MBA1937 How to Spend More Time On What Matters + Free Ride Friday

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Hey, welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show your daily dose of business goodness every single day with our 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 Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away our automated Webinar Challenge. It retails for $99. Override webinarninja.com AWC but you can win it for free. Just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like today, to see if you won. We announce this week's winner later on the episode. In today's lesson, you will learn how to spend more time on what matters. They say time is money. I say it's worth more than money because you can make more money, but you can't make more time. As a leader, as the person that's running your business, your time is incredibly valuable. So how you spend your time is incredibly important to the success of your business. So in today's lesson, I'm going to walk you through a Great strategy, a great practice that I do every single day. When you get up to get started in your day, how do you prepare for the day? How do you create that to do? List and make sure you work on the things that actually make an impact in your business. That actually moves the needle and moves your business forward in leaps and bounds rather than just doing the same thing over and over because it feels like work. You're going to want to grab a paper and pen for today's episode. If you don't have one handy or you're driving. Just listen through so you can get the concept, get the theory and then listen back again. A paper and pen so you can implement this tomorrow or the next day you get to work. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Many entrepreneurs get overwhelmed when they start the day. They know they got a ton of things to do. They're not sure which ones to do first, second, third. And what happens is we often get caught up in the mundane as human beings. We actually gravitate to the mundane, the routine, whether that's opening up Facebook or checking our social profiles. It's easy, it's familiar, and we often spend a lot of time not really having a direction for our day. We're gonna stop that right now because the planning that you do for your day is actually more important than what you do during the day because it's actually gonna set the tone and put you in the right position to win and set you in the right direction. So I actually like to have a yellow legal pad. I actually have a legal pad that I do this exercise every single morning and I don't even look at my screen because I don't wanna be by notifications or emails or anything like that because that's not a good use of my time. When I start the day, I'm fresh, I have a clean slate in my head, I'm well rested. So I want to give my best self to the most important things when I get started. That's why I first start with a yellow legal pad and actually just go to the couch in the living room or out in the balcony where I'm not distracted by any Kind of notifications. So what do I do on this piece of paper? Well, I first start with a brain dump. I write down all the things I need to work on in my business, Big and small projects that could take months, Things that might take me an hour or a few days. I just write down everything. This allows me to just look at what is ahead of me. You know, it just gives me a chance to exhale. A lot of us, it gets overwhelming because it's all in our head. We don't know what we have to do. It's just good to just put everything down. And I actually spent. I spend five minutes doing this where I just. I actually force myself. Is there anything else I want to put on this piece of paper? It doesn't matter how long it is. It could be 20 items, 30 items. Just write down everything that I feel like I need to do. Again, this could be something as big as, hey, a marketing campaign, or it could be something as small as I need to set up a meeting with a potential partner. So we could do a partner webinar. So you just jot everything down. Once you do that, you're going to look at your list and the first thing you're going to do before you think about what's important or prioritize or anything like that, you're going to look at it and you're going to ask yourself, is there anything here that I can eliminate? I can literally just cross out? Don't really need to do it. Is not really that important. It's just something that I think I have to do, but maybe I don't have to do that. So the first thing I like to do is just eliminate. Just start crossing things out that I think, hey, really not that important. The next thing I do is I look at the list one more time and say, is there anything I can delegate? Okay, is there anything I can give to anybody on my team or hire out for or get a freelancer to do? And yes, that's gonna be a separate task to, you know, give that instruction to a teammate or to hire somebody to do it. But that's good to have a kind of a circle around, hey, these are the things I'm gonna delegate. And I'll create a different to do later. But right now I'm going to just delegate it to somebody else. I'm not going to do it. So this is actually quite good because it gets you in the habit of saying, hey, I'm the founder of this company. I'm the leader of this company. I'M the CEO, I should be assigning tasks to people instead of doing everything myself. So once I've circled the things that I am going to delegate, I then separate the things that are left over in a separate list and I just write it down. Usually by the time this list is cut, maybe in half by now, now that I have this list of things that I have to do, I now have to kind of figure out which ones are actually really important, which ones are the things actually gonna get me the best roi, the best return on my investment, the things that are actually gonna move the needle in my business. And to do this, we're gonna give each item a score, and it's called a Rice score. Now, I've learned this actually from another company called Intercom, who's a software company, and they share how they do this, and I want to share it with you. Now, Rice is an R stands for reach, I stands for impact, C stands for confidence, and E stands for effort. We're going to break each down, but for now, know that the first three letters, Ric, these are the benefits of this project, of this task. And E is the cost, the effort you're going to need to expend to pull this thing off. So with each of these letters, we're gonna give a particular score. So we're gonna look at a particular task on the list and we're gonna give it a score for each one. And then finally we're gonna have a Rice score. And that's gonna be like a total score for that task. Let me walk you through an example. Let's say you're gonna run a three day email marketing campaign to promote a new product. This is the task on your list. And let's walk through the Rice equation for this so we can give it a score. So R again stands for reach, and we're going to give it a score to know what the reach potential is for this task. And the way to do this is just literally what's the goal of this task? Goal of the task is to sell your new product. Now, how many sales do you think you're going to get with this actual task? So let's say you have an email list of 10,000 people. And historically, when you email your list, you get a 5% conversion, meaning that when you email your list, 5% of the people actually convert and do what you ask them to do. So that means 500 sales. So you're literally going to write 500 as your reach score. The next score is impact how many people will be impacted by this activity. Now in this example, really, it's everybody who opens the email because they're going to be aware of your new product. Even if they don't buy, it's making an impact on them because. Because now they have awareness that you have something new. They are reminded of your brand and your business. You're kind of top of mind, so you are impacting to some level. So you can literally just go into your email marketing software and find out what's your average open rate. Let's say 3,000 people will be impacted. That's pretty impactful. That could be maybe equivalent to your monthly traffic on your website. That's pretty impactful. So a massive impact is a score of 3, a high impact is a score of 2, a medium impact is 1, low impact is 0.5 and minimal impact is 0.25. So minimal impact means like a few people would be impacted versus thousands. Right. So you might be saying, what do these numbers do? Well, we're going to be multiplying these numbers in the equation. So we're going to do our reach score times the impact score times, you guessed it, the confidence score. What's confidence? What's the confidence you have of the success of this project based on the data you have? And a good way to gauge this is just how do you come up with the numbers for your reach and your impact? If you have actually solid data like we have from our email marketing, then that's pretty high confidence. And you're going to give your score 1 to 100, 100 meaning like 100% confidence. And 1 is like no, no confidence, just a 1 score, 1% confidence. I found in my experience, if one of those like reach or impact, I'm kind of just using my gut intuition. It's kind of a 50, 60% confidence. If both of them has gut, then it's quite low. It's under 20%. I need some data to really be 100%. If I have data to prove both, I feel 100%, 90, 100% confident, and I give it a score of 90 or 100. The last thing is effort. And really what effort is going to be like the denominator of this equation. So we're going to multiply the first three numbers. The R score, you know, the reach, the impact, the confidence. And then we're going to divide it by the effort. And what is effort? This represents the cost of doing this task. And the way that intercom equates effort is person months, meaning how many people on your team are going to need to exert a month of work to do this. And that would be one person month. If it's one month in a person. If it's one person and it's less than a month, like a week or a day, then it's 0.5. So say for example, this is something that's going to take you one month and you're the only one involved. Then that is a effort score of 1. If it's something that's going to take you two days, then it's a 0.5. If it's going to take two people, but it's going to take two days.

