My Favorite Time Management Strategies

Hi everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Connect the Dots. I'm your host, Matt Ragland. Thank you so much for listening, and for some of you watching this episode on YouTube, you can now find Connect the Dots on any major podcast provider. Just got an email saying that it's been approved and added to Google Podcasts. So for those of you that were waiting on that, please make sure you subscribe there, and thank you so much for being a supporter of the show. The only other ask I have for you is if you're listening on Apple Podcasts specifically, or if you're an Apple user, please would you leave a 5-star rating and review? Of course, if you think the show deserves it, but it is a really great way for the show to grow and be promoted by Apple in the early days of the show launching. So if you're able to take a few minutes and do that, I would be incredibly appreciative. Of your rating and review. The topic for today's show is all about top time management strategies and systems going into the new year. I know as I start the new year out, I'm thinking a lot about the time that I'm spending on different tasks, different ways that I'm focusing on the core elements of my business. Now, part of the inspiration for this episode came from my longtime friend Casey Proctor. Shout out to Casey. And Casey was asking me, he's like, Matt, I I'd really love to know more about how you're managing your time now that you fully control it, now that you have complete say in how you manage and use your working time. It was one thing to think about how I was going to manage and prioritize my time and tasks when I was only spending, say, an average of 10 hours a week on my side hustle. And really, when I was doing this for the 2 or 3 years previous, most of it was just all about how can I create the next piece of content? Can I make sure that I'm spending enough time making a new video or writing the new email every single week? And that was how I spent a lot of my time. I almost didn't need to manage it too much because I was just making sure just like getting the new video out. But now there are a lot of things that I can spend my time doing. Yes, I still need to record new YouTube videos. Yes, I have the Connect the Dots podcast now, and I have coaching clients, and I have a course that I'm ramping back up. If you go back and listen to the How to Plan Your Year episode, I think it's episode 3, that will tell you more about like different outcome-based goals and system-based goals and how they really will define the amount of time that you have every single week. And one of the reasons I talked about system goals versus outcome goals is for me, when I track my time and I look at how much of my week, how much of my work is focused on these system-based goals—YouTube videos, podcast episodes, weekly emails, coaching calls—all of those things take up 70 to 80% of my week every single week. So when I think about doing something new or in addition to these systems that I already have in place that are the backbone of the business, I really have to be specific and disciplined on how much time I'm giving to these other areas of my work. Now let's segue into one of my favorite time management strategies, which is Google's 70/20/10 principle. Now this is something that I first heard from Google CEO Eric Schmidt on the Tim Ferriss Show podcast. And Eric was talking about how they have to spend 70% of their time on core business functions. So those are things like Gmail, Search, obviously AdSense, YouTube. They get 70% of Google's time and attention for like designers, developers, engineers. That's what they spend 70% of their time on, the core business functions and features. Now, in order for there to be innovation at Google, there still needs to be some focus on new and developing opportunities. So that's the next, that's the next phase. 20% of the time for Google is spent on new opportunities that could prove to be one of the things that becomes the backbone of the business, one of those core business functions. So interestingly enough, it could be something like Google Maps started as a new opportunity, and especially Google Earth kind of grew out of that as well. And now probably both of those are a part of the core business functions as well, but it just started as something they were spending like 20% of their time on. So now we still have 10% of time left, and this is actually where I first heard of this principle because there was something that I heard about even before 70-20-10, which is Google's famous 10% time. And it's the emphasis that Google gave their designers and developers specifically to spend 10% of their working time on whatever sounded most interesting to them. Something that they thought would probably, might impact the company or be useful. But that, like, that wasn't very— that wasn't tightly enforced at all. It's just like, hey, what do you find interesting? Spend 10% of your time each week working on that. And the most famous example of a product that came out of 10% time actually is Gmail. Google started in search and they weren't really doing much with email at all. A couple of developers and designers started working on the product that became Gmail, and so they were only spending 10% of their time for that. And it's an interesting way to think about how a feature, how a product, how anything can grow through these 3 phases. So if Gmail starts as something that you only spent 