5 BIGGEST Time Wasters For Online Coaches

If you're working more than 20 hours per week to build a 6-figure online business, you're doing it wrong. According to Inc.com, entrepreneurs waste 21.8 hours per week on tasks that contribute little to no value to their company. Today I've put together a list of what I believe to be the top 5 that you are probably wasting a ton of time on, and I'm definitely guilty of these, but I keep myself in check and I've gotten way better at noticing these things over the years, which has helped me save a lot more time and ultimately immediately put a lot more money in my pocket. Hey friend, I'm James Allen, founder of Profit Your Knowledge, where we help coaches, creators, experts, consultants, authors, people who teach stuff take their knowledge and turn it into a lucrative online business working under 20 hours per week. Now, if you're really serious about growing your online business and making it be so it works for you whether you're working or not so that you can work fewer hours, I'd highly recommend you check out our free masterclass. It's going to show you how to earn $2,000 per month of passive income in just 5 hours a week without complicated tech. If you're skeptical on passive income, just watch the masterclass, check it out, and you will see how it works because it is a very legitimate thing. Uh, and especially for you if you want to take your knowledge, turn that into online courses, membership sites, digital products, and then have that be working for you in the background. That's the whole point of the masterclass. We're going to show you how to build great products, how to build a system that sells that product for you, and then how to drive traffic to the system so you can make passive income. If you want to check it out, go to profityourknowledge.com/masterclass, or I'll also put a link down in the description. So the first way that entrepreneurs are wasting a ton of time is with email. No surprise here, but I'm not talking about email marketing. I'm talking about email, the endless checking and scrolling and cleaning up of your email. People's email management is terrible. And I was a productivity coach before I started teaching online business, so I totally get it. This email was a huge piece— inbox zero, all that stuff. My viewpoints have changed. I do not care about inbox zero. I like having a clean inbox because I can be sure to respond to things that are truly important when I need to, and unsubscribing from a lot of unnecessary newsletters and things like that. But where entrepreneurs go wrong is that we oftentimes can spend a lot of time in our email on low-value emails. These are things like responding to every email that you get, whether they're from people who love you or who don't so much, you know, the haters. If they're responding to you saying that you suck or whatever happens, you know, it's like, okay, I don't need to respond to you. And even when people love you and they're praising you for what you do, it doesn't always require a response, and that's okay. They're not gonna be mad at you and resent you for not responding to them. Sometimes they'll say like, You don't even have to respond. I just want to say thank you so much for your help. Obviously, if you do respond to the people who are praising you and saying how much you've helped them and stuff, that's even better because it just deepens the relationship between you and them. But you don't have to respond, and that's what I want you to understand. And the other thing with email is just the constant checking of your email. I'm guilty of this too. I will spend some times where I'm looking at my email and I'm like, why am I even here? I just checked it. And it's almost like a little stimulation piece where we just want to check something. But in reality, I just have to check myself and get back to it. And I recommend that you do the same thing. Is it really worth checking your email? A great way to get over this and to move past this is to put a time in your calendar or just a mental note that you're gonna check your email one time per day. And what I would recommend is to put this towards the end of your day because if you do it right in the beginning, first thing in the morning, you're probably gonna be flooded with different responses and things like that. And then that can put you on a whole whirlwind and total different trajectory and path than what you decided that you were gonna focus on that day, like creating content or serving clients or whatever else you could be doing. Obviously you should check your email 'cause it's an important part of your life, but you don't need to constantly be checking on it. So I challenge you this week to check your email only one time per day at the end of the day. The second biggest way that entrepreneurs waste time is with social media. Now I know this one's gonna be a little controversial for a lot of people because some people, their entire business is on social media, and I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I definitely make money from social media too, or I have in the past, But honestly, I don't even post on social media very much. In fact, I have somebody else who posts my YouTube videos and just chops it up into clips with a tool like Opus Clips and puts that onto Instagram or TikTok and that sort of stuff. But in the grand scheme of things, that doesn't really equate to a lot of money in my pocket. And that's what I want you to think about. Everything here is constantly looking at social media, constantly responding to all these different comments or likes and looking at, oh, I did— how many likes did I get on this post? Like, is that really leading to money in your pocket? If it is awesome, keep doing it. But 9 times out of 10, that's not even the case. In fact, this past year I stopped posting on social media and my income doubled because I chose to focus on podcasting and my YouTube channel. And so much time is wasted in between your workday when you could be building products, having coaching calls or enrolling people or actually having real conversations with people, just looking to see, oh, did people like my post? And what's been happening on your posts. Okay, so it just comes back to it again. I'm not saying that social media is the devil and that you can't post on social media. I probably— I still spend time on social media, but realistically, I spend about 30 minutes to an hour each week on social media because I found other ways to grow my business rather than posting on social media, like having guests on my podcast. It's a huge part of my business because I build real relationships instead of just DMing people. I do have a YouTube video where I talk more about that strategy. I'll make sure I link it down in the description. But when you catch yourself going onto social media, really think to yourself, is what I'm doing or what I'm thinking about doing going to put money in my pocket? If it's not, stop doing it. The third biggest way that entrepreneurs waste a ton of