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as a small business owner how many times have you said this to yourself there's just not enough time not enough time Taman not as a business owner not enough hours in the day not enough days in the week not enough weeks in the month that's not enough time I don't care what you say to me there's just not enough time as a small business owner it's exhausting well if you've been struggling with this problem then this video is for you interested let's get on with it hit it [Music] so towards the end of this video I'm going to walk through in detail what a typical week of mine actually looks like and how it's structured so please do make sure that you stick around until the very end but for it to make sense we are going to go through six steps which are really important to go through before you get to the end because it's not going to make sense so let's go through six steps that I take and hopefully by the end of this video you'll be able to take so that you can structure your week in a way that is really effective productive efficient all of that good stuff ready let's get on to point number one point number one is really about how you approach things because a lot of times myself included I was going around saying to myself I don't have enough time I don't have enough time there aren't enough hours in the day well actually if we think about it the hours and the time is constant it's what we choose to do and what we prioritize to do and not to do is what fills up our time so we have to take a proactive effort to understand that we are in control of our time we are in control of what we do and what we choose to do so that we can actually put it to good use so what I want you to do as step number one is actually say that to yourself time is constant it's me and the decisions that I make that are going to make a big difference to how I spend my time and how I give myself the time to do what I want what do you want yes it's not as simple as that it's not that simple because obviously you've got stuff that you need to do there are things that you'll have to actually obligations and business and making sure that you've got money and all of that we're going to get to that stuff however making sure that you take control of that aspect is going to be really important so that's it really step number one let's move on to step number two where we begin to start actually doing stuff so step number two is to really begin to understand what are the differences between what your role is as the CEO of your own business and what is it that you should be doing and what are the other functions inside the business that still need to happen on a day-to-day basis so that the business can still sort of operate and what are those differences now I find a lot of times people when they come to me with a problem of I don't have enough time in my business or for my business or anywhere else for that matter it's usually a case that they're trying to do absolutely everything and they're trying to do all of the functions inside the business that are not necessarily Your Role now I know what you're going to say to me Tema I don't have enough money to hire or Outsource or delegate or do any of that stuff I'm still very much early on in my business and I cannot justify hiring out great that's fine you will probably still need to do the roles that you cannot afford to hire out for until you can but the difference here to know is what is it that actually is your role what is it that's going to actually move the needle because your role is to grow the business Your Role is to bring in more Revenue Your Role is to actually move the needle inside your business and create that impact create that growth what is it that you should be doing and what is it that other people should be doing and whilst you're wearing the hats of other people temporarily you know it's not your job and you're going to need to hire out for when the time is right when you can justify it but at the same time and here's the big distinction knowing what your role is we need to make sure that we block out time to prioritize that those things so that it could grow your business so that you can get to generating revenue and growing your business so that you can actually start hiring out as soon as possible now I've got two videos for you to watch at the end of this video don't skip it yet I'm going to put the links in the description below the first one is the CEO role and what is it that you should be doing and the second one is what are the essential functions inside any and every business so that you can begin to understand what they are now I'm going to put up on the screen here for a second the different pillars and the different functions inside the business you can pause it if you want to but if you really want to go into a lot more detail please make sure that you watch those two videos because they will be if you haven't seen them already on this channel they will be very eye-opening so that you can begin to understand what's your role and what are other people's roles now once we've begun to identify what is it that you should be doing and what it is that other people should be doing or you're going to at least wear the hat of those other people until you do bring them in then we can move on to step number three so the third step that I would do and hopefully you'll join me as well is to do a Time audit because after all don't we want to know where all all of that time is going so what we've done for you is we've created a free downloadable Google sheet I'll put the links in the description below of how to get access to that and there are a couple of tabs in that sheet one of them is for the time audit which is a very simple timetable that you could do yourself but the second tab is where you would actually put the structure in your weekly timetable and beginning to understand whose functions are you actually performing at that particular time by the way if you're finding this video valuable I'd appreciate you hitting that like button because it really does help the video and the channel thank you very much let's have a look at the time audit Tab and in this case as I said it's a very simple blank timetable that what you will do is pick a typical week in your schedule not something where you've got an urgent deadline where it's unusual and you wouldn't be working doing those things a typical week in your schedule and sit down and track every task you do and log it down in terms of what the task was and what time that was that you did in so for example we'll start and say right on Monday 9am first thing I'd social media because that's what you do and then I did social media and then I did social media social media what would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered now that sums it up for me and then lunch and then we went