10% of your time on, and then you're like, oh wow, this is a new opportunity, we might really have something there. Now we start to spend 20% of our time on it. It's like, oh wow, this is really becoming something. Now it's part of the 70% time. It's one of the core business functions. I believe AdSense started as a 10% time project as well. So you can see how something can start really small but then grow into something that's very big for your business. So how do I do that? How do I think about 70/20/10 in my own business? Well, I can think about the things that are part of the core functions of how I keep my business running. How does it bring in the most people, the most interest, the most revenue so that I can continue to keep running this? And for me, it's pretty simple. Like, it's YouTube is definitely a core business function, email marketing is something that is core for me as well. And then coaching programs and masterminds are the, like, kind of third piece of that 70% time. That's where I get the most traffic, I get the most subscribers, and I get the most revenue through those three pieces. So I need to make sure that every week, and especially every month, I know I'm roughly spending about 70% of my time on one of those three functions. So if that's my 70% time, what is in my 20% time? Well, interestingly enough, this podcast is in 20% time for me. I know that I shouldn't spend more than 20% of my time, say like 8 to 10 hours each week, working on the podcast because right now it doesn't have near the subscribers the YouTube channel does. I definitely shouldn't ignore the YouTube channel in order to make more podcasts, It's something that is a new opportunity. I'm very excited about it. I love doing it, but I need to make sure that it doesn't grow to be more than what, like, YouTube or coaching or any of those, like, primary areas of the business are. Another area that's a part of 20% time for me is continuing to work on courses. I want courses to become more of a 70% time area. In the year ahead. But right now they are a good part of the business, not great, and I am spending more time on them. But I need to make sure that again I'm not spending too much time that affects the areas of the business that are bringing in the most interest and revenue. Now the 10% time, what am I spending my 10% time on? Well, I have to be honest that so far I haven't been very good at focusing that 10% time on something that is a wild new idea for me, something that I'm just really interested in. I know what it is, but I've actually been doing more of like 70/30 so far since I started like focusing full-time on my business. And I want to say that's okay if you don't really have the time right now to kind of have that 10% time. I will say that like your long-term, your long-term innovation and creativity may suffer. But in the short term, like I'm doing right now, I'm just, you know, I'm giving myself some grace. I'm giving myself a little bit of a pass in how I'm managing that time. But let me tell you what my 10% time project is. It is validating a concept for an actual physical notebook that I want to create a Kickstarter campaign for later in the year. This also offers a really good, a really good example for how a project can go through 10, 20, up to 70% time. Let me give you this example. So I need to spend, say, a few hours each week thinking through how I would validate a journal concept, an actual notebook journal concept. Then once I actually move into the validation phase and I'm like, okay, there are enough people interested in this, I either had a bunch of people sign up, maybe I had some people pay to be on a in a pilot program to test out the different concepts and give me feedback. But once I validate it, now it moves from, okay, this is a cool new idea I spend 10% of my time on, to, okay, well now I have to like dedicate 20% of my time for this because now I actually have to put together mock-ups, I have to organize the Kickstarter campaign, I have to do photo shoots, I have to do all of these things to get myself to the Kickstarter program. Now, if the Kickstarter program becomes a part of 70% time for like a quarter, that's totally okay. What I'm interested in though is, let's say the Kickstarter program does go really well, and I would work hard enough to intend for it to go really well. Well, now I just have a whole new business opportunity that has come to fruition, and it needs to be part of my 70% time. So there are some things that could change for me. We'll get into some of that in just a little bit, but you can see how it— a project could move from, okay, I'm spending 10% of my time validating a concept. Great, it's been validated. Okay, now let's spend 20, maybe 30% of my time making sure that I have a great Kickstarter campaign and that I meet the goal. Awesome, I've met the Kickstarter goal. Now this is going to be something that for at least a quarter or half a year, maybe longer, maybe forever now, it's a big part of the business. Now it's a part of that 70% time. So if you check out the description and the show notes for this episode, I'm going to link to an article or two where I describe the 70/20/10 principle in more detail. 