Balancing Time and Responsibilities for You Business | Ask Me Anything

hi friends how are you today we are popping in for a little bit of a live chat and conversation but i'm going to start with a question and it's going to be a quiz where do you find yourself today so that is a quiz and i would love to know your responses the way that i like to have conversations is if i know who i'm speaking to we can tailor the conversation for those uh people so let's make this conversation great for you and with you now we're talking about balancing time and responsibilities for your business but we should probably start off by stating the very very clear truth is time is the most valuable thing you own no matter how much money you have or what you can do you can never buy more time so what we're going to be focusing on um uh let's see let's see uh it looks like there's no audio so courtney is there no audio when i'm on my slides or when i'm on the camera because it looks like i should be set up for it huh it looks like i should be set up for it let me make sure that um okay well dang it it looks like huh oh okay let's go back here this is what happened because you know y'all like let's just go with the tech stuff answer this quiz hey i have a nine to five and a side hustle b my business is full time but i'm a solopreneur i wear all the hats and c i am trying to run my business while also caring for my family okay so what i was saying was that this quiz it's actually not just to get the conversation going it's it's so that i'm better prepared on how to tailor conversations because the thing i hear a lot from business owners is how do i get all the things done why does it feel like some people are more productive or why does it feel like some people have more hours in the day and we'll go back to what we know is true is that time is the most valuable thing that you own and the good news is that it isn't too late to change or modify how you spend it because i have a lots of conversations with business owners who just feel like no matter what they do they're spinning their wheels and their to-do list is getting bigger and the rate at which they're moving keeps on getting slower so the good news is also that it's an even playing field everybody has just 24 hours in a day so if everybody has 24 hours in a day why does it seem like some people are more productive than others have you ever felt that way have you ever looked at somebody else and you're like well they also have four kids and they're also like doing this part time and they also volunteer church like how are they able to get all that stuff done and why do i feel like i'm falling short well i don't know your particular situation and i can't speak to those things specifically what i do know and will be about to rub people the wrong way is that productivity comes down to priorities productivity comes down for priorities whenever i used to say it would be very common for me to say i don't have time for social media or social media takes so much time i don't have time to go to the gym and somebody looked at me from across the table and said why don't you change i don't have time and instead use that's not a priority for me i don't have time and substitute it with that's not a priority for me and they said try that on and see how it feels and the minute i said marketing my business isn't a priority i was like wait a minute that's not true whenever i i tested saying uh working out is not my priority well that wasn't true so we go back down and i'm just going to walk you through how things radically change for me because productivity comes down to my priorities and i started shifting my priorities so i also started to understand that how you spend your day is a reflection of what is most important to you how you spend your day is a reflection of what is most important to you and as i say that if what's coming right up for you is how you spend your day and you're not spending the time that you want with your children or you're not spending the time that you want volunteering at an organization or you're not spending the amount of time that you would like to focus on your business whatever the case may be however you spend your day is a reflection of what's your priority so the question that becomes does your current schedule reflect what matters to you most and like i like having these conversations because i have an opportunity to be real and i'm hoping that you could be real with yourself and the question becomes yes or no does your current schedule reflect what matters to you most so if it's not a priority then own it but if it is a priority then show it if marketing your business is not in your wheelhouse right now say it is not in my wheelhouse right now great now you cannot now you forfeit the opportunity to complain about the results you don't have for the work you did not do and that is okay it is okay to say i can't do all the things and so i'm saying that working out is not a priority for me no problem i own it that's not a priority but then i cannot complain when my pants don't fit i cannot complain if i don't have a six pack why i didn't do the work that i wanted to get the results so if we know that balancing our time boys down to priorities and if it's not a priority no judgment good for you start identifying what your priorities are if you need to change how you spend your time let's dive in a little bit to what are how how do we start making these small changes well your brain is meant to generate ideas not store them so write down everything that you can