Can You Get 10 Hours a Week Back?

Don Dalrymple December 7, 2020

If your weeks are passing by and you are not moving the needle on the big things, then it may be well worthwhile to reevaluate your work strategy.

Effective people convert their time to high output returns on the things that truly matter; ineffective people fritter away their time across questionable payoff activities.

If you are simply going with the tides of distraction, busyness, interruptions and even productivity, you could be simply exhausting yourself at the wrong things.

However, if you could slough and get back 10 hours in a week and put that towards bigger payoffs, what would your results look like?

This is hard to do without intervention and intention. After all, your habits can harden you towards certain rhythms which become comfortable, but ineffective.

You can get 10 hours back. You have to want to though. And in doing so, you can free up your mind to reapply your time and energies with higher ROI. Here are some low-hanging ideas to reclaim your weekly time budget:

• Data input. Whether it’s accounting, CRM or project management, take notes and hand them off to someone that can input them into the appropriate systems.
• Bills and Invoices. Outsource this and build a simple handoff process.
• Customer touches. Consolidate your communications to a newsletter that is world class and make the time personal, helpful and impactful that you design and communicate. It’s much less time than many one on one calls.
• Subscriptions. You may have sampled many new and shiny tools that are lagging. Unsubscribe, save the money and delete your logins. Pick 2-3 that you can double up on using and commit to regular use. You can increase focus with more payoff.
• Social media. Which one has the best payoff? Only use that one and post daily. Delete the other ones off of your phone.
• Roles. Evaluate how many roles you are playing. Then hand off all except one, the one you love.
• Projects. What clients or projects have become unenjoyable and costly? Phase those out and sharpen your targeting. Use the negative experience to qualify the kind of clients and projects you will only take on. Then give your best to your best clients.

You have to push hard to set up new ways of doing things, but it’s about making your work worth it. Your energy can get zapped by spreading out too thin. And your highest payoffs get neglected. Pull out a piece of paper. Think about where those 10 hours of time are and start pushing on reclaiming your focus and energy so you can reapply it to growing your business.

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