Value Your Time: How to Prioritize, Delegate, and Make Every Minute Count

Welcome to Profits Through Podcasting, the show for entrepreneurs with podcasts who want to monetize by generating leads and profits for their business from podcasting. I’m your host, joel Oliver, ceo of East Coast Studio. If we were to look back at a breakdown of how you spent every single minute for the last week, what would we find? Would there be anything shocking like an hour of Instagram scrolling every day, a couple hours of TV before bed? What about a dozen hours spent doing tasks that really should have been outsourced? Or perhaps even less obvious things like the time that you lose by multitasking or having to stop and start tasks because you’re getting distracted by your email or phone notifications? Time wasting comes in many different forms. They can be very obvious to very subtle. It can even be perfectionism, where you end up with diminishing returns. You spent hours of additional time making something just right and you really didn’t get any added benefit. It was probably fine the way it was and you really didn’t get any added benefit. It was probably fine the way it was.

However, time-wasting manifests for you. It’s something that we, as entrepreneurs, really need to be mindful of. We have to be extremely protective over our time, because it’s the one thing we can never make more of and we can never get back If, at the end of every day, you end up thinking, uh-oh, another day is gone, but I barely made a dent in my to do list. Well, in this episode is for you, because today I want to remind you about the importance of valuing your time and what we can do to make every single second count, squeeze the most out of every day, maximize your business returns and ultimately, live the life that you want. This is something I’ve been personally thinking about a lot lately and, as a business owner, I’m sure you can relate. You’ve got all these ideas and things that you want to do. You want to research, learn about, execute on, but every day it’s, like I said, that list doesn’t seem to get any shorter, because you’re just caught up running the business. You’re replying to emails, you’re working on projects probably for not enough money, and this is all keeping you from doing things that you know you need to be doing to grow your business and your revenue and get more freedom. And that’s just in the business side of things, right. So a big consideration when it comes to recognizing the value of your time is opportunity cost. That is, essentially the cost of choosing one option over all other available alternatives. So anytime you make a decision to do something with your time, you decided not to do something else or a variety of other things, and that could be good or that could be bad, depending on the decision and the situation.

We want to be doing the things that are going to bring us the best ROI, and only we can do right. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. What should I be spending my time on? The things that are going to make me the most money and make the business succeed the most, or other things that are going to make it succeed less? Right? Pretty obvious once you think about it.

As an example, I had an open heart surgery in 2018. And while I did have some limited interactions with the surgeon beforehand those men and women they are very, very prized. Okay, they’re not calling me to schedule the appointment. They’re not the ones ordering supplies or setting up the operating room. They are not helping with the recovery or bringing me food. But the surgeons have a very specific job and doing things this way lets them maximize the use of their skills and help as many people in need as possible. You know, through that process, I had to have interacted with at least a dozen it has to be more than that, I would think, actually, but at least that many other health care staff, from the people at the check-in desk to nurses, rehab therapists, anesthesiologists, guys wheeling me around on a bed, my own cardiologist.

You should be running your business this way. Okay, think of yourself as the surgeon, and if you’re not doing it like that, now that should be the goal. This is a really important consideration, especially if you often find yourself saying I got to do that myself or no, I can’t get someone else to do that because they just wouldn’t do it right, I’ll just do it. You’re never going to get where you want to be with that kind of thinking. Okay, I guarantee it. It’s impossible to scale, it’s impossible to have enough time. So the opportunity cost is a big reason here to put the value of your time in context.

But also consider if you are pressed for time. That can bring more stress and anxiety. It can lead you to make bad decisions. It can lead to burnout. It can take up time from other meaningful things in life. Hopefully now we’ve established why your time is valuable and the importance of setting things up so you can be operating at a high level yet not feeling stressed. I’m not really sharing anything groundbreaking here, but I know over time, if we’re not reminded of certain things, we can just tend to forget. Maybe some bad habits creep in or return. We just don’t realize that time wasting activities have popped up. So it’s good to take a step back and really look at what’s going on, how you’re spending the time each day.