70/20/10 now gives me a helpful framework for understanding how much time should I spend on different areas of the business. To make sure that the core business functions are being taken care of, new opportunities are being cultivated, and I'm also kind of scratching that itch for what sounds really interesting and what could be this huge new thing that changes everything about how the business is run. Now there's another time management principle. This concept is the 50/30/20 principle that was coined by Jim Collins, author of such great business books as Good to Great. I heard Jim talking about this on the Tim Ferriss Show podcast again, and It struck me as so brilliant and simple, which is always something that I'm trying to strive for—something that makes a lot of sense and is really simple to follow. And the way that he breaks down his time is to look at it and say, am I spending 50% of my time on something creative, some creative output or intake? So that's really important. I think about that a lot. The other one is, am I spending 30% of my time researching and teaching? Now, Jim Collins does a lot of researching and a lot of teaching, a lot of speaking, so it makes sense that's his like next level of like time management chunk. The other one is 20%, which is the 20% of time that he needs to use on any kind of administrative or managerial tasks. I found it very interesting that the 20% time is that admin and manager. Time. And that's something that I know I can get stuck in often, and a lot of us can get really stuck in a lot of times. Michael Hyatt has a concept that I really like that dovetails nicely here, and it's the concept of uphill versus downhill work. Uphill work is that creative work. It is the important research. It is the learning. It is the thing that's going to continue to push your work forward and up to the summit. Downhill work are the things that— are they necessary? Often yes, but they're things like, let me check my email again. Of course I need to check email and make sure that things are being followed up on. It's things like, I need to post this to social media. I need to write this new, you know, tweet storm. I need to do these things for my work for promotion. Are these necessary? Oftentimes you could argue yes, they are necessary, but not always.. And so when I think about this concept from Jim Collins of 50% of time on creative work, 30% of time on teaching and researching, learning, and then 20% of time in admin and manager roles, that is, I think, a really interesting and brilliant concept for a really simple way of how you can think through what kind of activities am I spending my time on. You may be asking yourself, Matt, how is this different, or how does this work? Work with the 70/20/10 principle from Google? That's a really good question. And I do want to say from the beginning that I'll be getting into some of the nitty-gritty of the details of how these work together and separately. But if you get to the end of this explanation in a few minutes and you're like, it doesn't really make sense to me how this would work together, then what I would encourage you to do is just pick one of the principles for now and practice either the 50/30/20 or 70/20/10 for the next couple of weeks. This is something that takes a little bit of practice and guidance to use effectively, and I do have an opportunity for you to do that with me, which I'll share at the end of this episode. So make sure you listen through to the end. Now let's take a specific area of 70/20/10—coaching—which is in that 70% time, one of the core business areas of my work. Now let's apply the 50/30/20 principle to coaching specifically. How does that work? Well, basically I need to make sure that anytime I'm working on coaching that I'm spending 50% of my time creating new lessons, creating proposals, creating posts that help different coaching clients and mastermind members. I need to be creating for 50% of the time. 30% of the time I need to make sure that I am teaching or researching new concepts or learning about ways that either I can be a better coach or I can deliver better creative content to my clients and members. The 20% of the time is making sure that everything is going as expected, that I can make sure that all the replays are being posted, that calendar links are updated, that the Zoom calls are set up. All of these kind of administrative manager things. And this is just what I'm doing right now with admin and managing. But one of the great things, and this is where any of these concepts that I'm telling you, they aren't hard and fast rules of like you can only spend 50% of your time creating, or you can only spend 30% of your time learning. I could look at this and say, all right, there are, and I am already outsourcing some of these admin tasks. Okay, great. No worries. How can I now shift maybe more of that time to teaching and researching or to creating? And so some of it's a just a useful starting framework. And I really liked 50/30/20 because it made a very clear distinction of you need to spend 50% of your time making things and creating things so that you are a better content creator, so that you stay and practice so that you're modeling good creative behavior for your clients and for your members in the masterminds. And this was a game changer for me. And so now every day I kind of look back at the end of the day and think, no matter what area of the business I was focusing on, did I spend 50% of my time roughly creating great work? Take the great out, actually. Did I spend 50% of my time creating content? Creating content like this podcast, like this will take me about an hour to actually record, and I will put that into my tracker. So I'm looking back at the day and figuring out how