think that you need to do so your brain is not intended to keep everything your brain is not a treasure chest your your brain is an idea machine but oftentimes where we get stress and anxiety is that we're keeping everything in here and then we're demanding ourselves to remember it and then if for some reason the next day that evening a week later you're like i can't believe i didn't remember how did i forget i'm so absent-minded no you're not you're just expecting your brain to do something it wasn't the best at doing so whenever you have a list of things to do write everything down now for over a decade i survived on a to-do list a manual paper to-do list and sticky notes this was my system and then all of a sudden as my business started to get bigger and i started getting virtual assistants i started hiring my first team member i realized that everything could not exist on a piece of paper that was on my desk other people had to know what was going on so we transitioned into a project management tool now there's a ton out there i don't get sponsored the team and i use asana but you can use monday you can use i mean there's just so many different options out there um so if we then know everything we need to do now it's time to start ranking them by priorities and whatever is not a priority you either eliminate it or you delegate it now i understand that people right now are like well that's just a luxury how nice to be able to delegate how nice to be able to delete but you see jasmine i have to do everything in my business and i'm gonna tell you i used to say the same thing i used to say that i was the only person who knew how to edit my photos i was the only person who knew how to design albums for clients i was the only person who could create submissions so that i was talking to editors and lending bigger gigs i was the only person who could write my blog post i was the only person who could respond to emails because it was a personal relationship that they're paying for listen i was there and i'm i wish i can go back to myself and shake me silly and say girl you do not have to be there you will go faster you will grow bigger the more that you are not doing things that are not a priority because guess what they'll still be getting done they just won't be getting done by you how amazing how freeing now what i thought back when i first hired we hired our very first team member in 2016 2017 so this is like a decade of doing everything on my own and when we hired that first person my thoughts were i'm not sure i have enough work for her to do my thoughts were i don't think she can do it as well as i can my thoughts were well now i'm not going to be as profitable but what i didn't realize then was that by bringing somebody on she was doing things that she was better at and i was doing things that i was better at and guess what because we were moving faster i was able to take on more projects and more things which shot our revenue up so everything i thought wouldn't have that was going to happen did not happen now let's flash forward to now present day and i think to myself i mean i literally had this conversation with my husband and business partner yesterday when i said when i look at the numbers and i look at the people we need to hire it doesn't make sense because i'm just so worried about like what revenue will be impacted and profitability by the people that we bring on but here's what i know i am standing in my own way i am doing way too many things in the business that i have to take a step back and say we need to hire for this role period the end i need to train this person i need to get out so i can do other things because what i'm realizing is that what i once thought was a priority it's no longer a priority because now i have a different vision so i need to train somebody to take care of this so i can go over here and build another revenue stream now that is going to be how you can get more done now word of caution is that we have to prioritize what's important versus what's urgent i daily must make the decision to say i need to focus on what's important not what urgent even though even though it's so tempting to be like oh you you have this email you have this message you just got hit up by this amazing opportunity on instagram okay that's urgent it's not important what is important will be the thing that moves the business forward not makes me feel good for today what is important will move the business forward and what is urgent makes me feel like i'm getting stuff today done today so there are times in the day where i just completely turn off all other ideas all other communication and i focus just on what i need to do in this very moment and then i push out all the urgent because i'm focusing important then i can come up for air and say okay who do i need to get back to where am i going i'm using two different sides of my brain so that i'm maximizing my time and my focus speaking of maximizing the time i have to come out and say the reason i've been able to get a lot done is because small pockets of time will be game changers it was very common for me to look at the clock and say oh um it's 12 54 and i have a meeting at one so what i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna um like i'll just scroll instagram or um i'll just you know text i'll text some of my friends which is good nothing's wrong with that nothing's wrong with that but the more that i started putting on my plate that now i look at a six minute break in my day and i'm like great i'm gonna do this for six minutes like