One thing that crosses my mind a lot is seeing what other people are up to, and that’s like, whether you know I have a friend who is reading a book a week this year, something I’d love to do. I don’t have the time. I usually opt for summaries on YouTube. Actually, it seems more efficient, but there’s all kinds of things people are doing and things you could be doing, learning new skills. Whatever your goals and aspirations are in life, you know I keep seeing those shuffle dancing videos and I think and I want to do that are in life. You know I keep seeing those shuffle dancing videos and I think I want to do that.

I go to the gym five or six times a week. I’m trying to walk or run every day. There’s things to do around the house? I like karaoke. I’d love to sing better. There are other hobbies I’d like to enjoy. I want to learn to play chess.

Like there’s no shortage of things that pile up that a person would love to do. They’re vying for your time and attention, but you just can’t really do it all. We can’t. We need to think what is really really the most important to us, what are the things that are gonna get you the best results possible? You’ve gotta pick. In business, that is gonna be like we talked about the 10X activities. I’ll call them the ones that are gonna bring you the most revenue, bring you the most freedom. They’re really going to make an impact.

And in your personal life, well, yeah, we got to have some time to decompress and enjoy some hobbies. It’s up to each of us to decide what is a waste of time and what’s useful. So, in your personal life, that’s up to you what you spend your time on, what brings you enjoyment, what downtime you need for your own mental health and that can go further to like who you want to spend time with. Are you spending time with people who are bringing value to your life and helping you grow? Are you afraid to say no to social invitations even though you really don’t want to go to a particular one. That’s time. That’s something you could have done in your business. You could have made money in that time, but you didn’t because you couldn’t say no. So don’t be ashamed, don’t be afraid to protect your time. You’re not going to get it back and there’s going to be lots of things and people that would love to take it from you.

Now, business wise, well, you need to assess what you are spending your time on, see what things could be potentially outsourced and delegated, and then what things you must personally do. Look into the Eisenhower matrix or Pareto principle to help categorize tasks and get you thinking. What is actually making an impact in your business? And also consider your business goals. Get clear on those. Look at the ROI of certain activities. When it comes to things like marketing, you can’t do everything and do a good job of it all, like. Maybe you need to only pick a couple of social media platforms to be on as a start and really look at where you’re trying to go in your business and if you are wasting time, even if it’s not you, even if it’s someone you’ve delegated a task to is that task really going to move the needle and bring you big results in the business? Ok, I’m not here to go through the ins and outs of how to do this, the prioritizing and how to run your business. There are so many other great resources out there for that. I’m just here to remind you how important this stuff is. So get into the habit of always thinking about what you’re doing at any given moment and see if that’s useful or wasteful. I find awareness is a key first step. You’re always going to notice what you’re doing with your time. You’re going to realize hey wait, this is not being productive. This is complete waste. I’m on Facebook right now.

I’d like to add as well an example of something that came up for us, because these things can be hiding in places you might not even be thinking of or considering that are a waste of time. But I’ll share this one. It was unqualified leads booking sales calls with us. Now I personally find the preparation and switching gears to do calls takes a lot of time for me. It’s kind of an interruption to my day. Yes, it’s necessary to the business.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I don’t want to do the calls, but it’s like it’s a different frame of mind. I got to prepare, I got to make sure everything is set up and looking good, so the calls we would be getting. Maybe I’d show up to the call and find out the other person doesn’t have any money, or they were just there for some free tech support because they saw a blog article on our website, or maybe they didn’t even show up. This is a huge waste of time, so we had to try to address that. But every business is going to have its own challenges. That’s why you need to look at your own situation.