time is by consuming more than you create. You and I are creative people, especially if you have an online business where you're sharing your knowledge, you're coaching, you're teaching people stuff. And you want to build that type of business, creating content is one of the biggest things that you can do to build your online business that will put money in your pocket. Every time I make a YouTube video, that helps me in the future make more money in my business. Every time I make a podcast episode or anything like that. The problem here is that a lot of people consume more than they create, and it's okay to consume. In fact, it's very important. I invest in Knowledge, I read books, I watch videos, I read articles, I pay for online courses, I sit on coaching calls with my coach. If you need to learn something because you really don't know what your next steps are, that's totally fine. That is a time where it's really important for you to consume. But the problem is that a lot of people consume, they read books, they take an online course or hire a coach or something, and they don't take the action that's gonna produce the result that they want. That's gonna help them put more money in their pocket. I think that we should spend about an hour every day studying something, reading something, listening to a podcast episode, constantly be learning, 'cause that's what I do. But I'm always creating more than I'm consuming. So if you're consuming an hour of content every day, maybe create 2 hours worth of content every day. And this doesn't just have to be creating content. It could be creating a membership site. It could be creating an online course or your coaching program or creating your first website or a sales page or a lead magnet. There's a lot of things that you could be creating, creating a client on a coaching call. Again, it's okay to consume in order to learn. Just be aware if and when you're wasting time. The fourth biggest way that entrepreneurs waste time is through repetitive tasks. There's a great saying that goes, if you don't have an admin, you are one. So the way to get past this is to first make a huge list of every single task you do in your business, down to the most minute task. Just write it out on a Google Doc or a pen and paper or whatever and get everything out in front of you. Once you've made your list, look at all the tasks and strike through the different tasks that you can eliminate. Put a big cross through them that say, this thing isn't actually putting money in my pocket. And a great question to ask too is, if I stop doing this task, what would happen? After you've eliminated as much as you can off of that list, then we want to think about automating the next set of tasks. There are some repetitive tasks that do matter, and if you stop doing them, it would actually be a detriment. But that doesn't mean that you have to constantly be doing these tasks. And it's crazy how many things we can do nowadays to automate. So if you're going back and forth with emails all the time to try and schedule appointments, a great way that you can automate most of that process is by creating an account in Calendly or Acuity. That way you can set up your own calendar link based on your schedule and when when you are typically available, send it over to the person, they can pick a time that works for them based on your schedule, and then it automatically creates your Zoom meeting or if it's for a phone call or however you want to meet, Google Meet, whatever it is. All these little tasks that go into the back and forth are taken care of for you and all you had to do was just send a calendar link. After you've eliminated and then automated as many of those tasks as you can or at least gotten a plan for it, then we wanna think about delegating. There's some things that you're doing in your business that are important, but you can't really automate them, and if you eliminated them, that would be a big problem. For example, with me, creating blog posts. I make a YouTube video every week, and then we put it into a transcription service, and then put the transcription into a blog post. Now the problem with this, and what I was doing for a long time, is that it's all jumbled up and it's just a messy transcription. It's not formatted for a good blog post. So I have somebody else now who does this for me, who runs through it and formats the whole thing. It takes a lot of time. It's tedious, but it makes a way better blog post than me putting it into ChatGPT, for example. So it's worth hiring a VA or someone to come in and help you with these things. You want to delegate what's important but doesn't require your voice or your face, because the things that do require your voice or your face are actually you. Those are the things that you should be doing in your business. Things like creating free content or your course content, showing up to podcast interviews, speaking on stages, coaching your clients, enrolling your clients, which technically you can outsource that too. But actually working with the people, that should be you. And the fifth biggest way that entrepreneurs waste time is by comparing ourselves to others. And I don't think that comparing yourself is really the problem. I think it's envy. It's when you look at someone that you may compare yourself to, but it's not the comparison alone. It's the envy of thinking, that should be me. I should be the one who's succeeding. If someone grows faster than you, it's really easy to feel like, why isn't that me? And that's where comparison turns into something negative. But me looking at someone who has the type of business that I would love to have, or they're in the kind of shape that I would love to be in, I'm going to compare myself to them. I'm going to say I'm different than they are. And that's actually motivating and inspiring for me because now I can see what I need to do to get to that level. So comparison isn't the issue, it's more envy. And if you can look at where you want to be and be clear on that and then put your head down and just do the work, you're going to be successful. It may take you a bit longer than somebody else, and that's okay. They're on a different journey. All that matters is that you are where you're at, you know where you want to be, and that's going to take some work. The question is, are you doing the work that it takes to get from where you are to where you want to be? And as a bonus, another massive way that entrepreneurs waste a ton of time is by tweaking and playing around with their website rather than getting out there and actually doing the work. Now, having a great website is incredibly important, and most likely it's a lot more simple than you think it is. So check out this video and I'll show you how to build a profitable website for your business. So if you got some inspiration from this lesson, start looking at the way that you are spending your time a little bit differently. Take what you learned here, get out there, make something happen, and we'll see you in the next one.