There's not much you can be absolutely certain of in life. Death is one thing, and taxes is another. The fact that time will continue to tick away constantly is another, and that's the subject of this post.
From Donald Trump to an unemployed, penniless person, the one thing we all have in common is that we're here now, and for a limited amount of time. And with the exception of those unfortunate enough to terminally unwell, none of us know for certain how long we have available to us. So making the most of the time we have is vital, not only in a business sense, but also in a life-sense in general.
Of course, the whole point of this blog, email newsletter and the subsequent products I've created is to educate you on running your own SEO & Information Marketing business, so we'll focus on that area here (but remember you can apply this logic to everything that you do).
The next couple of posts are going to focus on the importance of managing your time effectively, and will show you how you some real methods (not fluffy theory) that you can use to get the most from your time.
Fundamentally, I teach this to people by getting them to first of all understand that time can be broken down into four quarters of a circle, with each one representing a different 'type' of time. I tend to break them down like this;
Quarter 1 - Time spent doing what must be done to keep you functioning (Affects all 4 quarters)
Quarter 2 - Time spent doing what you need to do in order to achieve quarter 3
Quarter 3 - Time spent doing what you enjoy doing
Quarter 4 - Wasted time
Now this may sound simplistic, but you can actually break everything that you do with your time up and slot them into those categories. Let's look at each one in a bit more detail;
Quarter 1 - This is probably the most straightforward of the four pieces, as this is everything that you must do in order to, in a broader time management sense, stay alive. Breathing, eating, sleeping, drinking water etc. Without these core requirements, your body would stop working and you would die, so a certain amount of time must be dedicated every day to performing these tasks. If you plan your working day on the principal that you have 24 hours in which to work every day, you will die of dehydration, or starvation, or exhaustion, or a combination of all of them. It's as simple as that. Failure to factor this quarter in your daily routine means you would, eventually, run out of time altogether, and therefore have no time for any of the remaining 3 quarters. So any 'life' plan that we create for time management must include time for these things.
If we stop and look at this in a bit more detail, we can then see that the amount of time that we dedicate to each of these things is also important. If we allow ourselves 4 hours a night of sleep, there's a good chance that we will become tired when we try to focus on Q2 (work). This means that we won't make as much money, and therefore might struggle to do the things we would like to do in Q3, and would end up spending too much time on Q4.
The point I'm trying to make here is about assigning a value to your time, because it's only when you truly value your time that you can actually start to manage it. How can you manage something when you have no idea how valuable it is?
Quarter 2 - This is all about the time you spend working toward a lifestyle that you enjoy. Now you may be fortunate enough to have enough money in the bank that you actually don't need to do much at all for this quarter, in which case you can re-assign the time to the other quarters (I would recommend 1 and 3!). But for most of us, we have to allow a fair portion of our time to this. This could be working a day job, or working on your own business, but either way it's time that you must spend in order to be able to enjoy as much of Quarter 3 as you possibly can.
Quarter 3 - This is anything that you like doing. For some people this might be a sport or hobby, for some people this may simply be spending time with your family or friends, but every lifestyle plan must factor this in there somewhere. This is the stuff that, without sounding too corny, enriches your soul and makes you the person you are, so time spent here is not wasted time at all, but time that makes you a better person. But of course, you can only devote a lot of time to this quarter if you devote enough time to the previous two.
Quarter 4 - This is time that's wasted, plain and simple. Anything that you do that can't fit into any of the other three quarters must go in here. This might include things that you have little control over, such as sitting in a traffic jam (which is often linked to Q2, as you may be going to work) or waiting in a doctor's waiting room (which may be linked to Q1, as it would be something you must do to stay alive), but often it's things that we have full control over. Sitting on Twitter or Facebook when we should be working for example, or messing about on your phone instead of getting something useful done.
The key to this post is to start to understand that everything that you do fits into one of those 4 categories, and it's up to you to decide which one fits where. Playing a videogame might to some for example, fit into Q4. But if you're a videogame fanatic, it might be something that relaxes you and gives you pleasure, and would therefore fit into Q3 (especially if it's something you do with a friend). It's up to you to interpret this the way you see fit. But the important thing is that you start to assign 'value' to your time.
The other vital thing to understand here is that, and let's say for argument's sake we imagine these four quarters as being a part of a circle, that circle cannot be any bigger. If it's representing a day, it's 24 hours. No bigger. If it's representing a week, it's 7 days. So with this in mind, we start to understand that the time we spend on any of the quarters has a direct correlation to the amount of time we can spend on the other quarters. If we sleep for 8 hours, that only leaves 16 hours to dedicate to Q2, 3 and 4. If we then waste 5 hours watching television, that only leaves us with 11 hours to work or spend doing something we enjoy. If we work a 10 hour day, we only have 1 hour left to spend with family (or doing whatever it is you enjoy).
You get the idea.
Once you start to assign value to your time, and you start to recognise how everything we've just spoken about is linked, you start to think more about how you utilise your time. Every successful entrepreneur I know for example has someone come and clean their house for them (a couple even have a chef come and cook for them). Is this because they're too lazy to do this themselves? No, because by their very nature they are 'go-getters'. But they've assigned a value to time spent cleaning the house or cooking food. They know it has to be done (because it fits into our quarters above), but they would rather pay someone to remove that from their time-plan, allowing them to spend more time focussing on Quarter 2 and Quarter 3.
They're not being lazy, they're just managing and valuing their time effectively.
This is the first fundamental step toward managing your time more effectively and getting more done. Once you understand the actual value of time, you can begin to use it properly. So to finish this post up, try this; For the next couple of days, make a note of how much of your time you spend on each quarter. It's not an exact science, so don't worry about being completely precise, but try to be honest. If you spent an hour doing nothing, write it down and add it to Q4. If you spent time with your kids, partner, friends etc - Chalk that up to Q3. As I said before, this is open to your own interpretation, just go with whatever you think it most suitable. But this will start to make you aware of how much of your day you currently spend doing the things that matter.
In the next post, we'll apply this way of thinking to your business.
Speak soon,
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