Why You Might Just Want To Buy Back Some Of Your Time

What’s our most precious resource? Time of course.

But even though we all know that, we still fritter it away or worse—we decide it’s too much work (or too expensive) to hire people to take things off our plates.

Let me let you in a little “secret”: when you’re running your own business, it pays to get distractions—annoying or otherwise—out of your headspace.

And we’re not just talking about business tasks, but how your responsibilities in the rest of your life impact your business focus and earning power.

Let’s take “Sabrina” for example. She’s running a healthy 6-figure business, but has a bigger dream—she’s anxious to build out a new membership option but is so busy day-to-day, she can barely think about rolling out something new.

So we tried an experiment.

I had Sabrina track her time in 15-minute increments for a week and she discovered the culprits that were sucking her energy and focus:

Doing her own bookkeeping (which she considered a necessary annoyance) was eating up two to three hours a week (in part because she’d pick it up and then drop it in favor of something more interesting).

Another couple of hours a week was devoted to crafting images and copy for her LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.

And between meal planning for her family, grocery shopping and getting dinner on the table a few nights a week, she clocked another ten hours a week that took her away from building out her new idea.

And that’s not counting the things she doesn’t mind doing, but would free her up even more (walking the dog, fixing whatever breaks in her house and driving the kids to their after-school activities).

Most of us can wrap our minds around hiring help—like say a VA, a bookkeeper, a web designer—for our business. But we don’t go there quite so fast on the home front.

Where is it written that we must do everything ourselves to keep our lives running smoothly?

We all need a team—or said another way by this African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Sabrina hired herself a VA (who would also do her bookkeeping), signed up for a healthy meal delivery service and started ordering groceries on-line. She sourced a daily dog-walker and a handyman to fix a laundry list of things she never seemed to get to.

She not only cleared ten plus hours a week, but she’s become hyper-sensitive to anything that gets in her way. She’s morphed her house cleaning budget from monthly to weekly and is swapping car pool duties with some other parents.

And her membership program will debut in 2022.

So if you’re ready to go far in 2022, it’s time to unburden yourself from the tasks that keep you stuck in your present reality.

Happy holidays to you and those you love—I’ll see you back in your in-box in January.