You’ve Lost Thousands of Dollars by Not Valuing Your Time

Far too many clinicians, doctors, and online health and wellness entrepreneurs who are billing one, two, or $300 an hour have told me. I’ll just do that myself. When it comes to 10, 20, or $30 an hour tasks, this attitude can lead to the loss of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue over the years, and you may be familiar with the saying, when you’re an entrepreneur.

In the beginning, you have lots of time and no money, but then later you have lots of money and no time. How this saying applies to your situation is gonna depend on where you are in your journey, but no matter what, this is a conversation that we need to have. We need to talk about what your time is worth and how it applies to growing your podcast, and in turn, your health and wellness business.

This is profits through podcasting. I’m your host, Joel Oliver. So being in a business where we help lighten workloads for busy entrepreneurs with podcasts, I often watch people who are facing that conundrum of what can I afford to delegate and outsource versus what do I have to do on my own? But too often they’re thinking of this only in a dollar spent perspective and not a time perspective, and certainly not an opportunity cost perspective.

And that’s what I wanna highlight for you today and talk about what is your time worth. As I mentioned upfront with that saying, in the early stages of entrepreneurship, of course it’s a different story, but once you’re further on the path, which is what we’re talking about today, you’ve got money coming in, things are stable, we’re trying to grow and expand.

You’re starting to feel like you’re too busy. That’s when we really need to be assessing. What can I delegate? And how can I save time in order to focus on the most important tasks in my business that are gonna actually make a difference rather than low level things? I hear these things all the time, but a recent one that comes to mind was a business owner in the health and wellness space who owned a practice and they were doing a service for generally a couple hundred bucks an hour.

That’s what they were billing, and as we discussed working together, he told me, well, my goal would be to get the podcast up and running and then learn how to do it all myself and take on the editing and everything else, and I asked why? Why is that your plan? You’re in a medical profession, you’re able to book appointments for 200 bucks an hour.

Right now, you’re doing that regularly. And you want to sit in your office at night and edit a podcast, which you have no knowledge about doing at this point. It’s not your area of expertise. You’ll have to learn it. You could be with your family instead or working on something else in the business that would help it grow.

Not that the podcast wouldn’t help it grow, but it’s not the best use of his time. He can delegate that. So yeah, I asked, why would you really want to do that when you can just outsource this for an affordable cost and get onto something else? Right? He was not in that beginner level of entrepreneurship or starting his practice.

Things were going fine. So it just, it doesn’t make sense. And another conversation recently I had with someone in a similar situation, this was a doctor and they told me, this is sort of unrelated to podcasting, told me that they enjoy making things in Canva. I don’t hate using Canva either, but as a CEO of a company, should I be doing that?

When you can outsource it for such a small amount of money, just doesn’t make sense. There’s so many other things that I should be doing in a day than using Canva. And then, although I don’t hate the idea of making an image in there, I’m pretty frustrated whenever I am in Canva because I’m thinking, why am I doing this?

If there’s some reason that I ended up in there at that moment. It’s not the best use of my time, let’s put it that way. Okay, so if one of those stories reminded you of yourself, let’s start here by understanding what your time is worth. You can do the calculation with your own numbers. So a rough way to do this is divide your annual earnings right now by the number of hours that you work.

So say earn 200 KA year, you work 40 hours a week. It’s about a hundred dollars an hour. And that’s a good number to work with as a base anyway, if you’re not there it’s a good reasonable goal. At least in the near term. We should be at least doing that, right, as entrepreneurs. But, okay.

Everyone’s situation is different, but work with me here. Let’s just go with those numbers. Okay? So Now, think of all the things that you do that would cost less than this amount of money.

Per hour to outsource. And it doesn’t even have to just be in the business. Think about grocery shopping and the time that you spend doing chores, or if you are cleaning and things like that. It all adds up. But especially within your business, things that you think, I’ll just do that myself, this can add up.

And it certainly for the most part, a lot of it. That you don’t need to do can be delegated, outsourced, automated for much less than it would cost of your time.

Something very important that I want to highlight next is how seemingly small tasks add up. They waste massive amounts of time, and then in turn you lose tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over time. Now, personally, I have always struggled with delegation. I will admit that, but recently I’ve made it my mission to change that as I have come to value my time more.

And just realize that if we want to grow this business and wanna be doing the right things, you’ve got to get over this. You’ve got to delegate. There’s only so much time in a day. No more of these low level tasks, it just can’t be done. Okay. And once I started really trying to shift into this mindset is when I really realized how much time I was losing.

I just had no idea. ’cause you’re just thinking, I’ll just do that. I’ll do that. It’s easier for me to do that. It’s too complicated to delegate that when you really look at it and add it all up. It’s. It’s quite a lot. Okay, so now at this point, one thing that I have is an assistant and just being able to message her and say, Hey, could you make up something like this image here I found, or give her a rough idea of what I want.

