How to get 40+ EXTRA hours in your week.
Want more free time in your week? Try these tips and watch your time multiply! We go over exactly what you need to do to get 40+ more hours for things like family time, dream time, and sales time. Make 20% more sales by organizing your schedule so it works for YOUR CUSTOMER.
- Protecting "Sacred Time"
- "Early Bird Gets the Worm"... right?
- Actually USE a Calendar!
- Avoiding Distractions
- Planning a Dream Day
- Setting Aside Purposeful Time With Loved Ones
1. Create & Protect Your “Sacred Time”
Now let me get into the 40 extra hours fast, I know everybody wants to know that. One of the things I have here is protect your time. Start things off by protecting your time every morning from 6:00am – 9:00am. Call this your “sacred time” and you will immediately get 21 additional hours in your week (count it out). It sounds TOO simple, but let me explain:
When I started Blink I would get up & work from around 6:00am in the morning to 9:00am in the morning, then till 5:00pm in the evening I would make phone calls to get new clients.
Then I would work from 5:00pm in the evening until midnight and then start that cycle over. And during that “sacred time” in the morning, I would do the production i need to get done for the next day. There is a very real reason for waking up at 6am every day:
2. The Early Bird Really DOES Get The Worm
There is an old saying that “The early bird gets the worm” and “successful people wake up early” and all that. Well, here’s how I translate these into today’s terms.
Between 6:00am in the morning and 9:00am generally speaking, no one needs you. No one is bugging you. No one is calling you. Yes, emails can come in, but generally they don’t, because most people aren’t at work yet. So you can protect that time and absolutely get heaps of work done early, which is important.
3. Actually USE Your Digital Calendar
When we are talking about protecting “blocks” of your time, these should be actually loaded in as events in your digital calendar so that when you are scheduling stuff, you see the conflict. When you set a meeting with someone, quickly add it to the calendar IMMEDIATELY. Get into the habit of logging EVERYTHING and you will NEVER ask “what do i need to be doing next” again.
4. Avoid Distractions That Are Costing You TONS Money $$$
When you’re hustling every day of the week trying to build your business, here is something that I did to help keep the cash coming in: I subscribe to the 80-20 rule. 80% of what you do every day should be focused on money NOW (immediate returns on actions, for example like making sales calls and getting paid clients). The other 20% is focusing on growing the company into what you want/dream for it to be. When you’re trying to get that extra 20% which is also part of working on your dreams, it’s very, very difficult to find that.
So when I talk about “Sacred Time”, this is also time that you get to work on what you want to work on. By the way, that’s how this platform format came about, that’s how I started side time to build these kinds of things. And what’s so important about that is if you start your day that way, like I said before generally people don’t bug you and don’t need you. BUT you’re ALSO working on what you want to work on. You’re working on your passion. So that passion, that focus, can’t help but bleed into the rest of your day. That’s why I say if you are a “night owl” become a “morning person” instead, and see what starting your day out with accomplishment does for you and your business.
5. Dream Day: Purposeful Time to Work On Your Dreams & Passions
The next big thing you need to do (I dedicate about 15 hours for this) is plan a regular dream day. I take Fridays and we work on the future of the business. That is the time that we think about what we need to do next, and by the time … By the way, a lot of my early morning protective time and my dream time are similar projects. We don’t stop enough in today’s world because we’re stuck working in the business to work on our futures. And I believe that you do need to spend a lot of time on now-money-now, but you absolutely have to spend time on future. That’s the only way to progress. And if you’re JUST doing futures, you’re out of balance with your revenue. If you’re just doing now-money-now you’re out of balance with your growth. See how that works?
And so we’d like to take Fridays and make that dream time where we work on our futures and that typically naturally, especially for me, bleeds into my Saturdays just because I don’t want to STOP.
6. Set Aside Purposeful Time with Loved Ones
I wanted to do purposeful time with my oldest daughter as she was growing up. So I went to her school every Friday and had lunch with her IN HER ENVIRONMENT. That really made up for a lot of time that originally my business activities had absorbed. And what’s great about that is that she felt loved (her words), and she felt like it was purposeful. A lot of people when they try to spend time with their kids, they do it half minded. They’re thinking of other things or just squeeze the kids in when they can (and it’s obvious). When you look at this family time and go to their environment/turf, it’s purposeful time and you don’t have to spend a whole lot amount-wise, you just have to make it purposeful. What we’ve grown that into today is we generally have theme nights.
- Monday night used to be Minecraft night, now it’s Virtual Reality Night.
- Tuesdays are movie nights.
- Wednesdays are “Justin & Me blow stuff up on video games” nights.
- Thursdays are kind of a free for all, and so are Saturdays & Sundays.
Every evening, we have something that we have planned with the family and that allows me to go out to the world and concentrate on what I need to do. So there, right there guys. I will tell you right there you got over the 40 hours that we told you that you can get ALL WHILE HONORING your family, passions, and finances.
Thank you Ruke for breaking down your weekly schedule. Time is so important…I am seeing a better way as a CEO to recalibrate my activities and receive another 40 hours of quality time needed…ALL WHILE HONORING my family, passions, and finances.