what has been helpful is for me to rank kind of like clocking like how is this a big task a small task a medium-sized task like how much time will it take and if i have a five-minute thing that i can do i'm using every single minute of the day and i know that sounds ridiculous and some people might say that and say that's not the life i want to live that's not how i want to run no problem but the difference between people who you see are like man how are they getting all done i i firmly believe that they're maximizing the smallest pockets time five six minutes and they're using things to move the needle in their business and one thing a major lesson i learned is that to be honest with yourself about your capacity i don't want you to set yourself up to fail it's so important that you don't put what is not humanly possible now remember you're not a computer and you're not a machine i love putting 25 things on my to-do list but then all of a sudden at the end of the day i would feel like i was a failure if i didn't do all 25 but i think to myself who could do those 25 things in any given day and so what i've slowly started to realize is that i i can only do so much in a day and now when i'm looking at workloads i'm thinking is this possible for me to do like if you were to assign okay this would probably take me 30 minutes and this will be 15 minutes and this will take me and then all of a sudden if you look and you have 12 hours of work to do in a day and you don't have 12 hours of work because you're a parent or there's commuting or you're volunteering or whatever the case may be then you have to say i can't do the 12 hours what more could you expect from yourself other than you doing the most with what you have in the time that you have so please don't beat yourself up for not getting 12 hours of work done in four hours it's just being very pragmatic about how much time it will take and one thing that has been a major lesson later in the business is to learn how to rest and not quit what happens is that our bodies become repositories they become containers for energy for depletion like what we put out what we put out what we put out we'll put it out but if we're not taking the actual time to like take a step back and like come back to a baseline we're gonna burn out i you know i'm not gonna age myself but i've seen a ton of really talented business owners with really profitable businesses say i'm done this is not the quality of life that i wanted this is not practical this is not the way that i can function so i'm cool i'm gonna go do something else and i'm i'm happy to say that being strict with putting parameters around what is a work time and what's not has made a profound difference like i'll tell you at the end of last week i was burnt like i was burnt out and i said if i even touch any work over the weekend it's i'm gonna be in a bad place next week and i need to be in a good place next week so this past saturday and sunday i didn't open my computer now did i know that i had a ton of work to do yeah i did and i still couldn't bring myself to do it because i need to be 100 in that week so that my monday morning i woke up early like my mind was like good it was like firing it was going so what i did over the weekend is i made space for my brain i made space for my body that way hit the ground running on monday i finished everything that i needed to do that was lingering over the weekend started monday with a good clean head onto how to finish the work so i know that we like i'm talking a bunch uh we want to move into q a so please know that this q a by and large this is always a free form open q a what we wanted to start doing testing remember that quiz earlier today where i said like where are you at what kind of bit like where are you at in your business so that we could tailor these conversations and then i asked are you a i have a nine to five and a side hustle b my business is full time but i wear all the hats or c i'm trying to run my business while also caring for my family full time like i asked that as a quiz and so please if you have a response now please add it in the chat because it really does help framework because what we saw was that people were saying i don't have time for it all so why not have a conversation around what time actually looks like and how i function in time and then we can carry a conversation from there okay so there are uh questions that are coming in and i restarted my computer got a whole new operating system the whole nine and i didn't turn off the dinging sound so please know that i'm getting your questions as they come in so you're gonna be hearing a digging sound so sorry um okay amanda davis said i am sure i will learn it here but i have tried hundreds of time to block and make a routine and i can't adhere to it fear failure maybe fear of commitment possibly how do i stick to a schedule amanda i wish that i was a time productivity specialist i wish that i can quote some scientific thing but honest honestly what you struggle with is what i struggle with and that's actually to make a commitment and see a schedule now your reasons why it's harder for you to stick to a schedule are probably different than my reasons why i had a hard time sticking to a schedule but like anything like having the discipline to work out like having the discipline to learn how to walk having the discipline on learning how to drive a car having the discipline to learn how to ride a bike right having the discipline to learn a second language whatever having the discipline to say i want to learn