And she can do that in Canva. She’ll get back to me with some options here. What do you think? And I can say that’s perfect. Or how about we tweak this maybe dive in and make one or two tweaks myself. But that’s about it. And it’s so much more efficient than doing it all on my own. Even just having a bit of research done.

Could you check on this or see what the best options are for something? And she’ll present me with some ideas. I just don’t have to sit there. All that stuff adds up. Even looking on Amazon for a product, you think that’s quick, but then you realize a half an hour went by and then there was task switching time, which I’m gonna talk more about. So it’s huge, right? Like me, you may think you weren’t really spending too much time on things like this, but once you actually delegate and you don’t even have to think about them anymore, you’re gonna be amazed at just how clear your days can actually feel and how much focus you have. When you have just a set list of the biggest things that you have to do, not a bunch of other things distracting you, it’s great.

You’ll see how much more you can get done. The things that actually matter, and you’ll see those results compounding and the results in your business are getting better because you’re focusing on what is most important, right? The results all come with this when you’re not wasting your time with a bunch of little tasks. And the issue of task switching that I briefly mentioned, that’s lost time and reduced efficiency By changing what you’re doing. You might think that a task takes 10 minutes, but it takes the brain time to refocus. Studies show it can waste 20 to 40% of productive time can lead to mistakes.

It takes longer to get things done. It’s harder to engage the brain in deep, high quality work if you’re changing around all the time or having. Little things that you need to pay attention to or give some time to. It’s not just 10 minutes, I guarantee you that. Okay. I feel so much better looking at my to-do list for the day and having just a few big important things.

I didn’t spend two hours doing a bunch of junk. That it didn’t need to be. Do you ever start your day? This happened to me all the time where I just, I start the day, I sit down, I’m ready to work, I’m doing stuff. I’m doing stuff. Two hours later, I just think, why was I doing this whole time? I didn’t get anything done because the big things that I wanted to do that day, or the big items on my to-do list, I don’t know.

They’re still there. I haven’t touched them at all, but somehow I wasted two hours. Those are the types of things I’m talking about, and that can eat up a lot more than a couple of hours a day. Okay, so we need to shift our mentality into protecting our time and understanding exactly what our time is worth.

I mentioned at the start, too often I see this stuff considered from a purely dollar perspective. You know, I don’t want to pay someone to order my groceries. I can do that. I don’t want to pay someone to edit my podcast. I can learn how to do that. I can make things in Canva. I can do that. Sure, it technically costs money you are paying, but what is the opportunity cost?

What are you paying in these other ways where you’re losing all this time? What could you have accomplished with an extra two hours a day? If you just paid someone $40 to handle those tasks instead, what could you have turned those two hours a day into? Think about that. Across a week, let’s call it 10 hours, and then after a month, this is significant time.

That seems like nothing if you don’t actually dig in and look at what’s going on, right? What could you have accomplished if you spent that time developing systems in your business and allowed yourself to further delegate? Right. So a lot of times when you start to delegate, you think, well, it’s gonna take too much time to develop the system or teach someone how to do this.

Not really. It’s a thing you do. Once you refine that a bit, they help you refine it, you work out the kinks, and then you’re done and you’ve got that off your plate for good. Now, if you do that over and over and you’ve got a whole bunch of things delegated and scaled now, now you’re really cooking, and that’s how this time, this, the time savings become exponential.

But if you don’t do it, you’re just stuck. Forever, right? As well. If you put the time into perhaps meeting and networking, connecting with bigger and bigger podcast guests, getting yourself more appearances on other bigger notable shows, now think of the exponential results you’re getting from that.

Because instead of reaching small audiences every time, you’re reaching much bigger audiences. And what would your additional revenue be after a few years if you started thinking like this and applying this in your business and to your podcast? Because like I said, it’s all exponential. This is massive. When you’re able to work on the business instead of just slogging within the business, you can focus on the things that help you grow instead of just staying afloat, staying above water. This can be the difference between tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars over time, it really does add up and it’s something to take very seriously.

Let’s just think about this in the opposite way for a moment. Let’s say a doctor. Tries to edit their own podcast after a few weeks. So they start, they try to edit on their own after a few weeks. They haven’t paid anyone to do it, but they’ve been more stressed. They didn’t actually spend the time. Trying to double their bookings and up their prices and provide more value to their clients.

Now at this point, maybe they’ve gotta stop podcasting because it’s taking too much time. And now instead of trying to build up that audience to 5,000 listeners over the next few years and building a million dollar business around it, they’re just kind of stuck doing what they’ve always done.