It'S less than a month.

So it's 0.5 times 2. That is 1. So again, you're going to multiply your reach, your impact and your confidence scores and you're going to get that number and then divide it by the effort score and that's your Rice score. Now you're going through this for the first time. But I've been doing this for a very long time. So when I do this, this literally takes 20 seconds to do a Rice score for each one. And this gives me a real data point, a real number to say this is something I need to work on. And basically I rank my list now based on the Rice score. So the higher the Rice score, the higher it is on the list. And now I know what to work on first, second, third. And I don't need to think anymore. I could just implement. There's no more guessing, there's no more wondering. There's no more questioning myself.

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Now you have a strategy and a formula to help prioritize your tasks. You know what really matters, what really is going to impact your business, what's really going to move the needle, what's actually going to bring in a return on investment. And I like to use this strategy for big and small tasks. And the funny thing is that ever since I started doing this, I started applying this to my own personal life. Like, do I really need to do these things or should I hire out for it? Should I not do it at all? Just eliminate them? Maybe that thing that's nagging in the back of my head that I have to do? It's not really that important. And I often just run a Rice score to verify. So this can actually help you in other areas of your life. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 MBA show, but today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is. Alan Cag. Alan Cake says love the quick, actionable advice. Five stars. The $100 MBA helps me at Northbound IO whenever I need a quick access actionable tip, I just open an episode that relates to what I'm doing that day. Thanks Alan for the great review. Your mission is to email us over at Omar00 MBA net so we can hook you up with a lifetime membership to the Automated webinar challenge, our 30 day challenge on how to automate your leads and sales with our software Webinar Ninja. You get free access to Webinar Ninja to do that so you can complete the course. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. That simple. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Overwhelm is the killer of all productivity in business. When we get overwhelmed, we often drift off. We hit social, we watch videos, we look at our phone. So you got to stop overwhelmed before it happens. You actually gotta be proactive. This is why I like to step away from my computer, do my list, take control over the tasks I have to do. You are the master of your list, okay? Not the other way around. And what's great about this exercise is that you start to realize, okay, I know what I have to do.

Let's do it.

Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you on Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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