off and I sat down and I sat there and I developed some websites because you know at the end of the day I needed to launch my website and then I wrote a Blog article and then after that I did some bookkeeping and then I checked my finances you get the idea I won't go through the whole week you can do that for yourself you put down what you actually did not what you want to do at this stage you are actually recording what you are doing and what you've actually done as a task log it down and then you do that for the whole week then at the bottom you'll see that there's a couple of color keys in terms of what we're going to start coloring in each of these boxes right at the moment keep in the back of your mind what it is that your role is as the CEO of the business what is it that really adds value to your business and what is it that you should not be doing and it's somebody else's role and you need to delegate green is if it really adds value to your business that's your role as the CEO that's what's going to grow the company that's what's going to move the needle you mark that in as green if it's something that is still important but needs to be delegated to somebody else then you say right okay actually we know how to do this effectively and efficiently but somebody else's role I'm going to put that in yellow if there is something that you need to do yourself or delegate however it's not done effectively or efficiently at this point in time Mark that in Orange because that's where we're going to start trying to improve our productivity in those particular time frames and then finally if it's something that's a complete waste of time then Mark that in Red so if we were to take the Monday here for example then what we would potentially do is say right actually we do need to do social media but it can be done a lot more effectively and it can be done a lot more efficiently so I'm going to mark that in Orange however we don't actually need to be doing it for the whole morning so we're going to delete quite a big chunk of that and then website development that's not my responsibility I'm going to delegate that or I should delegate that or at the very least if I don't have the money to delegate it to I know this is not my responsibility for now and then later on as the business grows I can hire out somebody or Outsource it when I can justify that then you say right writing blog articles in this case maybe you're a content creator and actually only you need to be showing your expertise your creativity so on and so forth then you say right that's going to add value to the brand to the business I should be doing that bookkeeping I can Outsource and checking finances part of my role as the CEO of the business is to maintain cash flow and monitor progress that's my responsibility remember with great power great responsibility and that's what you would do for the rest of the week you would sit down and color code it and as you can see here from Monday alone we could potentially free up 60 to 70 percent of that day if we had the resources to delegate out but at the very minimum we've gained back pretty much the most of the majority of the morning and then when you've done that you're ready to move on to the next step the next step is for you to sit down and start looking at which hats are you going to wear you were born to wear this hat you've now eliminated the tasks that you don't want to have you've hopefully tried to say we're going to need to optimize certain things now what you want to do is you want to be able to look at the stuff that you have said that needs to be delegated and whether or not you can justify delegating it at this moment in time once you begin to understand that then you should start saying right this is marketing this is sales this is this this is that and then once you've identified all of the roles you can begin to say okay who can I really Outsource to can I actually Outsource this can I justify that can I delegate it do I have someone in my team already that I can delegate this to if not then I'm going to have to wear that hat if there are things that you've seen that need to be optimized then this is something that you need to decide okay is it me who's doing this or is it going to be something that I delegate out to and if you're going to delegate out to then you need to work with that person to optimize that process let's move on to number five where it will all begin to start making some sense oh makes sense now so the next step that you want want to be doing is time blocking and batching and this is where things become a little bit more interesting because what you want to be doing is you want to start saying right what are all the hacks that I'm going to wear what are all the functions or the roles that I'm going to perform and I basically block out time for each of these roles so Tuesday morning I'm marketing Tuesday afternoon I'm sales Wednesday morning I'm going to be CEO however what you also want to be doing is making sure that you give sufficient time to the priority roles that are going to make your business grow so you say the CEO role if I'm thinking about strategy that's going to be important I need to block out some time for that and that is my appointment with me the second thing that you want to be doing is batching wherever possible so if you've got certain tasks that you do on a daily basis or on a weekly basis you can begin to see right can I actually batch this and actually do them all at the same time and block out some time to do that for so for example if you are doing a YouTube video a week you don't necessarily need to go and do the research and the writing and the scripts once week for a YouTube video you can do all of that in one session and the way that you begin to decide whether or not you should delegate certain things is what is the value here what is the time that you're doing are you paying somebody ten dollars for an hour where you could spend that hour and generate revenue of a thousand dollars if that's the case then that ten dollars is worth the investment every time you Outsource or hire somebody there needs to be an Roi and you need to be able to say can that Roi give me at least two three four times as much as that I can get back in terms of what I'm spending my time elsewhere right so once you've identified your roles what you're going to actually do yourself what are you going to block out how much time you're going to need to block out for what how are you going to batch all of these things that's when you can begin to put down your timetable and this here is an example of my timetable and you'll begin to see that first of all I've color coded it in a way where it's built around the different pillars that we have inside the business and the different functions that we have so we have three main pillars the product pillar where it has our products and services