Time Management Tips to Grow Your Business – Racheal Cook MBA

Hey there CEO’s, this post marks the third of a LIVE Uncomplicate Your Business podcast mini-series especially released to help you set yourself up for a successful summer.

Once the school year ends and beach weather begins, it’s easy to get distracted and lose momentum and maybe even revenue in your business. And while you may have the good habits to keep working IN your business {queuing social posts, responding to emails, serving current clients, etc)… what about the big picture?

How do you get the dedicated time to work ON your business?

Here are 5 time management tips to help you build more CEO time into your business::

Time Management Tip #1:: Get Clear on Your Goals!

All this begins with a Mid-Year Review. This is my favorite pre-summer practice to help set oneself up for fall. If you haven’t gotten YOUR FREE copy of the workbook yet, you can grab it right here::

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What I mean here is goals that you have 100% control over. You can keep your revenue goals and your list-building goals, but your focus needs to be on things you can directly and actively control:

You know that these big picture ideas would be game changers in your business… suddenly you’d open up new revenue streams, reach and serve more people, and finally be working smarter.

Ask Yourself:: What are my actionable business goals this summer? What can I accomplish now, to support my revenue and list goals come fall?

Time Management Tip #2:: What Are Your Summer Hours?

A practice I first saw implemented by my father in his business was the idea of setting summer hours. We lived by the ocean and he and his employees all had their own families. He designed his summer hours to allow everyone to be able to focus 100% on family and work without putting strain or distraction on any of their time.

It’s time to DESIGN your days and weeks to help you make that shift from overwhelmed to fired up! That’s where the Model Calendar comes in.

A Model Calendar is my hands-down favorite strategy of all time to consciously design your week around what matters most, to you. And I’m not the only one who believes in this approach – Pat Flynn and Michael Hyatt share their experiences using this strategy to create more balance between hours they dedicate to their business and the time they prioritize for themselves, their families, and their health.

The biggest key to designing a model calendar that works for you is keeping it structured enough to create a container for your work hours and flexible enough to adjust to the needs of your business and your life.

Building a biz while working a job? You can easily find 20 hours a week when you replace 3-4 hours of TV every night with a few hours of biz building plus 5 hours on Saturday mornings.

Busy mamapreneur with littles under 5? I found my work hours by waking up an hour earlier than my family, enrolling my twins in preschool for 3 hours a day, and asking my husband to take them to the park for a few hours when he got home from work.

Work better at night? You don’t have to be an early-bird to be successful – adapt to your own creative rhythms by working from 11-2 on your most creative work.

Ask Yourself:: What time to I have available to work on my business? What time makes the most sense given my lifestyle, my family and my own creative rhythms?

Time Management Tip #3:: Take Yourself on a CEO Date

One of the biggest reasons we never seem to find the time to upgrade our CEO habits is many of us – as overachieving perfectionists – tend to think in very ALL OR NOTHING terms.

We tend to think that if we want to write a book, we need to wait until the right time magically appears when we won’t have any other distractions and nothing but writing is on our calendars.

It just doesn’t happen that way. You’ve gotta carve out the time to map out your big picture projects so that when you do have an hour or two, you can make some decent progress towards your goals.

That’s exactly what a CEO Date allows you to accomplish. At a minimum, you should have a weekly CEO date to not just plan all the regular day-to-day tasks in your business, but to work on the bigger things that will move your business forward.

Your CEO Date is the perfect opportunity to map out that big launch, outline your new program, make a plan for an interview blitz. It’s so much easier to actually write the book when you start by mapping out all the chapters, then outline the chapter, then start filling in the gaps. Suddenly an overwhelming dream project becomes a manageable task that you can make time for!

Ask Yourself:: What is a big picture project you want to focus on for the next 90 days? Schedule your CEO date to map out all the steps and tasks to help you bring it to life!

Time Management Tip #4:: The Answer Is NO!

When most of us start out businesses, we say YES to everything. Want to speak to the local social media club? YES! Want to connect over coffee? YES! Wanna attend every networking event in town? YES!

And at the beginning – YES is essential. It gets you out there, talking to real live people.

But YES to everything is a scattershot approach to growing your business. When you say YES to everything, you have no strategy to decide what does or doesn’t makes sense for your business. You’re like an octopus on roller-skates, trying to do everything at the same time, but getting nowhere fast.

You don’t have to say NO to everything right away – but start paying attention to where you are saying YES too much.

A perfect example – my friend Denise Duffield Thomas found herself overwhelmed with interview requests that just weren’t a perfect fit for what she was creating in her business.

The solution? She created a dedicated page outlining her interview requirements, including preferred topics that fit into her zone of genius. Talking about money blocks? YES! Anything outside her scope as a Money Mentor – NO WAY. Brilliant.

Ask Yourself:: Where am I saying YES too often that just isn’t leading to results in my business – and how can I create clearer guidelines to what is a YES and what is a NO?

Time Management Tip #5:: Get Out of the Office!

I hope this inspired you to begin growing your business by DESIGN, not by default, by making time each and every week for the ideas that will move your business forward.

And if you loved this conversation, you’ll love joining me for The CEO Retreat – a 1-day strategic planning event focused on perfectly planning the next 90-days for your business.

If you know that you need to get your plan on paper, if you know that you need to surround yourself with other amazing supportive and intuitive women entrepreneurs, if you know that you need to turn your big picture into check-off-able action steps… the you will want to join us! Find all the details {and Early Bird Enrollment!} at RachealCook.com/CEO-Retreat.