Time is short when your list is long.
As entrepreneurs, our lists are very long.
We have to think about the long term and the short term, the vision and the daily tasks, and about a million other things that come along with building a business.
When your head is spinning and you feel overwhelmed, what’s at stake?
What’s at stake when you’re overwhelmed?
I had a conversation with a head-spinning overwhelmed entrepreneur yesterday.
He’s a very smart man, and he’s part of a very good online business that has helped many people in the niche. But no matter the level, we all need a little help sometimes.
So we hopped on a call.
After we talked for a few minutes about what we were supposed to talk about, we realized that there was a deeper problem. It’s a problem a lot of us can face, not matter how long we’ve been in business.
That problem: he didn’t have processes.
When you feel like you don’t have time, check your processes.
When you feel like you don’t have time to do everything, you’re right. You don’t have time to do everything.
There’s a difference between “doing everything” and “doing everything you need to be doing.”
What you need to be doing varies based on a lot of factors that might be unique to your business, your resources, and your current situation. But we’ve all got things that need to be done that don’t need to be done by us.
Things that don’t need to be done by us need to be done by someone else.
To be done by someone else, we need to have basic processes in place.
It takes time to make time.
The processes that you take time to create now will save you an incredible amount of time down the road.
Pick a Sunday afternoon, grab a cup of coffee, a pen, and a pad of paper. List out every single thing that you think you need to do. Eliminate the things that you don’t really need to do.
Choose one thing on the list that someone else could possibly do for you.
Write out step-by-step instructions for how you accomplish that task.
What you’ve just created is a key to growing your business, making more money, and devoting more time to more important tasks.
That’s the power of processes.
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Photo: Flickr/linus_art