the customer pillar where it's our basically our customer Journey the Marketing sales after sales and the business pillar which is basically operations the finance the legal HR all of the things that you would have inside the business that make it run on a day-to-day basis those are the pillars and of course we've got the CEO pillar which is my role inside the business and I color code it in a way where I can begin to see exactly how much time I'm spending on my role and how much time I'm spending on other roles and whether or not that is the right proportion and when should I start delegating it if I want to or need to the green is free time and I believe in free time a lot so I do not work on Saturdays and in the evenings I tend not to do work most evenings how I've structured the day is in the mornings I don't do meetings in general and what I would typically do is start the morning by looking at my dashboard my okrs like kpis basically trying to see what our results are what targets are we meeting our goals what's happening I just want to get an understanding to start the day to see where are we today and where do we need to head to during the course of that day then I will do some planning based on some of the results I've seen and I will plan for the day which I'll talk about in the next step after this and then after that I will do my emails for half an hour and social media for half an hour no more and then after that I dedicate time for strategic thinking where I'm thinking strategy I'm looking at the strategy of the business where we are do we need to tweak certain things revise look over our strategy are all of the roles and tasks and things that we're doing all aligned to the strategy at the moment is it edging us forward is it not edging us forward are we verging off do the clients or the market or any of that give us more data that we need to particularly change or tweak or like pivot or any of these things and also really mapping out every day a little bit about making sure I've got a bird's eye view of the entire business the people the teams the world what I need to do how am I going to improve like the work culture the environment am I going to coach people and basically really having that time where I'm thinking about nothing but the bird's eye view of a business on Monday afternoon I block that out so that's where my batching comes in time block and batch where I do all of my YouTube and then I finish that up by looking at emails right at the end of the day doing a little bit of networking because I think building relationships is really important if you haven't seen the three things that you need to focus on in your business here's the video I'm going to put a link in the description below so networking building Partnerships um all of these kind of things are things that I tend to try and do and then after that right at the end of the day I look at the final lenses one more time checking to see if anything has bounced any issues how's our cash flow what happened at the beginning of the day what happened at the end are we better positive negative so on and so forth that's my Monday and then as you can begin to see I won't I won't waste your time you can pause it and you can see the rest of the of the week of how I structure it and you can see that I structure the finances a little bit different so when you look at the Monday at the end at seven o'clock that's actually my role of looking at the financial status of the business whereas actually on Tuesday at the same time that's actually bookkeeping we do have a bookkeeper that does a lot of the bookkeeping but sometimes I need to do certain things for the bookkeeper and getting like receipts and things like that sent over and that's still things that I shouldn't be doing and it's probably not adding a lot of value and that's why I color coded as that being business finance LED rather than it being a CEO role and you can begin to see here that it's very clear when you look at it you can understand right right where am I focusing my time how am I blocking my times out and how am I going about being very strict of the amount of time I spend on looking at my role as well as doing other potential roles as well as we grow the business and those items will change as time goes on and as the business needs certain aspects now when I first started a lot more of this especially in the afternoons where we didn't have Team meetings and I didn't have teams those would be other hats that I would be wearing in terms of more marketing more sales more legal more Finance more any of the other role more product development things like that they would have actually fit into those boxes but they are slowly being replaced as we build the team now instead of me actually doing the work I spend time on coaching and developing the team and making sure that they are effective at what they do and they are motivated so what is in that mysterious planning box I hear you ask well it's actually quite simple at the beginning of every day I spend about half an hour really breaking down every single time block and hat that I'm wearing and in that time block I actually break it down into sub locks if you will so if I'm wearing the marketing hat I will say to myself right from 10 o'clock till 10 30 I'm doing x and x is a deliverable X is an outcome not a here's what I'm going to work on no actually what am I going to achieve by the end of it and I give myself a time to finish it in because let's face it chances are if you give yourself five hours to do a one hour task the chances are that you're going to take five hours to do it in however if you give yourself 55 minutes to do that one hour task in chances are you're going to push yourself and do it in 55 maybe 56 you're still four minutes ahead of it being a one hour task so that's what I like to do I like to really chunk things down and say right from this time to this time that's what I'm going to do and I do that every day the reason I do it every day not at the beginning of the week for example for the whole week is because it keeps me focused every morning on what I'm going to actually achieve and what I'm aiming to achieve by the end of the day but also sometimes things change tasks differ results happen clients come in and say different things and we need to adjust what we're doing and based on that every morning I know what I need to do for that day and that's why it keeps me focused anyway what about you what tips or tricks or tasks or things that you've learned along the way how do you lay out your week how do you structure your week have you got any advice jump down in the comments below really I'd love to hear your thoughts and actually share it with the amazing and awesome community that you are becoming and this channel is growing because of you so I thank you very much hope that's been useful for you I'll see you next time