MBA1672 How to Stop Being So Busy + Free Ride Friday

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Hey, today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free Ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. You can check it out at EasyCourse co. It retails for $500 or you can win it for free. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review or Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. And you are in the draw until you win. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on Apple. All right, let's jump into today's episod. Hello, welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Because it's never business as usual, that's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn how to stop being so busy. If you're running a business and you feel like you have no time, you are swamped. You are working 16, 17, 18 hours a day you're tired, you're frustrated, you have no personal time left. Don't worry, you are not alone. This is very common. Starting a business can be all consuming, but it's not sustainable. You have to make sure you have time for life, for yourself, for your sanity. But how? How do you make sure you're not so busy? Well, I'm going to explain how in today's episode, your time is your greatest asset. So let's treat it that way and make sure we give ourselves our own time so that we can reflect, so we can think, so we can really, you know, be in a good state of mind to make better decisions. When it's time for work, when it's time for business. Speaking of business, let's get down to business. The first thing we have to understand is that time is like any other thing in the world. Whether it's health, whether it's money, whether it's relationships. If you want to manage it, you. You have to measure it. Like Peter Drucker says, what gets measured gets managed. So if you don't measure your time, it's impossible for you to know how to reduce your busyness. All right? How to make sure you have more time for yourself. In other words, how to manage your time. So what are we gonna do? We're gonna first make sure we're measuring time. One of the things that a lot of people do in the beginning of their entrepreneurial journey is that they just work, work, work, work, work, and they don't manage what they work, they don't manage what they're doing or when they're doing it. So, so the first step is that we are not going to do anything, anything in our work week without putting it in the calendar. So every task you do, whether you write a blog post, whether you're answering emails, whether you are in meetings, whether you're doing a webinar, whether you're working on your website, whether you're working on your product. Make sure you put it in the calendar. If you're doing it, put it in the calendar. Why? Because we have to see a visual of what we're working on, how much we're working on it, when we're working, all that stuff. So what happens is that you're going to follow your calendar and you're just going to do. You're going to implement what it says there. And you need to make sure you have no gaps. So if you work from 9 to 5, there should be no gaps between 9 to 5 in your calendar. Even if you're taking a break, put it in the calendar. Even if you're taking lunch, put in the calendar. Because what happens is that if you have a gap, that's where time gets wasted. That's where you stress things out. This is when you start doing other things that you're not supposed to be doing that is causing you to be busy. If it's important, if you have to do it, if it's part of the business, put in the calendar. Because then you can evaluate. You could say, okay, is everything here important? Can I eliminate any of these things that are on my calendar? That's the first step. Elimination. Yep. That's not important. I can eliminate. I don't have to do checking email every hour on the hour. I can do it once a day. Okay, you want to eliminate or reduce? Okay. The second thing is, can I ounce outsource? Is there anything on my calendar that I can get somebody else on my team to do? I can train. Think about it. How did you learn how to do it? Right? You could teach somebody else and get them to do it. If you don't have somebody on our team, who can you hire? Get a virtual assistant. Get an assistant that's local. Hire somebody to do the task. Because again, your time is more valuable than money. You're the leader of the company. You're going to bring in the big bucks, the 10,000, the $100,000 deals. Okay? Stop spending your time on things that will generate a value of $5. Hire out for that. But none of this is possible if you don't see what you're doing. If you don't see on the calendar what you're doing every single day of the week. So your first exercise is doing that, making sure you put that stuff in the calendar. It may take you a week or two to fill out that calendar and actually work with your schedule. So as you do something, you put it in the calendar. Okay. This is what I do at this time. Okay. Then we, again, like we said, we are going to try to eliminate and see if we can reduce anything. Maybe I don't have to spend so much time on something. And then we outsource. What you want to do is you want to color code the things you eliminated. Okay. Color code the things that you outsourced. And now let's say, for example, you made elimination red, and you made things you outsourced blue. Now, you know, hey, I got some gaps here. Okay? I got some things where I can do other things. Now, the problem is that most people, they just Say, I'll just do more work in that time. No, you're trying to free yourself up so you're not so busy. You're probably too busy right now. So you're going to fill the calendar with the things you just removed. Whether you outsource it or you removed it altogether, eliminated it with other things for your life, for your sanity. Whether it's going to the gym, whether it's, whether it's picking up your hobby, whether it's going grocery shopping in the middle of the day, whatever it is, plug it