What are you doing next Wednesday at 2:15 p.m.? How about 9:00 a.m. Friday morning? What would you think about a business owner with many blank spaces in their calendar running a business? If this is you, you need to work on your time blocking.
If you’re a business owner, you should either be working towards your goals or not working at all. You owe that much to yourself and your family. The worst place you can find yourself is in your office or place of business “working” on nothing, day dreaming about unproductive oblivion. Here are some tips to get you time blocked correctly and super-efficient so you can work on creating your ideal calendar.
The Power of 3
What are your top 3 most productive activities? If you owned an ice cream shop and you only had 3 activities that you had time to do, what should they be? Let’s assume you need these critical activities:
1. Sell ice cream
2. Market ice cream store
3. Delegate
You should be pulling these most important activities from your business plan. Now you might be thinking, what about paying your bills, hiring employees, customer service, quality control, cleaning your store, etc. These are all very important tasks but they are not the most critical daily activities that bring in cash flow to keep your lights on.
Thoughts on why these are the most important tasks:
If you are a new ice cream shop owner, you are going to be spending most of your time trying to sell as much ice cream as you can. Selling is the lifeblood of any business. Once you’re selling your ice cream you need to increase those sales by marketing your ice cream store. Once you’ve started to build consistent momentum, you will need help to keep things under control. You will then to delegate important tasks in order to continue growing.
Click on the link for an example of how much time you need to spend doing the critical: Google Calendar Time Blocking Example
What are YOUR top 3 most productive business activities?
Be Efficient
When is the best time to be doing what? Staying with the ice cream shop example; You notice you sell most of your ice cream on Monday afternoons after 3pm. Why on earth would you schedule clean up around that time? You wouldn’t because it does not make sense. You would be best served helping make more ice cream sales happen and listening for ways that you can make the customer experience better. Efficiency allows us to get a lot of productivity out in less time. Next time you are standing in a long line of an understaffed restaurant and a staff member is mopping the floor, you will remember what I am talking about!
Be aware of having too many gaps in your calendar that are blank. Blank spaces drain you of your focus by leaving you to think too much about what you should be doing. Instead, you want to tell yourself what to do in your calendar and make like Nike. Just do it (see what I did there).
Be Specific
Take a step back and pat yourself on the back. If you’ve read the points above, you have the most important activities in your calendar and they are efficiently timed. You notice that your calendar says “Clean Containers”. How many and how often? If you do not have this laid out as a standard operation procedure, it must be in your calendar. Be detail oriented which means you need to have down exactly what your goal is during each time block. If you don’t, it will be tough to focus.
For example, let’s say you have to clean out the ice cream containers all at least 1 time per month. If you have 12 containers, you need to clean 3-4 containers per week. So, instead of saying “Clean Containers”, it should say “Clean 4 Containers” each week so that they are always clean. This may seem obvious to you. The reality is that we can get so caught up in working ON our business, we forget to work IN our business.
Make Your Ideal Calendar
Your ideal calendar should be about the best times to do business activities built around how you want your life schedule to be. For example, if your son plays basketball on Tuesday nights and you don’t want to miss the games, you should build your calendar around that.
Creating your ideal calendar allows you to feel good about working in your passion. Make sure your ideal calendar includes some of the things you enjoy most outside of your business too. If you don’t have your ideal calendar today, it should be something you’re working towards. Who said being an entrepreneur and working hard shouldn’t be fun? Not me!
Respect Your Calendar
I’m so tired today. Maybe I will skip cleaning out the ice cream containers this week. I don’t feel like calling vendors. This kind of disrespect to your calendar will lead to dirty contaminated ice cream containers or not having enough inventory in our ice cream shop example. If you are consistently finding that you are not able to execute the items on your calendar you need to do one of two things.
1. Move the block
2. Delegate the block
By moving the item to a better time when you will have the energy or time, you will still be respecting your calendar. You will also be moving it to a more efficient place for you and your energy level during that time of day.
By delegating to an employee, you are still respecting your calendar by having the task completed. Even if it’s not you. You are also creating more efficiency for yourself in the process.
What are your calendaring secrets? How are you able to get the most done in a short amount of time? Comment below.