MBA994 5 Ways to Work Less

Hey. Oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, the business podcast that's worth your time with Our practical 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 Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. In today's lesson, you will learn five ways to work less. If you're feeling overwhelmed, if you feel like you have too much on your plate and you're working too many hours, this episode is for you. I'm going to share with you five practical strategies that I have used myself to reduce the amount of work that I need to do. I found that six solid hours of work a day is really the maximum of what you can really do and be completely effective. I'm talking about six hours of real work, not busy work. But of course we don't work for six hours. We work for 8, 10, 12, even sometimes more. If you're in that camp, you need to reevaluate and implement these strategies today. These are gonna be ordered in order of ease to implement. So the first one is gonna be pretty simple to do and the fifth one is gonna be the most challenging to do. Even though it's challenging, it's gonna save you so much time and effort. We got a lot to cover, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the $100 MBA show is supported by AIG. You see a skyscraper going up. You know what AIG sees? AIG sees life insurance and retirement solutions protecting the crew, business insurance covering companies around the globe and career opportunities for up and comers. You see the skyscraper AIG sees the people and companies inside are ready for whatever comes next. Learn more about AIG Insurance Solutions and Careers@aig.com podcast Again, that's aig.com podcast. Before I begin today's lesson, you may notice that my voice is not exactly on point. Last week, you may have noticed that I took a break. I was seriously ill and I've recovered, but I'm not totally 100% yet. But the show must go on. I'm feeling healthy enough to get on my feet and get on the mic and deliver lessons. So hopefully in a few days my voice will be back to normal and your experience listening to this podcast will get a bit better. Anyway, let's get into today's lesson 5 Ways to Work less. So the first thing I want you to do when it comes to today's lesson is treat this as an experiment. In the first step in this experiment is that I want you to look at how long you work every day and you're going to cut that out by two hours. So say, for example, you work until 7:00pm Instead of seven, we're going to have a hard stop at 5:00pm yeah, we're just going to shave off two hours. And there's good reason for this and it has a lot to do with the strategies I'll be sharing with you today. But that's the first step. You're going to cut out two hours. So by force we're going to work less. Now don't panic. I know you're going to be like, well, how am I getting all my work done? That's where the strategies come in. But first we have to set a precedent. We got to set a container. And by limiting ourselves by that time, by that hard deadline, it's going to allow us to really focus on working less. And that leads me to strategy number one. Hard deadlines. Yes, we have a hard stop at 5pm or whatever, two hours before you normally stop. But. But now we need to set hard deadlines for every single task you do each day. So say, for example, you have a to do list for today and on that list, let's say there are eight things. So each of those tasks need a hard deadline. An actual time like this task needs to be completed by 11am when everything is open ended. There is no urgency, there is no focus. Now I know you might be thinking, well, it just takes the time it takes, not really. And we're going to save you some time and speed things up with some of the other strategies. But we need to have a deadline for every task and tasks will take as long as you give them. Trust me, I know this. We're nearly at episode 1000 of this podcast and at the start, when I started recording these podcast episodes for me to record, maybe three episodes would take me all day because I gave myself all day. But once I started tightening up my time and giving myself some tight deadlines, recording three episodes took a couple hours, which freed me up to do other tasks. Or guess what? Live life. Enjoy life. Go for a walk and enjoy the day. So right now go to your to do list. You should have a to do list for all your tasks for every day and put a hard time deadline for each of them, whether it's a actual time like 11am or one hour or a half hour or whatever time you're going to allot for each one. Now you May not know how long this task will take. Guesstimate and multiply it by two. You'll find that that's pretty much where you're going to land. All right, so we got hard time deadlines for each task. At the start of this whole thing. Already shaved two hours from the day. What's strategy number two? Strategy number two is removing all distractions. We've talked about this several times on the show before, but in order for you to get more work done in less time, you have to do less things. So you may not notice, but you're wasting a lot of time with distractions and moving from one task to another, losing focus. That takes time. That transition of going back and forth to takes time for your brain to really readjust. You really should be focused on only that task during that time period. So, of course you need to shut off all social media. Your inbox do not have your notification popping up where you see an email. Every time you get an email, shut off your email client. One of your tasks could be check email for 30 minutes where you check and reply to all emails at that time, shut it off. No one expects you to reply to an email within five seconds. So we're going to shut off social media, shut off our email. We're going to shut off notifications on our phone to make sure we're not distracted. That way, there's things outside of our computer that may distract us. If we live with other people in our household, you got to let them know, hey, I am working right now in this time period. I need zero distractions. Please do not interrupt me. It just needs to be you and the task head on, face to face. That's it. In fact, if the task doesn't require you to have Internet access, I would shut off your Internet access. I would shut off your wi fi. Like, for example, if you need to write a blog post or draft a podcast episode or something like that, you don't really need Internet access for that. Shut it off. It will allow you to have zero distractions. This is great because this is going to allow you to really get to work, get things done faster. Now, this is going to be a little challenging at the start, not procrastinating with distractions. But trust me, after a few days of no distractions, shutting them all off, and just focusing on your tasks, you're not going to miss it at all. You're going to love it because you're going to be renewed with energy with how fast you're finishing things. All right, that's Strategy number two. Strategy number three is batching. Batching is one of the best techniques you can think of when it comes to working less. And batching pretty much means grouping similar tasks together and just doing them in one shot. So I don't record an episode every single day. I batch several episodes and record them all at once or all in one sitting or one standing. I stand what I record. So whether it's three or four or five episodes, I sit there and record all those episodes in one shot. I don't spread that out through the day. I don't spread it out through the week. If you're writing email campaigns, so say, for example, you write one email campaign a week. Why not do all the email campaigns for the month In1Sitting? 