how to golf and so then you just go and start taking golf lessons like everything is simply making the cognizant decision to say i'm going to be disciplined that's it that's it you could be afraid you could have fear of failure you could have fear come in all of those things could be true but even if they're true the only way that you stick to something is by sticking to it and then in the beginning i'm going to tell you it's going to suck and your timeline is going to be way off and you're going to be like oh see this doesn't work no no no it's the more you stick to it and the more you refine your timeline that you have a big dose of reality of your like wait a minute i was really expecting the impossible from my schedule and so then i would beat myself up and say tell myself that i wasn't moving fast enough but i can actually see what is humanly possible for me so how you stick to a schedule like i mean like deep thoughts and i'm not going to be like your time guru is you just make a decision you make a decision to say i will stick with this and now i this is where i can quote a scientific study a scientific civic study reported or proved that 30 days turn something into a habit so can you stick to a schedule for 30 days because if you can you will then get enough information to say how long does this really take me what i'm what do i need help with what can i delegate what should i delegate uh karen says i'm an online esl teacher and learned how much i can actually get done in a five minute break between classes i carried it over to business karen i am so happy that you are out here testify like i needed somebody to say like truly truly that what we can do with five small pockets of five minutes per day that's 25 minutes do you know what you can do in 25 minutes a heck of a lot can't i there are so many days that i do not have the luxury to sit down 25 minutes just to work oh no it's about doing all the things okay sophia said without income you cannot delegate well i understand sofia like my heart it goes out to you because i felt the same way if i don't have income i cannot delegate and then i started realizing that there are people where you can get creative so um okay so my husband and i uh i okay wow okay so in 2015 2016 instead of writing a book about my photography career and how i built my business i decided to self-publish a magazine that's the length of a book so this magazine was 138 pages my husband and i paid for the magazine to get created and we published it ourselves and then we put it in this online store and it was called expose and it was so great but all of a sudden what we realized was i didn't have money to hire somebody to do all the shipping and the shipping whoa it was so much time and energy and so i just thought i can't delegate and i can't outsource but you want to know what i did i turned to people who i trusted and they trusted me at the time i asked my brother and his girlfriend to work with us for one month for free until i got the money from selling the magazines to pay them for the time that it would take to package everything okay one one thing another thing was that you don't know that there is the opportunity for people to work with you in exchange for experience in exchange for exposure you also i mean depending on how involved or how close you are with the group of friends i have asked friends to step in for me when i really needed it just to get it off the ground and quite honestly another way that you can afford to delegate or to admit is to do a trade so sophia i don't know what it is you do maybe you're a makeup artist and you really need somebody maybe you need a virtual assistant to like help you with emails maybe you make her or him customized makeup tutorials maybe you say i'll do your makeup once a month or twice a month five times a month in order for you to be in my inbox five hours a week i don't know but we can we can find excuses or we can find reasons why it would work okay sandra says when does it become unrealistic to build a business when to recognize that it might not be the season for it talking as a new mom who left corporate but can't find the time sandra okay the kindest thing that you can do for yourself and for your new child is for you to believe and hold on to the truth that building a business is in you but it might not be the time right now and that's okay if you believe and sandra i'm what i'm feeling very strongly from you is that it might not be the time for you to build your business and that hurts and there's probably a chance that maybe you don't want to go back to corporate america maybe you want more time with your new baby but you're like where does that put me and i would invite you sandra to start looking for opportunities with other people or other businesses that are doing what you want to do so sandra i don't know what it is you want to do but let's just say you want to create a course to teach other people on how to create a course what would it look like for you to work with somebody who's needing help as they create their courses so you get to see what is in the process of creating a course or hosting the course or selling the course or promoting the course or let's just say you really want to create your own etsy store and you want to create like scarves and hats great but you don't have the time to do all the things that's needed well could you do admin work for somebody who has an etsy store just so that you could see like how things work it is totally okay i just know that as a mom of a 22 month daughter my life has