116. How The Top 1% Manage Their Time

As somebody that's running two rapidly scaling businesses, one of the most common questions that I get asked is how in the world do you have time for everything? People are like, how do you have time to create all of this content, to run a mastermind, to attend, a mastermind, to manage the teams from two different companies. How do you have time to do all that and still have time for your family and travel and fun? Well, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Today I'm giving you a behind the scenes tour of my time management system that I call the ACE Method. It's not magic, it's not lucky, it's definitely not Maybelline. But what it is is the result of deliberate planning and disciplined execution. So stay tuned because I promise you, what I'm going to share with you today could absolutely change the way that you think about your days and it could even end up changing the way that you run your business and your life. Let's dive in.

14, 40 minutes. That's all the time that any of us are given in any given day to get all of the things done. So in a lot of ways, time management becomes one of the great differentiators between people that are not things done, that are not able to scale their firms and people that are able to get more done, people that are able to have more impact and still have time to do the things in life that gives them joy and passion and energy. And so what I found is it's not only important to be strategic with how we manage our time, but it's also important to be both intentional and disciplined as well. And what ends up happening if we're not strategic and disciplined and intentional with our time overall, we tend to get less things done. But more than that is not only are we not getting as many things done, but we're getting fewer of those important things done. And so what ends up happening is our work life ends up creeping more and more into our personal life, right? Like the time starts to expand with how much time we're spending on work related activities. And as that creeps into our personal life, we tend to feel less fulfilled from our work. We tend to have resentment and we start to get burnt out. So it's really important again to be strategic and intentional and disciplined with your time and with the things that you're doing in that time. So how do I think about time management? Well, over the last 10 or 15 years, I've developed this methodology that I call the ACE Method. The ACE Method has been so instrumental for me in making sure that I'm not just working on the right things, but I'm also working on those things at the right time. And so today I'm going to break down the ACE method for you. And my hope is that you can take a couple of the concepts that have worked really well for me and you'll be able to figure out how to apply some of those to your own time management system so that you can get more of the right things done at the right time yourself. The first part of the ACE method I call the AIM phase. I truly believe that your time management tactics and your calendaring those things should all be aiming you towards achieving your goals and following through on those priorities that you've set for yourself. And what I mean by that is like, you know, your calendar should be a reflection of your priorities. We can all agree with that. And so when it comes time to figure out your calendar and how you want to spend your time, you've got to put those high priority activities and strategies and tactics on your calendar before anything else or what ends up happening is those lower priority things will end up taking all your time. So as an example, if attending your kids soccer games is one of your big priorities, because that's important to you, then start by putting that on your calendar first. Don't just think about it like literally put that on your calendar first. If health and wellness is a priority for you, then make sure that you've got time on your calendar before anything else to go to the gym. Again, we don't want to let those other things come in and take over those priorities and then they become an afterthought. You turn around six months later, you haven't gone to the gym and you've missed like all of your kids soccer practices. You know, from a business sense, if one of your big priorities for the quarter is business development, then gosh, your calendar should have time blocked to do business development. You know, I don't know what those priorities are for you in your personal life or your family life or your business, but really start by aiming your calendar in the right direction to get those things done. And the best way to do that is to make sure that you start your calendar from a clean slate and put those things on there first. One of the important things to remember when it comes to the AIM phase is that your calendar in time management should be treated a little bit like a business budget. You know, as a fractional cfo, when you're plotting out the budget for your clients, we all Know that that's just the best guesstimate. We know that from time to time, there's going to be emergency expenses that come up or there's going to be declines in revenue. And that means that we've got to have a little bit of flexibility and a little bit of grace with those budgets, because the realities of life just come in. And the same thing is true with your calendar. So, yeah, like, while it's important to get everything mapped out on your calendar, to make sure that the calendar is aiming towards those highest priority goals and things that you've got in your life, also remember that things are going to come up. So give yourself some grace. Give yourself some leeway to move things around. Now, what I want to encourage you is, like, don't let that become the norm. Don't let, like, every little thing that comes up be an excuse to not go to your kid's soccer game or to not do business development. Make sure that you are being disciplined about it, but also know that there's going to be some things that come up and give yourself that grace to adjust accordingly. Now, when it comes to the AIM phase, one of the most important and helpful and useful and valuable and like, highest ROI things that I've ever found to help me with this is having a great executive assistant. When