Many business owners I meet have the same wish:

“ If only I had a few more hours each day to get things done!”

If you are working for more than 50 hours per week, some aspect of your life is going to be suffering. It could be your physical or mental health, your family life, your fitness or your enjoyment of life. This is a situation that’s not sustainable long term.

Putting up with working ridiculous hours for the first few years of your business goes with the territory. Nothing worthwhile is built without putting in some hard work to get it going. However, if after year 3 you’re still working long hours because you have to, not because you want to, then something is going wrong.

Business or Busyness?

The problem may be that, over the years since you started your business, you’ve confused Business with Busyness. Our brains are designed to release chemicals when we are in “fight or flight” mode that make us feel energised, so that we can continue to fight or flee until the danger is past. When we are building our business, we are in fact in flight mode. We’re running away from the danger of not having enough money to support ourselves and our family. As a result, we do whatever we can to relieve that fear of failure.

The challenge is that in business, that fear never really goes away. There is always an inherent risk when you own and run a business that tomorrow could be your last day. What if your team don’t turn up, your best customer leaves you, or a vital piece of machinery breaks down?  There is always something to worry about, and thus our brains tell us to keep on running. If we do not change this thought pattern, then we are destined to work ourselves into divorce, breakdown or an early grave.

Work SMARTER, not HARDER

The key is to stop DOING, and start THINKING. The title of this article is “How to get 12 hours of work into 5 hours per day.”  Now, I’m not offering some magical time management tool to achieve this. Instead, I want to help you remove 7 hours of work from your day that you should not be doing. That’s all very well, you may say, but what work should I remove, and how do I actually do it?

Well, the what and how are set out below.

According to Stephen Covey (Author of “7 Habits of Highly Successful People”) there are 4 types of work that business people do:

  1. Not important and not urgent – this is a Distraction;
  2. Not important but urgent – this gives the Delusion that we are making progress;
  3. Important and urgent – this is a Demand on our time;
  4. Important and not urgent – here you are in the Zone and working most effectively.

So the first thing you need to identify is what is important in your business. The only way to do this is to have clear goals and plans for what you want to achieve over the coming days, weeks, months and years. Without these, you are doomed to fail before you start, as you just don’t know what you need to be focusing your time and attention on.

Get into The Zone

Once you know what is important to your business success, you need to review everything you have on your “to do” list, and decide whether each of these tasks is helping you achieve your goals. If not, don’t do it! Bear in mind the 4 types of task listed above:

  • Not important and not urgent – these distractions should be ignored, or delegated to somebody else.
  • Not important but urgent – this is where other people’s priorities are higher than yours. To deal with these issues, you have to get better at saying NO, and teach people to solve their own problems.
  • Important and urgent – there will always be these demands on your time. However, if there are patterns and the same issues repeating time after time, then there’s a problem.  Here you need to put in a system that enables the issues to be resolved before they become urgent. Better still, allow others to deal with them.
  • Important and not urgent – this is where you are planning the strategies that will enable you to achieve your goals. Spend your 5 hours each day being in the zone, as this is the most valuable work there is. After all, it is why you set up the business in the first place! Working ON your business will enable you to start your journey to greater success and fulfilment.

So now you know how to get 12 hours of work into 5 hours per day by focusing on what is important for the success of your business. If you need help in identifying what is important, setting goals, developing action plans, delegating or systematising your business, then do talk to us!