one thing from each. And you may be thinking, Evan, I do— I'm already doing only the high-value stuff. You can find something to eliminate. You can find something to eliminate from your schedule. Okay, that's the first one. Second one is chunk. This is really important. You want to chunk important things together. So anything that you're doing multiple times per day, you're now going to do once per day. Anything multiple times per week, you're now doing once a week. And everything multiple times per month, you're doing once per month. Okay, so you're not checking email all day long and running frantically around. You're not meeting with somebody and then doing something else and, and having a crazy schedule. Okay, you're chunking your time. Email is now once per day. Meetings, you chunk it. If that was multiple times per week, now it's once per week. My typical schedule on Mondays, I do all my admin, my Batman work. Batman is like working in the business, important projects. And these are things that, you know, still involve me, but I have to work on it, but it's still high-level stuff. And I do that for the week, but I know that Monday I'm sitting there and I'm just doing— I'm head down, you know, nose in the work. And if I don't want to shave, I don't have to, right? You know, if I don't want to dress up, I don't have to. You're getting the mindset up. Today I'm just going to work. I'm not going to let anything distract me. I'm just going to work. Tuesdays I have my CEO days, my big picture stuff, my big planning stuff. You have to make time for CEO time. You're working 60, 70 hours a week. And you don't have time to work on yourself. This is important. You need time every week. I call it CEO time to work on developing your business. The on-the-business stuff has to happen every week, otherwise you're gonna be constantly running on this treadmill and never seeing major growth. It's really important. Wednesdays I do my videos, so I spend the day, I do videos. Today is a Wednesday. I don't know when we're gonna release this, but I record All my videos on a Wednesday, I'll sit down in front of the camera and bust out 10 to 20 videos depending on how I'm feeling. Today I'm feeling pretty good, so we'll see how far I get. Thursday is my meeting day, public-facing day. It's my radio show, it's my phone calls, it's my seminars, it's my coffee meetings. All of that happens on a Thursday, and I put them back to back to back. The reason is I wake up and I know today is my public-facing day. Today is a day where I'm going to have lots of energy, where I'm meeting people, you I'm going to look good, I got to get my new t-shirts on, right? You think of what happens before a meeting, right? Or before a phone call. 20, 30 minutes before a meeting, you're not really doing anything productive, right? Because you know, oh, I got a meeting coming up, so I don't want to start anything big. So you're doing little tiny tasks, right? And then if you have a phone call and they're calling you and they're late, right? If they're 10, 15 minutes late, what are you doing in those 10, 15 minutes? Nothing, right? You're waiting for them to call, so you're doing more tiny little tasks, you can't get anything big. So you're wasting a lot of time. I book my meetings back to back to back to back. If it's an in-person meeting, you're coming to me, we meet at a Starbucks underneath my office. And if you're doing phone calls, I'm calling you. Because I'm always on time and I respect my time and I also respect yours. And they're back to back to back to back. It frees up so much of my time. So you want to chunk similar tasks go together, okay? 3, a huge thing that helped me was I eliminated the phone from my business. You may be thinking, Evan, you're crazy. Eliminate the phone? We need the phone. Unscheduled phone calls is other people's agenda for your time, and you need to protect your time like the most valuable asset you have because it is. That has to be your mindset. And if somebody calls you, even if you don't pick it up, You look to see who it is, right? You look over, oh, and then you wonder, who's that number? Who is that person? Or why is John calling me here? I wonder what he wants. What does it do if you don't pick up the phone? It distracts you from what you're doing. And if you're doing these tiny little tasks, then who cares? But why are you spending time doing all these tiny little tasks? You should be working on the big stuff for your business. And if you're deep into big stuff for your business, you can't afford to be distracted by phone phone calls. If it's super important for your business, then somebody else on your team handles phone calls. I try to run a no-crisis business. I don't want people calling me. My phone number's not on my website. My phone number's not in my emails. My phone number's not on my business card. My business card is my email and my Twitter account. That's how you reach me. I do a lot of business on the phone. I close a lot of deals on the phone with billion-dollar-plus companies over the phone, but we're doing a scheduled phone call. And I'm calling you on a Thursday. It may seem a little crazy, it may seem a little, well, it's not going to work for my business. If you really don't want to go that nuts, I understand, but at least chunk out time to yourself where you're not answering the phone. You need to have focused times. I prefer 90-minute chunks of just dedicated work to get stuff done and not be interrupted, because those interruptions are causing that 60, 70 hours a week to really be crunched down into like 20 hours a week of actual high productivity stuff. That's where you're losing all your time. Number 4 is automate. I hate doing stuff multiple times. If I have to do the same thing twice, I get a little upset. If it's 3 times, then I get frustrated. So there has to be a better way, and I find a tool to help me. Anything that you're repeating, there is a tool that can help you because you want to be doing the high-level stuff. You don't want to be doing the day-to-day grinding out boring stuff that doesn't really help your company grow. Okay, so I'm looking for tools. So I'm eliminating everything that doesn't have to be done. Everything else, I'm then looking for tools to help me do it faster, more automated, make less mistakes, and free up my time to focus on bigger picture stuff. So I use Accounting software, right? Basics. You gotta use accounting software. Stop trying to track everything in Excel. I use Dropbox, I use Fiverr, I use oDesk, I use a whole bunch of tools. Evernote, right? I use tons of tools to help me make my business stronger, and then I have a programmer who will automate tasks and create custom programs for me. So it doesn't just code my website, it's I'm doing this thing, what more than 3 times, I need you to make this automatic for me so I press a button and it happens. Or even better, set up a cron job so I don't even have to press a button, it just happens on its own, right? Automate. You gotta look for ways to automate because your time— some people look at it and say, well, accounting software is $100. Are you kidding me? Your time isn't worth $100? How much time are you wasting? It's ridiculous. You have to value your time. And then the last one is delegate, okay? You eliminate what doesn't need to be done, You're then automating what's left, and then what's left over from that— this has to be done, it can't be automated— you're then going to delegate a lot of stuff out, okay? Because you shouldn't be doing 80% of the work you're doing. You personally should not be doing 80% of the work that you are currently doing, maybe even more. Somebody on your team has to be doing it. You need to be able to build your business to the point where you have enough margin to afford a team member to come on and help you do some of those tasks. That's how you're going to build your business. Otherwise, you're going to be stuck on this wheel going round and round and round. And it doesn't have to be a full-time person. The first person I hired was for 1 hour a day to do some database work for me, and he was better at it than I was, so it freed up an hour and a half of my time to focus on bigger picture stuff. You can hire interns, you can bring on high school interns that are free, paid university interns, foreign language interns that are free. You can use websites like oDesk to find people around the world to work for you. You can use stay-at-home moms as part-time workers, right? You don't need to have a full-time employee sitting there in your office sucking up a whole bunch of money. You can start small, but when you start getting used to building that muscle where you're thinking, does this have to be done at all? Can this be automated through technology? And then if not, can I give this to somebody else to do? That really aligns your business for massive growth because you are doing the work now, the time you have left, right? You're building your business, you're doing the high-level CEO stuff. If you're doing stuff that you don't love, that you're not great at, that you're not one of the best in the world at, if you're doing something you hate every day, How do you expect to build a great business? So eliminate, okay? Chunk common tasks together. Stop answering the phone and getting distracted all day long and answering those emails as soon as they come in. Automate the technology and then delegate the rest of your tasks away so you are left doing what you love, what you're great at, and what's going to change the world. Believe. For those of you watching, like the video, you can support me by clicking on the link in the description description. Leave a comment, let me know what you think, or if you have any other questions. And click on my face, subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much, I'll see you soon.