How do you focus on growing your business when you’re stuck in client deadline hell? Time blocking. Time blocking isn’t a set it and forget it thing. In fact, I’ve had to change my “ideal workweek” multiple times in the last 90 days. Covid? Fix my cal. Growing team? Fix my cal. Have a baby? Fix my cal. Hire more people? Fix my cal. There are a lot of reasons to use time blocking so this isn’t a video on how to time block but I wanted to share two tips that made it work way better for me while dealing with client deadlines.
Transcript / MP3
Do you find it difficult to work on your business while client deadlines are looming? Well, if that’s the case in this video, I’m going to break down two tips that I follow religiously when it comes to managing my calendar, managing my time and time blocking specifically that I just shared recently on one of our client coaching calls. So we’re going to jump over to inside that segment, where I’m going to just kind of riff for a few minutes on some things that I do personally in my own calendar, as my days, have been evolving very, very quickly from our team growing from four to 11 people in a matter of 90 days to having a newborn baby, to having two children now, while still being a husband and trying to keep it all together. If this resonates with you and you want some tips on how to better manage your business, your time while dealing with your clients, then let’s just jump right in. … I revisit my, my perfect week, um, at least quarterly. Um, and then as the team evolves, like, you know, we brought Brandon on, we have a sales team, like I’ve actually, I’ve created an adjusted my calendar and with the baby more times in the last 90 days than I have in the last multiple years combined because the constraints are different. The, um, how my time and where my time needs to be spent is different. Um, you know, historically as the team was, was smaller, I had spent less time in sort of managing the team and being around like having calls with the team. And now I’m finding, I have a lot more calls with the team because the team is responsible for more things. And so I need to get updates on where they’re at and see how I can support them and spend time coaching them, um, and teaching the team so that I can, um, you know, move them forward so we can all move forward. Um, but you know, the, when it comes to time blocking two things that, um, that I really focus on and have always focused on is theming my days, um, to minimize context switching, um, you know, if you have, uh, kind of your situation where like, like if this is kind of your full day and you know, this is sales activity, and then you jump right into client fulfillment, like those are two such different, like you need to be in completely different States to, to be doing that. And oftentimes what I used to do, and I see a lot of people do is like, they give themselves no break. You will easily lose 15 minutes, if not more, uh, just the context switch. And so if you don’t give yourself a break of at least 15 minutes, if this was 60, and this was a 60 minute block, this actually isn’t a 60 minute block. It’s probably more like 45 minutes if that, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t get a lot of momentum in a 45 minute stretch. Um, so I’m trying to compartmentalize my days around similar themes if I’m creating content. Like those are days where I want to be focused on marketing. Um, if I’m, you know, if I’m in FA like Mondays for me has become like, basically that’s when I have my, like Monday his team, like we have our sales huddle, we have our management meeting, we have our team meeting. Um, every other once a month we have our finance meeting. Then I have, uh, we now have our marketing meeting on Mondays. So like I’m in kind of back to back meetings most of Monday. Um, but it positions everybody else to win throughout the week. So if I have other things like, like little nitty gritty planning, I’ll put that on Mondays. Um, and then I don’t really have many team meetings, you know, throughout the rest of the week outside of our daily huddles. Um, so really focus on that compartmentalization, um, and that time chunking, because you can lose a lot of time, uh, in the context switch [inaudible].It’s probably more like 45 minutes if that, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t get a lot of momentum in a 45 minute stretch. Um, so I’m trying to compartmentalize my days around similar themes if I’m creating content. Like those are days where I want to be focused on marketing. Um, if I’m, you know, if I’m in FA like Mondays for me has become like, basically that’s when I have my, like Monday his team, like we have our sales huddle, we have our management meeting, we have our team meeting. Um, every other once a month we have our finance meeting. Then I have, uh, we now have our marketing meeting on Mondays. So like I’m in kind of back to back meetings most of Monday. Um, but it positions everybody else to win throughout the week. So if I have other things like, like little nitty gritty planning, I’ll put that on Mondays. Um, and then I don’t really have many team meetings, you know, throughout the rest of the week outside of our daily huddles. Um, so really focus on that compartmentalization, um, and that time chunking, because you can lose a lot of time, uh, in the context switch [inaudible].
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