Evan Carmichael breaks down how to free up time by eliminating unnecessary tasks, automating repetitive work, and delegating. He shares specific moves like switching to accounting software, hiring part-time admin help, and batching email checks. The goal: build a business that doesn't demand constant firefighting.
Chapters
How do you juggle your time? If you're like most entrepreneurs, you're working crazy hours, putting everything you got into your business, running every position in your business from the CEO down to the janitor. And if you really want to have breakthroughs, then you have to make sure you're spending your time wisely because that's the biggest asset that's going into your company. And if you spend too much time on the wrong project, it could sink your business. So I got a question from an entrepreneur, Love Moore, who wrote in to say, "How do you juggle your time and the running of your business empire?" So I could go on for a long time talking about time management, all the different stuff that I've done, but a few highlights that may help guide your thinking. If you're thinking about how you're gonna spend your time, the first thing you need to think about is eliminating the things that you don't need to do. Too many of us are running programs and projects and initiatives that we do not need to do. They are not really adding much to our business. You could eliminate a lot of the stuff on your plate right now and it would have zero impact on your bottom line. The next thing is look at what you can automate. I hate doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. First of all, you're likely to make mistakes. Second of all, it's really boring. And third of all, it's not a good use of your time. If anything can be automated, then you should find ways to do it and look at software that can help you or create your own software or web tools to help you do it. A great example is accounting, right? If you're doing accounting and you're using Excel, you're, you know, have your receipts in a shoebox, just get an accounting software package. It's so much faster. It saves you so much time. I just download my statements pop it into my accounting software, it remembers everything and spits out the statement. And it takes me like 20 minutes a quarter to do my accounting. Super simple because most of it is automated. I have a programmer on staff and he will help take a lot of the things that I hate doing repeatedly. If I have to do something 2 or 3 times, then I try to find a way to automate it because I'm gonna start making mistakes or get bored and there's better uses of my time. The third thing to think about is delegation. So we've eliminated all the stuff we shouldn't be doing, we've automated as much as possible, then look at what's left on your plate. So these are mission-critical things, things that are really helping grow your business. You don't have to do everything yourself. You gotta think about what are you best at in the world and how can you delegate the other things away to other people. People usually start delegating admin stuff, right? Nobody likes doing admin stuff. Entrepreneurs hate doing admin work. We like We like the big picture, we like the visionary stuff, we like the exciting projects. It's never the admin work. The first person I hired was an hour a day to do admin work for me so I could spend that hour doing something else. Right, you don't have to hire a full-time person straight off the bat, but doing those things quickly frees up your time to focus on higher priority projects. A few more tips that'll help you. I've got a lot to say on this stuff, so if you want more detail on anything in particular, Let me know because I've created a whole section of worksheets on this that you can go through to help figure this out for you better. So some more ideas: 1, I don't answer my phone. My phone number is not on my business card, and if somebody calls in, I don't pick it up unless it's my family because they know my number. Most people don't even know my number. When the phone rings in my office, it's a surprise, like, who's calling? Because phone calls are such a waste of time. Unscheduled phone calls. I do a lot of business by the phone, but I'm always calling out to people at set times. Because when somebody calls you up, you're in the middle of working on something, what happens? You answer the phone, may even take 5 minutes, you put down the phone, you forget what you were doing. It takes you half an hour just to get back in the flow of where you were before. Unscheduled phone calls are other people's agenda for your time. And you can't let them take up your time. Okay, next, emails can be the same thing, right? The email comes in, if you check every minute it comes in, ding ding, the light goes off, you stop working on what you're doing to check your email. Huge productivity suck. Either check your email at a designated time, spend an hour a day doing email, and then let it go. Or sort it at least, so you have really important people who you'll check frequently and everybody else can wait until the next day. Next, try to build a no-crisis business. I hate working with clients who are— I don't want to say demanding, but always in a state of emergency, like, we need this right now, we need this right now. And so you're constantly just reacting and putting out fires instead of proactively growing and building your business. So I work with clients who respect my process and who I can deliver great results to if they follow the process. I'm just working on a deal with a huge company in the US, and I'm kind of under NDA, so I can't say anything with the name, but they wanted me to sign a contract. Like, sure, I'll sign a contract, no problem, send me the contract up. But they wouldn't do it electronically. They FedExed it to me and wanted me to then FedEx it back to them. One page to be FedExed that I could scan in easily, send it off. And it took me a long time, it took me like 2 weeks to do it because I never could go down the street to my FedEx office to do it because I was so busy doing other stuff. It wasn't important enough for me to go and spend that time doing it. This could be a big contract for me. And so today I actually made it to the office to send it out, and just as I was finishing, the guy emailed me and said, "Hey, what's happening with the contract? Are we still on?" And I wrote back to say, "I just sent it out today. Here's the tracking number. If you sent this electronically, it would have been done the next day. I love e-contracts," and little happy face and send. And he said, "Okay, okay, we'll know that for next time." And so it's training people to respect your time and your process. Because if the companies that I work with always made me do that stuff, I'd just be running around with my head cut off, never actually being able to do anything to grow my business. So those are a few tips for you. I still got a ton to say on time management, but I'm, you know, conscious of your, your time watching this YouTube video. If you like the video, you want to see more, please give it a thumbs up below. And if you have further questions, you want me to dive deeper on any of these topics, or you have a different question for your business, leave it below in the comments and I'll absolutely create a video response for you. Thank you so much and I'll see you soon.
