Time To Get Control Of Your Time

By Jayme Broudy, Contractor’s Business School

Dear Jayme:
I’m so constantly busy but at the end of the day that I’ve barely kept up, let alone made any progress. My day is a series of distractions and interruptions that keep me from concentrating on the overall business, but if I don’t stay involved, everything stops. What can I do?
-Chris

Dear Chris:
The obvious answer is to eliminate the distractions without disabling the business, and that’s completely doable. Before we can eliminate the distractions though, we need to figure out what they are and how much time they’re consuming.

First, figure out your current situation.

Gather the data...

• Buy a pocket-sized calendar broken into quarter hours. This will be your constant companion for one week.

• Log everything you do from getting out of bed Monday AM until bedtime Sunday night. At the end of each day (bedtime) there must be no empty spaces. Include detail, i.e., “Phone call” isn’t as helpful as “Phone call to Louie about repairing the cement mixer”.

(This is a pain. Do it anyway. It’s only a week.)

Categorize your activities...

• Personal time: leisure, family time, lunch, non-business errands and calls, etc.

• Strategic work: Planning, high level decision-making, systems development, etc.

• Technical Owner’s Work: Operational stuff that no one else could possibly do.

• Technical Employee Work: Tasks that you could offload if you knew they’d be done right by others.

• Wasted: No real purpose, no payback.

• Total the hours for each.

Determine your real work week: Subtract your personal hours from 112 (16 waking hours X 7 days).

Analyze Your Work Time. What percentage is being spent on...

• Strategic work: An effective owner spends at least 60% of his time doing big-picture, long-range projects.

• Technical Owner’s Work: More than 20% and something’s wrong.

• Technical Employee’s Work: Culprit/Opportunity #1: Many owners spend a huge portion of their time doing the work of an employee.

• Time Wasters/Phantoms. Culprit/Opportunity #2: A few categories of these probably represent most of the total.

Speaking of home: What % of your waking hours are devoted to personal things? A 40 hour work week means about 2/3 personal time for you. 60 hours drops it to 46%. Is this in line with your priorities?

What to do...

• Build processes, get and train good people, and delegate. This is the single best thing you can do to both shake loose from the firefighting and start making real progress. Learn how to delegate effectively (solid processes run by capable people) and you can unload all of this with no loss of effectiveness or control. Delegation is a whole topic of its own. For more information ask me via our website.

• Eliminate the prime time wasters. You’ll never get rid of all of them, but every hour wasted is an hour at home you’ve lost.

• Do this exercise every quarter. Otherwise you’ll drift off track.

An owner usually has enough time but is using it in unproductive ways. You can be successful working 40 hours a week if you use that time properly. Many owners do this, but you don’t see them because they’re at home while you’re signing the checks and ordering the toilet paper.
Cheers!
Jayme

Jayme Broudy is the founder and principal of Contractor’s Business School® - a coaching, training and consulting firm specializing in helping contractors produce more profit in less time. Since 1993, Jayme has worked with hundreds of contractors in many specialty areas to build successful stand-alone businesses. Visit www.contractorsbusinessschool.com/assessment to complete a free Business Analysis, or call (800) 527-7545 to get the FREE CD "10 Key Strategies to Build a Business that Works."

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