Yaro is a serial entrepreneur, blogger, podcaster, angel investor and digital nomad.
Once on a podcast Tim Ferriss was asked to describe what his day is like.
His answer was deceptively simple…
“I spend most of my time thinking.”
I’m paraphrasing here, but this was the general message.
He didn’t talk about tasks or goals or morning routines or anything specific.
He went on to explain…
“I think a lot because I only make a few key decisions each year. I spend my time being sure I make the right decisions.”
Tim has a lot of money and is already successful, so you may not feel walking around thinking all day is a good choice for you too.
On calls with coaching clients I frequently explain the 80/20 Rule and how it can guide your daily actions.
Much like Tim focuses on a few key decisions each year, I want to be sure the few key actions I do each day lead to what I want.
For many people, the actions they do each day are reactionary to whatever is coming at them.
As an employee, that’s fine.
As an entrepreneur, it can kill your business.
I am very conscious of my work style. I can’t focus for 8 hours of work time (I am unemployable!).
I function better with two to three bursts of work per day, interspersed with other things like gym, cooking, eating, walking, time with people, etc.
This means in terms of pure hours worked, I don’t put in an 8 hour day.
Hence I better be sure what I work on matters.
For many years with my teaching business, the one thing that mattered most was creating content.
Every day I focused on creating a blog post and/or an email newsletter.
Sometimes I recorded a podcast or content for a product.
Today I still focus on content, like this post I am writing now, but also a lot of my work time goes into creation of ad media.
To put it simply, most of my life as an entrepreneur has been spent on some version of marketing.
The reason I can spend almost all of my time on marketing is because the businesses I’ve built have people and systems doing everything else.
Client services and support are delivered by my team.
If I had to do client onboarding, service delivery, respond to support queries, and even basic things like admin tasks, bookkeeping, replying to emails etc, I’d never have time for growth.
It’s nice to be in a position to focus on the one or two most important things each day, or like Tim, only a few key decisions each year.
This is only an option when you have people helping you, or you’ve already made it financially.
Once you have the cash flow to begin thinking about hiring help, one of the highest impact steps an entrepreneur can do is to bring on board an executive assistant.
You task them with the ‘busy’ work, the tasks that take you away from the ‘productive work’ that would actually grow your business.
This can include replying to emails, customer support, social media replies, task management, scheduling and admin.
Once you delegate these tasks you free up as much 50 hours per month for you to devote to growth.
50 hours is a lot of time you could spend on key 80/20 activities.
In my case, my current activities are all around lead generation. For example:
- Coming up with ideas for new ad media for our campaigns on LinkedIn
- Coordinating with our video and graphics team to make those ads
- Hiring a specialist to take over our Google Ads (and eventually LinkedIn ads too)
- Strategizing content blocks for a new landing page that will present our service offer in a new way
This list doesn’t include answering emails from our clients, or dealing with an invoice from a contractor, or coordinating a meeting between our staff. Other people do these things for me.
The key to growth as the leader of your company is to do the things that make your company grow.
Duh!
If you’re doing other things that don’t contribute to that goal, it won’t happen.
Yaro
P.S. If you’re ready to hand over the busy tasks, my company InboxDone.com can provide you with two executive assistants who have systems ready to deploy in your business to take over emails, scheduling, task management and more.
Take this step today so tomorrow you can focus on the few tasks that matter most.
