Leverage Your Time

Deciding what to do with your time is only half of the battle. You must also figure out and clearly decide what not to do. We all have so many different ways we could be spending our time. We're all asked to help with this, to volunteer for that, or to pitch in here, on top of our business and family obligations. Worse, if you're a typical entrepreneur, often times it's hard to let go of business responsibilities for fear of giving up control. The problem is, we can only do so much. There's only so much time in the day and only so much energy we can give. You can't possibly get it all done or fulfill all of your commitments if you say "yes" every time someone asks you to do something, or if you insist on being involved in every aspect of your business and do it all yourself. Even worse is if you try to do it all in your business and your personal life. If you do, your life and your business will always be limited to that which you can accomplish with your own single effort. You need to be able to leverage your time to create maximum results.

Here are a few tips to take some of this stress off your back and free up your time.

1. Decide what tasks you really should be doing - What is it that you excel at? What are the main tasks and activities in your business that honestly only you can do? These are the things that you really can't hand off and are the heartbeat of your business. They're likely also the things you enjoy the most and that give you the most energy when you're doing them. Why would you do anything besides these things anyway?
2. Decide what tasks you should not be doing - What can you hire out or delegate? What are you not as good at that you can easily hand off to someone that will do a better job. Even if you are good at it, if it's not essential that you personally be the one to do it, and if you can hire someone else that can do it well, for a reasonable cost, and it will free up your time, than do it.
3. Let it go - Don't just decide what you shouldn't be doing. Decide, hand it off, and let it go. The worst thing you can do is hand something off and then micromanage it. Not only is this counterproductive (how can you be saving time by handing something off if you're just going to babysit it anyway?), but you'll frustrate yourself and the person who you handed it off to. Trust them to do it and let it go.
4. Hire the right people - This helps immensely with the trust side of handing things off. If you hire good, competent people, you'll be more likely to give them greater responsibility and trust them to do it. It will be a lot easier to let it go if you  know it's in good hands. If you try to be cheap and just hire anybody for as little as possible, you'll get what you pay for and spend more time training or re-doing or checking in on what they've been doing for you. You need to be able to let them take it off your plate completely and have them get it done right and effectively or it's not accomplishing what you've set out to do.
5.  Keep trying, reviewing and adjusting - It takes time to figure out exactly what you should and shouldn't be doing, and who you should be handing the other things off to. Start with the obvious, and constantly be analyzing and looking back to see if you should take a task back (but not because you're being a control freak), hand an additional task off or delegate it to someone else. They point is to start recognizing you can't and shouldn't be doing everything, and to start surrounding yourself with the right team to help maximize your time.

Spend some time now making a list of the things you need to do, both in your business and personal life. What are your commitments? What are the tasks and activities you need to be doing on a daily or weekly basis? Write everything out. Figure out which tasks are essential that you personally do yourself. Is it face-to-face meetings? Is it proposals? Negotiations? Customer relations? What specifically do you need to do that creates the most results? Next, figure out where you can trim back. What doesn't really need to be done? What commitments can you back off on? What is on your "to do" list that can fall off and really not make a difference? Finally, figure out what you're currently spending time on that isn't a good use of your time, either because you're not good at it or because there are higher value tasks you should be doing instead, but that still needs to get done. Find a way to delegate or hire out those lower value or less productive tasks. Hire a personal assistant, add an extra employee or outsource to another company. If you're doing it to open up time, thought space and energy to do your most productive, highest value tasks, the investment will be well worth it and you'll see it produce dividends quickly. Not only that, but you'll be less stressed and more excited for your day, because you're spending your time on the activities you enjoy, are good at and that drive your business and your life. Learn how to leverage your time. You'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner.