Mastering Time Management for Seven-Figure Success Ep. 019

What if you could transform your business by simply managing your time better? Discover the essential strategies that can propel your online venture to seven figures, as we explore the art of balancing your workload with tasks that are both challenging and enjoyable. In this episode of Brightside Business, I share my proven framework to help you spend 80% of your time on activities that not only fuel your passion but also significantly drive revenue and growth. Learn to navigate the four-quadrant task table to effectively focus on what truly matters, steering clear of demotivating and unproductive tasks that can hinder your progress.

Join me in mastering the three-step approach designed for early-stage entrepreneurs eager to maximize their potential. Learn to identify a successful money-making strategy that resonates with your interests and allocate the majority of your time to these crucial tasks. I offer insights into maintaining both satisfaction and sustainability in your business journey, ensuring you're always engaged and never burnt out. Reach out with any questions, as I'm here to guide you in achieving a balanced, productive, and fulfilling entrepreneurial life.

Got Questions? Send them here and I'll tackle them on the show: joey@joeyhyoung.com

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Chapters

• 0:00 Time Management for Online Entrepreneurs
• 7:12 Prioritizing Time in Early Business Stages

Transcript

Joey Young: 0:00

Welcome to Breadside Business, where we talk to online entrepreneurs like yourself about growing your business to seven figures. Over the past four years, I've led a business that's in the seven-figure range and I've also coached multiple six and five-figure entrepreneurs on productivity and business systems. One thing comes up consistently as an issue for these entrepreneurs that I work with who are trying to scale to that seven-figure range, and that's time how to manage their time, how to use their time in a wise way so they're not just working hard, they're working smart. So in this video, I'm going to tell you how to spend your time. If you're an early-stage entrepreneur, it's a framework I'm going to lay out, basically telling you how to allocate your limited resources of time in this video. If you're a business owner who has outside responsibilities, this is perfect for you. Let's say you have another side gig to make income while you're building your business, or you've got family or other obligations. This will be really helpful. I had a client ask me recently like listen, joey can only spend about 12, 15 hours on my business per week, but I always end up sitting down to work on my business when I have time and I don't know what to do with that time. So I showed them this diagram here I'm about to show you, and it really helped them to clarify. Okay, what's my next step? What am I going to do here and what am I going to do there to create the revenue I want to create? But before we jump into the framework, I want to lay out some presuppositions here.

Joey Young: 1:21

A business is the process through which you add value to people's lives and they give you money in exchange. It's an entity to handle that transaction between the value added and the money coming in. To add this value to our customers or our clients' lives, we need to exude effort, and that effort needs to be combined with pre-existing skill or knowledge or expertise. Now the problem is a lot of business owners get burnt out before the effort exuded to create the value creates income for them on the other end. So they get burnt out basically trying to add value before the revenue comes in, and so they get discouraged and they quit. So if we're talking about how to build a successful business from scratch, or we're talking about scaling the revenue of a current business, we're really talking about how can we stay in the game long enough. Add the value, which is the effort combined with expertise and knowledge. How can we do that long enough for the revenue to come in the other side? That's the challenge we're trying to solve here and that's the key to a sustained business. You're in the sweet spot here where you're being challenged, you're having fun and you're making money. If you can achieve all those things at the same time challenged, you're having fun and you're making money you're in a great spot, and that's what this framework is all about.

Joey Young: 2:46

We're looking at a table with four quadrants. In the columns up top, you've got fun and life-sucking. On the rows on the side, you've got hard and easy. So the four quadrants of this table are fun and hard, fun and life-sucking, and then easy and fun. Easy and life-sucking.

Joey Young: 3:04

So where do we spend our time as a business owner in the early stage? Well, 80% of our time fully 80% of our time we spend building our business should be in the fun and the hard category. The vast amount of your time should be spent on activities that are fun and that are also difficult, hard, challenging, make you grow, make you think outside the box. These are the needle-moving activities that actually grow revenue, that actually create money, that actually build your business. Now the problem is when people slip into the life-sucking and hard quadrant. So if you're having fun and you're working hard, you're in a good spot. You're working on those activities that generate revenue. It's difficult work but you're enjoying it. Great, that's an awesome, sustainable way to spend your time building a business. You're going to last the distance.

Joey Young: 3:57

But what I see a lot of entrepreneurs do is slip into the hard and life-sucking category. Now, there is a certain amount of work in every business and it should be less than 10% of the time here where you have to do some things that are hard and are life-sucking. Let's say you have a customer that's pissed off because an expectation was not met. You can't just ignore them and say, hey, I'm not gonna answer that email, I'm not gonna answer the phone. Obviously, there are some minimal amount of tasks that are hard and life-sucking, but it should be, again, less than 10% of your time. If you're an early-stage entrepreneur, the idea is that you hire out these areas later on, if you hire a customer service engineer or manager later on down the road. But If you are early on in your business and you're spending more than 10% of your time on hard and life-sucking things, that's your reason why you're demotivated. That's the reason why you're struggling. I don't care how good your strategy is, if it's sucking the life out of you and it's hard, you're going to give up. You're going to move on to distractions. You're going to be using that time that you are working on your business very poorly because you actually don't enjoy it.

