Insurance Consultant Tip: Where Does All Of Your Time Go?
As I work with many agencies across the country many owners continue to struggle with time management. If you think about it, time is out biggest currency. We can always make more money but we can’t make more time. Your time is something that can be spent on very valuable work, wasted on things that don’t better you or your family or worse, stolen by what I call a time thief.
We all have time thieves in our lives. This could be the person we continue to enable by doing their job because it’s easier than dealing with them or a continued drama ridden situation at home or the office that is most likely unsolvable however hours of your precious time are sucked into it. If the only true asset we have is time, why are we so bad at managing it?
I struggle with this constantly. I think I have random ADD. Sometimes I just can’t focus on the project I have to do. In college ,I used to clean the entire room rather than write a term paper. Some how the pressure of it made me do it. If I really looked at what I spent my time on that week, there were easily a million better uses but I chose to wait until the last minute.
Obviously, college is different than being a business owner but some people manage their time much better than others. Here are some common time thief areas and some ways to handle it:
| Unnecessary staff drama | Sit them down and make them work it out, if they can’t start looking to replace them. No agency has the time to focus on team members refusing to focus on the job. |
| Extracurricular activities | If your agency isn’t where you want it to be and on most days you can be found on the back 9 limit your play time to weekends. Yes I know business happens at sporting events and the course but it happens much greater at your office. |
| Home issues | Some home issues deserve consideration (sick family member, aging family member etc.) however, I have seen many unsupportive families to the entrepreneurship lifestyle. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should come home early. Be selective and if you are involved in a home issue you have to make up the time, yes nights and weekends. |
| Ineffective schedule management | Really look at your schedule, do you need to attend everything you have on your calendar? Can other people help you? Are you booking your own quiet time to work on your business rather than in it? Every business owner needs a minimum of 4 uninterrupted hours on this. |
| You’re doing the $10 an hour jobs | How much do you want to make an hour? If you can outsource bookkeeping, payroll, recruiting, marketing etc can you focus on revenue generating activities? Don’t bog yourself down on what you can pay others to do. Now that made up time you have to hyper focus on revenue generation to pay these vendors. |
| Your team is not optimized | When you have the wrong team, with the wrong training coupled with no processes you will waste time. As the owner you will be diving into client issues. |
The bottom line is you have to limit time thieves. You may not be able to squash them all over night but you can strategically plan to reduce your time theft.