They’re tired, they’re frustrated, they’re not sure, how do I escape this? How come I can’t grow my business? Why is this not working? Well, they refuse to delegate. They refuse to get help. Once you start delegating, things will change, but you’ve got to make that leap. Since doing this, not only have I had all the benefits that I’ve talked about here, but I am seeing those results in the business. More leads, more calls, more conversations. All of these things, I’ve been able to spend the time on everything that, the activities that lead to this stuff. So it only makes sense if I’m able to spend more time on LinkedIn, sending connection requests and starting more conversations and meeting people, building relationships, of course I’m gonna see that I’m, I’m gonna see this all reflected in more calls and more revenue for the business and all these nice things. I’m spending more time talking to our marketing person and implementing what she tells us.

Higher level stuff, more one-off stuff that I don’t necessarily need to delegate or we’re not at the stage two delegate yet, but at the very least, getting those smaller tasks off my plate so then I can move up to the next thing. Right. But even better would be, yes, getting contractors to delegate some of these things to which I have.

Some of it, that’s a really great feeling. You know, when we’ve delegated our marketing, I have time to help to focus on that and work with this marketing person on it. She tells me, go do this, and I can go to someone else and say, Hey, could you do this? Then we’re, that’s just a great feeling, and as I said, you see the results coming out in the business, right?

That’s really the ultimate proof that this works. So if you’re spending time on low value tasks, that has to change and you’re gonna thank yourself once you see the results. It can feel, as I mentioned briefly, it can feel overwhelming upfront to develop those systems and seek out the quality help, because that’s a whole thing in itself is how do I even document this properly and teach someone else to do it?

How do I avoid mistakes being made? How do we deal with mistakes? All that kind of stuff. But it’s gonna be worth it. For sure. And in the context of podcasting and what we do at East Coast Studio, we even eliminate that problem. Really that pain of finding the right help and delegating. ’cause you don’t have to design the systems and the SOPs, right?

It’s a turnkey solution. You bring us the podcast recordings, we do everything else, and that’s our goal. Right. We want it to be that simple. So overnight you can free up time and depending on what else you need help with, there are other turnkey style solutions out there as well. For things like marketing and social media management where the requirement from you is very minimal.

You pay them, they do a great job. You’re gonna have to supervise to some extent, but it is definitely easier than having to go and develop all of your own SOPs and systems, which you can’t avoid that completely, but it’s just something to think about when you assess what to delegate and how to actually delegate it. Like what is the right solution? So with that said, I’ve got a couple of action items for you that I would like you to implement, try out and start moving down this path of delegating.

Your low level tasks more efficiently within your business. So for the next week, try tracking all of your tasks with a time tracking tool. I’m not a fan of doing this forever, but I like doing it for evaluation just to see where we’re at, get a baseline and get an idea of just where most of your time is going, and more importantly, how much is being wasted.

So whatever time tracking tool you want, find out what you’re spending your time on through the course of a week. Then calculate the worth of your time and with all the data that you collect over the weeks, start to determine which of the tasks there you can delegate, which are the ones that are just not worth your time to be doing and are the easiest to start having somebody else do some you could just eliminate entirely.

That’s another important consideration. It’s not only the delegation and automation, but what do I just not need to be doing here? What is not getting me results? If you’ve been doing something the same for a long time and it seems like nothing’s working well. Don’t necessarily give it up, but it’s a good time to evaluate.

Is this doing anything? Am I doing it right? Should I learn how to do this better? Okay, so start with the easiest, most practical things to delegate and then work your way down the list. Another thing I want you to think about and perhaps do if you find it’s useful to you, is block out specific times in your day for certain types of work.

Yeah, and you may know that work can shrink or expand to fill the amount of time available. So be cognizant that you’re not thinking that you’re working product productively, and in fact you’re not. I’ve definitely been guilty of this over the years where I feel like I’m at the computer all day, I’m getting some stuff done, but if you actually broke it down, especially say towards the end of the day.

We’re just getting more tired your brain is getting fatigued. The actual productivity there is not very good. Like maybe I spent eight hours doing stuff that should have only taken five. And that’s not good either. So we want to be aware of that. And if you block out times and say, these two hours, I’m doing this, I’m closing my email.

I’m not gonna be distracted every five minutes by a text message or an email. Remember, task switching. All this inefficiency and time wasting. I’m just gonna do this. No distractions. Have your glasss of water or coffee at your desk. You don’t have to get up. Just get that stuff done. I guarantee you’ll start squeezing a lot more.

Out of your days once you begin to think about this delegation stuff and being more efficient with your own time. So consider that as well time blocks throughout your day and as well as we wrap up the episode here, if podcast editing has been taking up a big amount of your time, whether you’re doing it yourself or you have some kind of other solution in place that’s not really working great, or you’re curious if things could be done more efficiently, you know where to find me.