just i i just feel like i'm in a whirlwind and i know that i can't work at the same rate and at the same pace that i was when i did not have a child so i have two options i can beat myself up and be so upset that i'm not working as fast or as productive or taking on as many projects as i was in 2019 or i can just say this is my reality and i need to put up parameters sandra you will go farther working 20 hours a week being the mom you want to be still having that creative outlet then trying to demand yourself to work 40 hours a week and still be the mom that you want why do we put ourselves and tell ourselves a story that it must look like this no you're in control sandra you get to decide how many hours do you want to work a week and what do you want to do then once you have that defined you go out and see what opportunities are available for you at the time please do not think that you must work 40 hours if you have a child you have multiple children oh my god my heart goes out to you you can define what it is you want to do however that might also come with a change in finances are you okay with that because if you're okay with tightening your belt because you absolutely could go back to corporate america and probably be making more than you would be working part-time doing your own thing but what in the long run is going to be best for you your ambitions and your child i hope any of those questions added a little bit of clarity of what it is that you want to do okay so uh oh zach zack why you got you gotta come in with those hard right hooks how do you communicate time boundaries to others in a way that highlights the benefits they are receiving from the boundary instead of being a lack of availability so zack i don't know if you're asking a time boundary question in relation to you and a client and i don't know if you're asking this time boundary between you and a friend so i'm gonna answer them both ways now i'm going to start with friendship si since becoming a mom i have noticed that my friendships have taken a back seat i want to say that oh i'm embarrassed or i feel like i'm let down and i struggled with that in the beginning and now i have since said it is a season and a time in my life before i had a child i would be my friend would be like hey let's just meet for a cup of coffee and let's go for a walk i would love that and i can't tell you the last time i met a friend for coffee and gone on a walk i just realized that at this time in my life i'm not the friend you call for a cup of coffee and a walk i will always be the friend that it's three o'clock in the morning and you need something in south africa i'm getting on a plane i know that i i will be a ride-or-die friend but the time boundaries that i have as i have huge ambitions with my business i have huge ambitions as being a good life partner with my husband i have huge ambitions at being a good mom and all of a sudden i started realizing i couldn't do everything well in addition to being that friend who will always be there so i have to communicate to my friends that who i was as a friend before it looks different now i will always be a friend and i will always shut for you but if you need closeness as a friend that requires me to be consistently hanging out with you on a weekly basis i'm gonna communicate to you that i can't give you what you need right now i hope we can get back to that but right now that's not where i am at so i apologize but as long as you know where i'm at i'll be with you and we can make plans but maybe not in the capacity that you need does it suck yeah has it been hard yes but i just feel like i know who i am now and i need to state this is the new version of me as far as setting up boundaries yes i absolutely think that business owners when i was a photographer and my clients would text me at 10 o'clock at night i would not respond then not because i was being rude but i'm like i'm not i'm not working right now like i'm having my like my my personal time and then i would respond to text messages between standard business hours when i was getting an email and a client would email me i wouldn't respond even if it was very very very important why oh let's go back this is like a perfect time for us to bring up that very thing that we had just spoken about is that that email or that text message oh it feels urgent but you want to know what's really important what was really important for me was having a healthy lifestyle with my husband and my business partner a really a really important thing was i don't need to get distracted responding to this email or this text message because what i'm doing right now is editing photos it's keeping me on a deadline with an editor it's having me put together a proposal for getting a feature remember i am not prioritizing what's urgent i'm prioritizing what is important every week we go live and we have these conversations i love this i love getting to know you i love getting this feedback uh please forgive the technical difficulties we had at the beginning thank you for dealing with me being like human and not knowing the having the perfect tech all of that to say every week we go live we have these conversations it's always an honor and a privilege before we go live we put out a call for questions so please whenever you see those posts it's very helpful for me and the entire team to know what you want to hear about because without you this format doesn't work so i appreciate you and i hope you have a beautiful day

2021-11-16 19:45

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