I just wanted to share one there to give you an idea of how to be thinking about these things, because it could be things that you’re not even aware of at this point that are actually wasting your time or you could be doing in a more efficient manner and, if you find it helpful, there are even apps that you can actually use to track your time and see what you’re doing with every moment of each day. Like. It does require you to log what you’re doing, but you can go back after a few days or a week or however long you like and see some pretty cool information about what you’ve been doing with all your time Very useful, especially if you feel like your time is just every day is just disappearing. So now that we’ve looked at prioritizing and we’re aware of how you spend time, as one of the solutions, let’s get into delegation and outsourcing. This is key the idea of delegating tasks so your time is freed up for the most high-impact activities in your business. To get started here consider your own strengths and weaknesses, see what is eating up a lot of your time and consider the impact that those activities are having on your business. Is it a big impact or very small, and how much time is that taking? You’ll also want to think about the cost of outsourcing versus doing it yourself. Just because it can be outsourced doesn’t necessarily mean it should be or has to be. It depends on the ROI, and you also don’t necessarily have to outsource all these things to other people. You can consider what technology and automation might be available as well, or if the certain tasks are even necessary.

Now, as we near the end of the episode, I do want to talk about podcasting briefly. Having help with podcasting is hugely valuable because it’s relatively easy to outsource and get nice processes in place, even with the most efficient podcast setup. Oftentimes if I do have somebody come to me saying, listen, I’m getting burned out from podcasting, it’s just taking too much time. This is typically because they’ve struggled to give up control and they’re just still making things too complicated. And you know that’s well within a podcaster’s right. But I can tell you from firsthand experience it often leads to problems, and I know I’m a bit of a perfectionist myself, so I get it. But particularly with podcasters who insist on, say, writing out a page of tiny little edits or things they want removed, that always leads to trouble.

And what I’ve seen work best is where the podcast host is just focusing on the recordings, some pre-preparation. Whether it’s a solo or interview style podcast, yes, they’ve got to get some things ready. They’ve got to be familiar with the points they want to talk about, they’ve got to do the actual recording, maybe even a little guest outreach if they really are honed in on who they want to be speaking to. But that’s kind of it in terms of a podcast host. Aside from that, they either have an assistant who helps send the assets over to us for editing. We send everything back. The assistant then maybe does some guest follow-up to say, hey, the episode is published and puts everything out on social media, but otherwise we pretty much do it all in the case of our clients.

If you are a podcaster and you’re spending four or five hours editing your own episodes because no one else can do it and you got to do it just right, I really challenge you to think about that, because I highly doubt you’re ever going to see a proper ROI from doing it that way, versus doing it a way where you get some help with it and you spend a fifth of the time on it. Also, I encourage you, if you haven’t heard it, listen back to the episode we did recently on maximizing ROI from podcasting to hear how to make the most of the time that you do put into your podcast, because you can have a whole bunch of other content created from just doing the podcast recording, and we want to be thinking about that as well when we are talking about time efficiency. Podcasting definitely has great benefits given the time horizon to do its thing, but it definitely takes a bit of time and effort from you. Even if you’ve outsourced everything, there’s going to be a little bit of work that you’ve got to do, but, like with anything, if it’s worth doing, it’s going to take some time.

There’s no simple solution to anything to growing your audience, growing your business, getting people listening to a podcast.

There’s only so much you can do to be efficient and optimize.

And if you’re doing a podcast, you yep, you’ve got to be there, you’ve got to show up and do the recording or do the interview.

But besides that, the important thing is focusing on what you should be doing and then delegating everything else. So if you are podcasting and you are committed to it, but you feel like you’re doing way too much work, I would suggest that’s a great first step to freeing up time so you can work on the more important things in your business while benefiting from having a great podcast with an engaged audience. You can have the benefits of a podcast, but you don’t need to be spending a ton of hours on it every single time. Ok, it should be pretty streamlined and efficient in terms of what you need to do. Join us again next time on profits through podcasting for more tips on how to turn your podcast into a lead and revenue generation machine for your business and if you’re ready to let a team of professionals handle your entire podcast production workflow so you can focus on the most important tasks in your business. Visit eastcoaststudiocom slash apply.