into the calendar, something else other than work. Because the whole point of this is reducing your work so you don't feel overwhelmed and too busy. But you might be saying, hey, Omar, what about like sales calls and appointments? I don't know in advance if I'm going to have those. Well, you should block book when you're going to do those. Maybe you're going to do those on Monday mornings, Wednesday mornings and Friday mornings and put it in the calendar in these three hours I'm doing these calls, okay? Even if you don't have appointments yet. That way, you know, now if you don't have an appointment, okay, you can have an alternative task. Now in Google Calendars, for example, you can block book a time and just give it a label, but you can allow other appointments to be booked during that time. You can actually stipulate that. Now the other thing is that what if you don't have an appointment? Are you going to do other work? Well, you can have an alternative task, something that's low, low priority, something that may be sparks your interest or something that you've always loved doing in your business that doesn't really have any urgency, whether it's redesigning a sales page, or maybe you're working on a new product idea, or maybe you're doing some research about a new tool you want to buy. That's when you do it, okay? In that alternate time, not in bed, at 9 o' clock on your phone, okay? That's when you do that kind of stuff. A few more tips. One of the things I really did recently that helped me a lot is reduce my appointments. So I realized I had some sales calls that are scheduled for 30 minutes. I said, why do we need 30 minutes? Maybe I can make it 20 minutes. And I realized that 20 minutes was enough time. Same thing with our meetings in our company, our internal meetings with our team. First we had a 45 minute slot, then we pushed it to 30 minutes and we got it done in the time allotted it allowed us to be more efficient, more to the point, and it saved me 15 minutes. Now this is 15 minutes of just one meeting. If I have 10 meetings, that's 150 minutes. That's two hours and a half, right? Think of what wonderful things you can do with two hours and a half. Go for a walk, have a picnic, go to the beach. Read a book. Have fun. Remember that. Fun. So by reducing your meeting times, your scheduled times, it really allows you to have those minutes pile up. Next. Interruptions are your enemy. Interruptions cause things to take more time. Extends the time of any kind of meeting or any kind of task you're working on. Be vigilant about no interruptions when you're working on something. Don't have an open door policy. I don't believe in that. Okay, have time for people. They can message you, make an appointment and speak to your teammates, speak to your colleagues, make sure you're leading, all that kind of stuff. But an open, you know, license to interrupt you at any time. Not a good idea. If you have Slack or any kind of messaging service, shut that down while you're working on your task. Open it up when you're doing a scheduled task where you're meeting with teams or coordinating with teams. Right now, when I'm recording this podcast, I have everything shut down. No messages, no phone messages, no notifications, nothing. I don't want any distractions because I need to focus on delivering this great episode in an efficient time. I got lots to do. Sometimes we think things are more important than they are. We think everything has the same level of importance. One day I want you to do like in the movies where they walk into their office and say to their secretary, clear my calendar. You don't have to tell your secretary. You do it yourself. Clear your calendar. Just say, I'm not doing anything today. Just take the day off. I know that sounds crazy and insane, but it's a great exercise to see. Was everything absolutely urgent that I had to do today? No. Maybe it's actually not that important. It'll reevaluate what you think is important, and then you can again reduce, eliminate, outsource. If you had an emergency, you would clear your calendar, Right? So in other words, it's not an emergency. The things that you're. That you're saying, that is so important. So it allows you to realign your priorities, realign the urgencies of these tasks or how important it is to the business. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's not adding enough value to take your time.

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Code gift to wrap up today's lesson. Your time is gold. Okay? You need to covet your time. You need to make sure you're not overwhelmed with so many things. You're so busy. Your calendar is totally packed. No. Take control of your calendar. Take control what's on it. Have visibility. What gets measured gets managed. Reduce, eliminate, outsource and take on the tips I shared with you today. Thanks so much for listening. Today's episode's not over though. It's Free Ride Friday. So let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is Bmore Trader. BmoreTrader says 5 stars. I'm still in the process of catching up. I started from the top and now I'm on episode 600. Love the bite sized nuggets of wisdom in every episode. Be more Trader. Your mission is to email me at omar00mba.net so I can hook you up with the lifetime membership to easy course, our $500 course over at easycourse co. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Freeride Friday. It's that simple. Listen on Friday to see if you won. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. You're going to feel so much better about your business. Showing up to your business every day when you don't feel so overwhelmed, when you don't feel like you are chained to your desk. You are in control. This is your business. You can't take a day off if you can't reduce your load. What's the point. You got to make it work for you. That's why you got into this in the first place. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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