4 email campaigns in one sitting. You're going to save so much time. Why? Because you open up your email client or email marketing service provider, you get into the mood of writing, you get the creative juices going, you have all your files ready. So there's all this prep work and preparation and mindset that comes into play. Might as well knock out all the tasks you have for the month right then and there in one sitting so you don't have to waste time doing all that stuff again and again and again every single time, every single week. The easiest thing to batch is email. Like I mentioned before, instead of checking your email throughout the day, you could set 30 minutes to check your email in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon. Maybe you don't even need 30 minutes. But when I say 30 minutes to to check your email, it means checking and replying. Do not check email unless you can reply. Because what's going to happen is you're going to check. You're going to see an email. You're going to be thinking about the email. It's going to be distracting you. And then when you go back to your email so you could reply, you're going to reread the email. You're going to be wasting a lot of time. So batch your email. Think of anything you do consistently, whether it's email copy, blog posts, email, even customer service concerns or tickets. Batch those as much as you can. All right? Like I mentioned, these tasks, these strategies are going to get harder and harder as we go on. Number four, consolidate. This is going to take some special power from you to do. You're going to list every single thing you do in your business, every single task, from content generation to sales to webinars, to answering emails to every single thing. And you're going to look at this list of all the things you do and you're going to ask yourself what things on this list have the least effect on my business? So for me, I did this. I checked out my list and I saw that I was spending a lot of time engaging on social media. Whether it's Facebook, Twitter, whatever, engaging in conversations, replying to people, going back and forth in groups. I was spending a lot of time on that. But I also realized it didn't have a huge effect on my bottom line on the way my business ran or how successful it was. So I cut it out. I quit social media. Yes, I quit since September 2017 and I'm going to continue to be off social media to the end of this year and then I'll reevaluate that. But the point here is I took a look at what I do on a normal basis, what takes a lot of my time that really doesn't have an effect on my business. And in fact I've been more focused and I'm able to contribute more to my team and, and improve the business more since I've been off social media. But that's just me. You got to look at your list and see what you're spending your time and what you can cut out. The best way to reduce the amount of work that you do is to cut out the work that you're doing. Things that don't really have an effect, yes, of course it's going to have some positive effect, but is it equal to the amount of time that you're spending? If you spent that time doing something else or half that time doing something else, would it have a better effect on your business? That's what you gotta do. Alright, I got one more strategy. This is the hardest one of all, but it's the most effective one. But before that, I gotta give a love to today's sponsor. Here's an interesting stat. A quarter of all Americans say they'd start their own business in the next year if they could. But only a fraction actually do. Why? 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Don't just build a beautiful website, build a successful online business with Weebly. All right, to wrap up our fifth strategy, to work less. And again, this is going to be the most challenging one to do, but the most effective, and that's to delegate. Sometimes you just can't cut out, you can't consolidate, you can't really remove things. But the truth of the matter is, is that most things that you do, you can get somebody else to do. So take a look at your list again. What are some of the things that take you the most time that you don't really enjoy doing? And maybe it's not your biggest strength. You can hire freelancers in minutes to help you edit blog posts, to edit video or audio, to manage your website, to do all sorts of things. My personal favorite is upwork is pretty straightforward and you get some really good talent there. Maybe you don't have to look that far. Maybe you don't have to hire a freelancer. Maybe somebody on your team already could take on those tasks. Sometimes when we get started, we feel like we have to do everything. We have to have our hand on the pulse on everything. That's not sustainable. If you're going to grow your business and if you're going to make it, you're going to have to start delegating. Find out what you're best at, find out what you enjoy doing the most and focus on that. Everything else you could delegate. Now, I know you might be thinking, oh, I'll have to spend some money in order to delegate this if I have to hire a freelancer. But that's money well spent. That's money that you're investing in your business and investing in yourself. If you're a sales expert, you're bringing in more money. If you have more time to do your area of expertise, and if you're not a sales expert, then it's a good idea to hire one so they can bring in you more sales so you could see the ROI already. Alright, to recap, here are the five strategies. Make sure you have a hard deadline, on time on every single task, every single day. Number two, remove all distractions to save you even more time. Number three, batch tasks you do on a regular basis, whether it's email, whether it's blog posts, whether it's any kind of tasks you do over and over email campaigns. And number four, consolidate, cut out, see what things you don't have to do that don't really have an effect on your business. My example was social media. And number five, delegate. All right, that wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. Tomorrow's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode where I answer a question from a listener to our question is how much should I spend on my logo? I'll be answering that question tomorrow. So if you haven't hit subscribe yet on the podcast episode you use, do that right now so you don't miss that episode or any other future episode. Also, by hitting subscribe you have access to the archives all our episodes from the past, nearly a thousand episodes. That's the only way you can access them because once you hit subscribe, you could see the whole feed or whole back catalog of all our episodes. Alright, thank you so much for listening to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the worst things you can experience in business is burnout, burning out and working too much to the point where you maybe get ill. Maybe you just can't take your business anymore and you just basically check out. You just can't do it anymore. You want to avoid that as much as possible. And one of the best ways to avoid that is to work less every day, to have frequent lessons, long breaks at the end of the day so you can enjoy life and really enjoy why you're working so hard to step away from it all. I hope today's lesson was helpful and impactful and that you can use it in your own life and your own business. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode, Take care. Of sam.