you've got a great executive assistant, he or she's going to be, like, super dialed in to what your family priorities are, your personal priorities, and your business priorities. And he or she can help make sure that your calendar is a reflection of that. I can tell you that, like, working with Gretchen has been. Or for those of you who don't know, Gretchen is my executive assistant, she's been all the difference in the world for making sure that I'm staying disciplined and staying in alignment with those priorities on my calendar. Because a lot of times I don't have the discipline that it takes, like, every single day to make sure that I'm sticking to the calendar and to make sure that, like, those highest priority things are on there. So if you're somebody that's been thinking about getting an executive assistant and figuring out, like, how to do time management and to make sure the right things are prioritized, I would encourage you, like, move forward with hiring that executive assistant because they can be all the different when it comes to getting your calendar and your time management aimed in the right direction. The second part of the ACE method is calendaring phase. This is where you're laying out the battle plan. And when it comes to laying out the battle plan. I found that there's really three best practices that help me make sure that I'm putting the right things on the calendar at the right time. The first one is to consider my energy. Gosh, this one took me like way too long to figure out. But there are certain times a day when I have better energy for doing certain types of tasks than I do at other times of the day. And so a great example of that is creative work. I do my best creative work early, early in the morning, like 6:30 or 7:00 until 10 or maybe 11:00 clock in the morning. That's when I'm able to crank through my best creative work. So when Gretchen and I sit down to do my calendar, when I've got to do things like blogging or writing my newsletter, social media posts, YouTube videos, maybe it's brainstorming ways to solve a problem in my own firm. We block that time off in the morning before I have any other calls, before I'm checking emails, before I'm getting on slack, doing anything on social media. And the reason for that is like my energy is at the highest, but also it's important for me to not have those distractions, those, those slack messages and alerts and you know, client communications. Those things really like cloud up my brain and really prohibit me from doing my best creative work. So we're scheduling those things like super early in the morning before anything else can kind of get in my way. Likewise, the afternoons I'm like, I'm pretty much wiped. Like decision making is pretty much a foregone conclusion. After two or three in the afternoon, I'm just done. And so we schedule all of my admin tasks after 2:00 in the afternoon. So if I've got to review DocuSign things, if I need to update my QuickBooks connection, you know, those kind of tasks that don't require a lot of mental bandwidth, we tend to schedule those in the afternoon. And what I found is when we're really disciplined and aware of scheduling the tasks that align with a particular type of energy I have, I'm able to get two to three times more work done in a given block of time than if I schedule it at the wrong time. So really consider your energy levels and when you show up to do your best work. When it comes to blocking time, when it comes to generating CFO reports for my clients, my firm has two non negotiables. The process has to be accurate and it has to be efficient. That's why my firm only Trusts Giacon. At its core, Giacon is a data connector between accounting platforms like QuickBooks and Xero and Google Sheets. But Giacon is so much more than just the data connector. Right out of the box, you're going to get hundreds of templates for all the reports that CFOs and accountants need to run for their everyday workflows. Everything from balance sheets to P and LS to AR aging reports. Or you can use gfcon like my firm does, to create our custom CFO reports every single month. My favorite part about gfcon is that you can set it up to automatically create all of these reports. That means every month I'm getting fresh reports with fresh data ready to deliver to my clients. And because G Accon is automated, that has completely eliminated the need for my team to download data from QuickBooks, upload it into Google Sheets, manually, apply formulas. All of those things that take up a lot of time and are prone to errors. In fact, G Accon has completely replaced all the other tools, services and workflows that we were using to generate CFO reports. G Accon is literally our one stop shop for making all of our CFO reports automatically every single month. If you're ready to start saving time and reducing errors, then you need to check out G Acconnect right now. Be sure to use the link in the description below to save 30%. That means you can get started with Giacon for as little as $28 a month. Join my firm and over 10,000 other firms and try G Con today. The second best practice that I've learned is just being aware of Parkinson's Law. I don't know if you're familiar with Parkinson's Law, but it's just this idea that says however much time you give yourself, the task will expand to fill that amount of time. This always reminds me of a buddy named Thad that I knew on my first submarine. And Thad was like this world class procrastinator. He put everything off until the last minute. And one day I asked that, I said, why do you put things off to the last minute like every single time? And he said, well, what I figured out is if I put something off until the last minute to get it done, that means it only took me a minute to get it done. If I start something a week early, it's going to take me a week to get it done. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is Parkinson's Law personified. And so when you're thinking about like putting things on your Calendar? Yes. I want you to, like, give, like, accurate time estimates and, you know, don't shortchange yourself, but also realize that if you give yourself four hours to get a project done, it is going to take the entire four hours. So really ask yourself if you have an executive assistant, you know, ask him or her to chime in, like, how much time do I really need to get this done? Because you could easily end up wasting 100 or 200% more time that you don't need to do get a given task done. And that's because of Parkinson's law. Another, like, huge unlock for me when it comes to calendaring was realizing that I need to block my days to the maximum extent possible. In other words, I like to put, like, thematic, you know, like themes on each given day. And so for us, that means, like, Monday is team meetings, Tuesday tends to be creative work, Wednesday tends to be coaching calls or client work, et cetera, et cetera. And the reason for that is because if I'm switching from meetings to client work, to coaching calls, to writing blogs, there's too much, what is called in the world of psychology, context switching. And there's so many studies out there that show that when you have to context switch, your brain is really, really slow to go from one type of task to another. And so that ends up just destroying your efficiency. And it also is, like, completely draining of your mental. So it's really been a best practice for us to schedule days thematically so that I can minimize context switching. The third and final phase of the ACE methodology is the execution phase. The execution phase is where you're taking your calendar and you're, like, doing the things that you've said you're going to do on your calendar. And if I'm being completely honest, the execution phase is the hardest one for me because as a husband and as a parent, as a business owner, there's so many different things that are competing for my time and my attention that a lot of times I find that it's just hard to execute on the calendar. But over the years, I have learned that there's, like, three really important best practices that help me minimize those distractions, that help me make sure that I'm working on the right things at the right time. The first one of those really important is when I'm getting ready to go, like, neck deep into a task. I find that I've got to minimize the distractions as much as possible. And the big one for me there is just taking my phone and literally putting it on the other side of the room. I actually have phone chargers set up on opposite sides of the room from my normal workstations so that when I'm getting ready to do different kinds of work, I can just put my phone on the other side of the room and let it charge. And then what ends up happening is like every single time like something comes up, like there's a flash on the screen, you know, like some kind of an alert, like, oh, wow, check it out, someone messaged me on Slack. Let me go ahead and get that dopamine hit and see what they wanted. Oh, look at that, somebody DM me on LinkedIn. Let me get that dopamine hit and see what's going on on LinkedIn. By having the phone like literally on the other side of the room, I can't see those distractions and it really helps me stay focused. The other thing that's like such an important tool for me is on my Mac, anytime I'm getting ready to like get into that work, I put the Mac on Do Not Disturb. Now I don't know if like Windows or Android computers or whatever else the cool kids are using these days has a Do Not Disturb feature, but that's really important for me on my Mac because all of those badges and alerts and emails and things like that, they're not popping up on my Mac and distracting my attention. So literally, like putting that physical space between you and a distraction or putting the digital space through Do Not Disturb, like between you and a distraction. So helpful for me to stay focused. Another great tool that I have for myself to help me get the right things done at the right time is using a Pomodoro timer. Now the concept behind a Pomodoro timer is that I give myself these like sprints of time to do work and then I give myself these short breaks where I can go and like basically screw off for a couple of minutes. And so for me in the mornings, I like to do 50 minute sprints where I'm like completely like, you know, engaged in my work for or like project or whatever I'm doing for 50 minutes. And then at the end of that 50 minutes, I have three to five minutes that I'll take a break, I'll go pick up my phone from the other side of the room, I'll check in on, you know, the gram or whatever, maybe I'll grab a drink of water, I'll use the restroom. But by building in those breaks, I'm less likely to want to pick up my phone and do things that are going to distract me because I know that I've built in a couple of minutes for me to look at those things every hour. Now, I'm not going to do a deep dive into how Pomodoro timers work and those kind of things because I've actually done another video on that. And so if you want to learn more about how you might be able to use a Pomodoro timer in my favorite apps for executing Pomodoro timers, take a look in the description below. I've got a really good short video that I'll link you to that'll tell you like all the ins and outs on how I use a Pomodoro timer to really up my game. When it comes to time management, the third and most important thing to remember in the execution phase is that you have the power to say no. The world is just full of people that are pushing their agendas, their goals and their priorities at you. And it's so important that you remember to stay true to your goals. You have things that that you want to get done in life. You have an impact that you want to be able to have on the world and so don't let people steal that from you with their own agenda and their own priorities. Remember, you do have that ability to say no. As with everything, I like to keep time management as simple as possible. I try to aim my calendar towards my goals and my priorities. I try to calendar things in a way that are going to make sure that I'm working on the right things at the right time and I try to execute against that calendar with excellence. As a fractional cfo, one of the things that you can do to make sure that you're getting the most out of your day is to make sure that you're using the the best tech possible. So I would love for you to check out this video where I talk about the best tech for fractional CFOs. In the meantime, I can't wait to see you back here next week, my friend. I'll see you then.