Joey Young: 5:03

Now let's talk about fun and easy the fun and easy quadrant. These are the tasks that are usually light, breezy. They're not challenging for you, you get them done really quickly and they're pretty fun. They are usually the tasks we do when we're procrastinating. Doing the hard and fun things, they feel good in the moment. They're like quick checkbox things. It's like organizing things or or like spending the 15th time reviewing the creative on a post, but not in a in a way that improves it, but in a way that like just is kind of like light and breezy and fun. You know we're just kind of doing things off the cuff and changing things. Or, again, we're organizing folders or information or doing quick little tasks that don't actually create revenue. They are distractions from the hard and the fun things that we should be putting our time to, so we really should not be spending any time in our businesses early on on fun and easy things.

Joey Young: 6:02

Let's talk about the last quadrant life-sucking and easy. So this quadrant is where a lot of people waste time on tasks that really should not be given the time of day. It should be less than 10% of your time spent in this quadrant, similar to the life-sucking and hard stuff like dealing with customer complaints. That is difficult and sucks. The easy and life-sucking stuff is, like you know, sending invoices to clients, drawing up contracts, checking your email, your, you know, closing the books in your business, like all this stuff. That just isn't like super difficult, but it's just got to get done. It's very easy to overthink or overcomplicate these things. You know people can spend hours trying to find the right online software for their business or find you know just the right contractor to do a project. You know they're easy, they're life-sucking things and we can just spend way too much time overcomplicating them. Again, it should be less than 10% of your time. Yes, you have to spend some time checking your email, some time drawing up contracts and invoices and invoicing your clients and charging them, and all this stuff. That's easy and life-sucking, but do not overthink it, do not spend too much time in it.

Joey Young: 7:12

So if you bring it all together, what are we spending our time on Fully? 80% of our time is on the hard and the fun stuff. 10% is on the hard and the life-sucking stuff, you know, dealing with clients that have problems. And then 10% of our time is on the easy and the life-sucking stuff, only the bare minimum, the necessities to get things off the ground. We're not spending the majority of our time early in business picking out whether we use Notion or Evernote or ClickUp or. You know that kind of stuff can always be changed later. It doesn't matter, you know. We just need to get through it so we can get back to the hard and the fun stuff, which is the prospecting, which is the sales, which is the product design, the marketing campaigns, the fulfillment piece. You know, the hard and fun, nitty-gritty pieces of business that actually create revenue.

Joey Young: 8:00

So if you're struggling to know where to spend your time as a business owner, there's three steps that you got to take here. First, find a strategy that's proven to make money. This is the key. First of all, you got to find a strategy where someone has used it before to create the financial results you're looking for. That's the most important piece revenue generating strategies. Second of all, think what it would look like to still be doing this strategy two years from now. So you've got to picture yourself not just implementing this strategy now, but think about continuing to do it for the next two years and think where you'd be.

Joey Young: 8:38

Would you be happy if you were still implementing this strategy on a week-to-week, month-to-month basis two years in the future? That's to test the fun factor. Because, again, the first requirement of a business is hey, it makes money, hello, it's not a hobby, right? So that was the first step. Second step is to test is this going to be something you're going to enjoy several years from now? Because if you have this really spunky, fun strategy that's proven to work but it sucks, it's in that life-sucking category. So it's hard and life-sucking. You should not be in that business, you should not be doing that work, you should not be trying to make money that way. So get out of that business. And a test for that is would I still be having fun talking about this topic or using this marketing strategy or using this product strategy, two years from now?

Joey Young: 9:22

And thirdly, you want to schedule 80% of your week that you have set aside to work on your business. 80% of that time should be spent on the hard and the fun needle moving tasks that actually bring about that strategy. So this is where the rubber meets the road. You've got your strategy. It's a lot of fun. That was step two.

Joey Young: 9:43

Step three is all right. I'm going to put blocks of time on my calendar that move this strategy forward. That creates the results to bring about whatever framework or business plan or strategy I've chosen to move forward with. And that's how you schedule your time. 80% of your week is already accounted for. It's already set in stone. You know what you're going to be working on and then all the other stuff falls into place around it All the things they'll get done. Believe me, like you'll get an angry customer email, you'll deal with it when it needs to be dealt with. You'll have to send out invoices. You'll spend a few minutes to do that. But what's really important is that you schedule out 80% of your time dedicated to working on your business, on those hard and those fun nitty gritty need a moving tasks. And that's how you schedule your time in your early stage business.

Joey Young: 10:34

I hope this has been helpful for you. I'm really excited to hear from you. What's your question about your business? Do you have a problem you're facing? Do you have a question about growing your business? Do you have a team issue? Do you have a productivity issue or a business systems issue? Let me know what it is. Shoot me an email, joey, at joeyhyoungcom. I'd love to hear your question. Just shoot me your question, your name, and I'll tackle it here on a future show. I'd love to hear what you're going through so I can help you and you can watch my answer to it on a future show. And if you have liked this episode so far you're still here watching I'd really appreciate a thumbs up, a five-star review. Hit the share button, hit the subscribe button, hit the like button, whatever it is. It really helps spread the show to more people. Thank you for doing that on this episode and until next time, my friends, happy scaling.