many hours did I spend on creative work today. Now I want to make a little bit of a distinction here as well. Well that a lot of people have asked me with this concept in the past. Well, like, where does something like— if you're working on a podcast or you are working on a YouTube video, two things that obviously I do— where does something like editing or writing or taking thumbnail pictures or doing any of those things, is that like admin time or is that creative time? And I would say, and I've brought this up a couple of times, this is going to be a recurring theme of Connect the Dots, is you can decide that however you want based on your situation and just trust yourself to make a decision. And as you grow and as you develop, you may find that like, okay, I don't need to edit this anymore. And so it goes into something that like I would say right now, the editing time for me is pretty creative. So I put that in creative time. But if I get to a point where I understand the process so well and I could teach someone else to do it, then something that used to be creative now becomes more admin for me. Like, do you see the distinction there? A certain task can shift from this is creative to now this is administrative or managerial because I could delegate this. I could outsource this. So things can change, but think about what is your creative work? What are the things that you are doing that only you can do? I think about those a lot as this is, this is my creative work, things that I'm really good at that only I can do. Only I can be the host of the podcast. Only I can make the YouTube videos. Am I the only person that can edit them? For YouTube right now, I would say yes, but already in just 5 or 6 episodes of the podcast, I'm starting to realize that the editing probably isn't something that has to be creative time for me. I could make more videos. I could make more podcast episodes in the amount of time that it takes me to edit. But right now it is a part of the creative time because I'm the only one that's going to like bring this creation through to publishing through the editing process. Does that make sense? So the way to think about this is you take your main areas of your work, the main projects that you're doing, and run them through the, like, core business 70%, the new opportunities 20%, and the wild interesting ideas 10%. And then you can also take, like, any of those areas themselves and apply 50-30-20 directly to them. So let's use the podcast as an example. Am I spending 50% of my time on the podcast actually creating content for the podcast like this? If the answer is yes, that's great. Am I spending 20 to 30% of my time researching new topics, making sure that I'm really dialed into the process and creating great new content for you going forward? Okay, great. That's what I want to be thinking about as well. The administrative— I actually don't spend too much administrative time on the podcast right now, and that's good because I shouldn't. That should be at most 20% of the time that I spend on the podcast. And even some of the administrative things that I do, like uploading it to Transistor.fm, which is my podcast host, and writing some of the descriptions, posting it to different social media platforms, I could actually delegate out some of that. So even still, maybe this 50/30/20 actually kind of morphs into a 60% of my time creating, 35% of my time learning and researching new topics, and then 5% is just on basic admin, which would be more just like checking in to make sure everything's going okay. I want to reiterate also at this point, if that whole section of how 70/20/10 and 50/30/20 work together just caused you some confusion, first, I'm sorry, and secondly, just pick one for now. As I've explained this to people, like, just in even in a mastermind setting, usually it's a little too much to think about the first time you hear all of it. And so I would recommend that whichever one resonated the most with you or clicked for you at the first time you heard it, just practice that for the next couple of weeks. You can try the other one the couple of weeks after that if you want, but just focus on do I want to be tracking my creative time versus my research learning time versus my admin time, great, go with 50/30/20. If you want to think more about like, okay, what are the core areas of my business? Am I spending 70% of my time on these core areas of the business, no matter if it is creative or research or whatever, but at least 70% of my time, and then 20% of time on new opportunities, and 10% of my time on interesting wild new ideas? Pick one or the other and at the beginning and just practice tracking your time in those primary buckets. There are two other concepts that I want to share with you, and I'm not going to go into as much detail with these two concepts because I have YouTube videos for them that you can go even deeper on. And so I'm going to link to those in the description and in the show notes for the podcast. So if these resonate with you, there is a longer visual example of how you can follow both of these frameworks. The first one is the 10 Block Method, and this is one of my most popular YouTube videos. So definitely, if you just type into YouTube "10 Blocks Matt Ragland," you'll see a couple of videos that pop up. But basically, in this, I am thinking about if I split my time in a normal work week into like these 4-hour chunks, then I have 10 blocks of 4 hours each. That I can use on different tasks. Now you could use this in tandem with either 70/20/10 or 50/30/20, but I'm looking— I'm using the 10 blocks to be more proactive for how I'm planning out my week and saying like, okay, well I need to make sure that I'm spending at least 8 to 12 hours on my YouTube videos. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm a YouTuber. I need to make sure that I'm spending at least that amount of time. On my new YouTube videos. Great. So if I spend, say, 12 hours, that's 3 of my 10-hour blocks. Okay, those are off the table. What do I do with the other 7 blocks that I have available? So make sure you check that video out. The other one is this concept of just very simple time tracking. And time tracking is really useful if you aren't really aware or you're unsure of how you're spending your time right now.. And if you've never done time tracking before, it can feel a little like OCD weird, but it is super helpful for, like I said, raising that awareness of where your time is actually going. And what's important when you're doing your first round of time tracking is not to judge yourself too harshly, because when you track your time, you'll often realize that you aren't spending as much time on the things that you thought you were. You spend— maybe I know anytime I do time tracking, I realize I'm distracted a lot more than I thought I was. And I also spend a lot more time on kind of that downhill work that I mentioned before. I spend a lot more time on downhill work than I expect. So when I go through time tracking, it's just a good reset for me to understand, like, okay, I need to be a little bit more mindful. I need to be a little more proactive with how with how I'm using these 10 blocks, with how I'm applying 70/20/10 or 50/30/20. So time tracking in like in a nutshell, and again, I would highly recommend checking out the recent video that I have about time tracking. But what I recommend doing with time tracking is again in more of a reflective, almost reactionary practice. And that's just every, every 2 or 3 hours, even 4 hours, you could do it 2 or 3 times throughout the day. Looking back over the last few hours and just kind of saying like, okay, what did I, what did I spend my time on? And you could look at that in 1-hour blocks, or I normally do it in 30-minute blocks, and just make sure you're reviewing and saying, this is what I actually spent my time on. Again, no judging. We're not here to judge ourselves with the things that we spend our time on, but we're just raising our awareness. So there are some good visual examples in the YouTube video. It's going to be linked in the description and the show notes for the podcast episode. But when you do time tracking, it will raise your awareness of where your time is actually going. So now you can just have more information. You have the data right in front of you, and it's not about judging what you've done in the past, but using the information that you have now to be more proactive, intentional, and focused in the future. To go back to my friend Casey's original question that I started this episode with of how are you managing and spending your time now that you completely control your time is it's interesting because I am definitely creating more. I have a higher output, but that is a function of just having more time. I'm going from 10 hours a week up to 40-ish hours a week. Now, if I roll that back a little bit, I do think, am I creating or outputting or doing 4 times the work that I was doing before? And the answer to that is no. And part of that is because for right now, I am spending a little bit more time on the admin side that I would prefer, but I'm getting that sussed out and organized, and I will be able to better control that as the year as the new year starts. But the other part of that is I realized that to start a new business and go into business for yourself, to completely control your time and feel like you're going to take on the world in November is kind of a really weird time to start a business because there are several things that happen. We like spent some time with family, there were the holidays. I actually did have COVID at the beginning of December. I'm fully recovered and fine, just as a, as an aside on that.. But there were a bunch of things that happened that I haven't really had that many like regular like 9 to 5 Monday through Friday type of weeks so far. So there is a little bit of weirdness in that. Again, I'm being more gracious with myself and also like reminding when I get like maybe anxious or worried about like, man, I'm not— I'm still not doing enough. I'm still not doing enough now that I control my own time. I got to roll back and reflect and again observe and report to myself instead of judge and like judge myself and think like, well, you know, there have been a lot of things that happened over the past 2 months. And my friend Sean Blanc, who I've mentioned a couple of times on the podcast, he runs a wonderful course called The Focus Course that I highly recommend. What I was telling him about this, and he has been working for himself for I think about 10 years now, maybe longer, maybe a little less, but he said, Matt, most weeks are like that when you work for yourself. And especially having young kids like he does and like I do, you know, thing— he said, I feel like I rarely have a normal 9-to-5 Monday through Friday sort of week. Another concept that I've definitely seen happen in my life the last couple of months is the effect of Parkinson's Law. And some of you will know exactly what I'm talking about, and maybe you'll understand it when I tell you what it is. You'll be like, oh yeah, that's, that's what Parkinson's Law is. I knew, I knew that already. It's the concept of the law that work tends to, or any activity tends to expand in the amount of time that you give it. And now that I have more time, I am of course doing more, but am I doing exponentially more that now I can have exponential more time? And Again, the answer to that is no, and I'm giving myself grace and understanding with that because there are more things just about running a business that are taking up my time, which is why that 50/30/20 is so important to me, of making sure that I am spending 50% of my time on that creative work, that I'm spending 70% of my time on those core business functions of YouTube, coaching, and email. But I'm thinking back and like, okay, work tends to expand in the amount of time that I give it. Hmm, am I giving too much time, especially like in an annual, you know, way? Am I giving too much time to certain projects? When I think of something that I'm giving a quarter, 3 months of the year to, could I get it done in like 6 to 8 weeks instead if I just really focused on and said, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ship this in 6 to 8 weeks and it's gonna be done? At that point? How would my work change? So that's where I'm going to leave us for now, is thinking about how could I compress projects and goals that I have for 2021 into a 6 to 8 week cycle. This is something that Shawn and I have talked about for a number of years. It's something that Shawn does with his business and one that he has kind of adjusted from the 6 to 8 week work cycle of Basecamp, which is a project management software. So in a future episode, probably pretty soon, I'm going to talk about this 6 to 8 week cycle test that I'm going to be running for my own business in the first half of 2021. I'm really excited about it. I'm a little scared by it, you know, to be totally honest. I don't know if it'll work. I don't know if I'll be able to do it. But the way that Sean talks about it, and Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamp, describes the flow of their business following a 6-week work cycle with 2 weeks of kind of chill and sabbatical after that— ooh, I gotta tell you, that sounds really nice. And the reason that it intrigues me and scares me so much is because I'm sitting back and thinking, could I go a week without doing really anything super related to the business? Sean takes a sabbatical week every 8 weeks, and he's not— I wouldn't say he's completely taking vacation, but he's not like doing the normal things in his business. And to do that every 8 weeks Sounds very exciting and also very terrifying to me. So I'm going to start that on January 4th. Probably sometime in January, I'll give you a quick update episode on how this is going and more of the concepts and structures that excite me and also terrify me when it comes to this more like big picture planning, big picture time management. So what we talked about today was 70/20/10 principle for managing the areas and projects of your work, and then the 50/30/20 principle for how you manage your time specifically for those different areas and projects in your work. We also talked about time tracking and the 10-block method. There are links and resources to all of these frameworks, concepts, principles, whatever you want to call them—I need to decide on a single word really—in the description and in the show notes for this episode. Before we go, the other thing that I want to tell you about is on January 18th, I'm going to be starting a 4-week productivity accelerator program called the Productivity Power-Up. If you have been thinking about ways that you can really accelerate and power up and level up your productivity and projects in 2021, this is a perfect opportunity for you, for us to work together. Especially if you— if there are a couple of things that we talked about today that you felt were a little hard to grasp and conceptualize. We spend an entire session going over these things with you. And there is a community forum where you can post your questions. Myself and other people in the program will chime in and help you out. But it's a 4-week program and there are 2 live calls. Every single week going through these concepts. I will have lessons for you and it's a very engaged program so that you can actually do the work, get feedback on it, and feel really calm, clear, and confident as you go into the rest of 2021. So if you're interested in that, there's going to be again a link in the show notes and the description. I highly recommend you checking it out. If you If you have any questions about it, just email me as well, matt@mattragland.com. I'd be happy to talk to you about that program. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Connect the Dots. If you have time, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave a rating and a review for how much you like the show or things that you think I might do better. I'd be happy to listen to all of it. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast on YouTube and the Clips channel as well. There's links to everything. There are so many links in the show notes. Pick out the one that works best for you. But thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next week on Connect the Dots. Thanks, bye.