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Foreign. Welcome to the Courage and Clarity podcast. I'm your host, Steph Crowder. I'm a former sales training director who's helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn a living doing something they love over the past 10 years. On your journey, you'll need the courage to be bold, to take risks, and to do what looks crazy on paper. You'll also need the clarity, the brass tacks, simple strategies that actually work. And on this podcast, we deliver both in equal measure. Oh, and by the way, we've got absolutely no time for bs, gross marketing tactics or get rich quick schemes. Just sustainable business strategies for good humans with big dreams. If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. Let's go. Hello. Hello, CNC listeners. Welcome to episode number 205. It is an exciting time of year here in Kentucky. Here in North America, lots of us are getting our kids back to school. That's what's going on over here. Last week, my younger guy, he went to first grade. For those of you who've been here for a while, can you even believe that? Y', all, even if you haven't been with me for very long, this is a pandemic, baby. He's going to first grade. How can that be? And then my oldest, if you've really been here for a while, she is going into fifth grade. So my fifth grader, I can't even say that out loud. That feels crazy. My fifth grader starts tomorrow. So if you are a parent or a caregiver, and you are in this season of Life, I am with you. I am you. It is so exciting. It is also kind of crazy making with all of the haircuts and the back to school supplies. My daughter and I did locker decorating yesterday. If you have a girl who is, you know, late elementary, maybe middle school, you know, the serious business of locker decoration, potentially, at least that's what we do here. And, yeah, everything in between. So it's been a very exciting time. And speaking of time, I thought that this might be a great moment to do a whole episode about time. Okay. I've been talking to my clients so much about time, their time, the time that we have, our division of, you know, how we're using our time in business, in life, what kind of time is available? Some people feel like they don't have enough time. Some people feel like they have too much time. Time is, there's a lot to it. There's like, I could have a whole podcast about time. I've really come to realize. And I, I, I want to share that time and how I use my time and how I think about time as a business. A scaling business owner is something that I personally have worked on a lot this year. Really, this whole year has been. I've, like, really been getting my act together when it comes to time. And I'll share more about what I mean by that, but I want to use this episode to give you some really strategic strategies. Strategic strategies. Some strategic sort of tips and ways of approaching your time and your calendar that have been super helpful to me and to my clients. Like I said, I've been coaching my clients so so much about their relationship with time. We've had some amazing conversations that I know have been really helpful and fundamentally changed how they approach their work week and how they approach their lives. So I wanted to bring some of that brass tax to the podcast. So I'm going to be really drilling into exactly what I have done to increase my productivity. And, you know, the. The truth of the matter is, y', all, I only ever week. I. Max. Well, let me back that up. I only ever work a maximum of 25 hours a week, and that's on like. Like a week where I'm really using my time. Well. I would say I probably average out at more like 20 hours a week. Maybe on some weeks, especially over the summer, we have things going on. It's 15 hours a week. So this is not an episode for someone who, you know, if you're. If you're thinking, I don't have 40 hours, I have a job or I have kids or all of the above, I totally get it. You know, I've shared many times on this podcast that something that's, you know, quintessential to my values and the entire reason why I wanted to start my own business in the first place was to call my own shots and to never miss anything that I didn't want to miss, whether that is a mystery reader at school or a kindergarten performance or a gluing two popsicle together ceremony. I don't want to be there if I say that I want to be there. And so my calendar is super important to me, and it's something that I've decided to take a lot more seriously this year. And I think that it's something that you should take seriously as well, especially if you have a lot of stories about time. It's been a while since I talked about this, but a couple years ago, I uncovered that my stories around time were some of the most prolific and the strongest and the most toxic that I Was telling myself on a daily basis, especially when my kids were little bit younger than they are right now, when I still had a preschooler. And you know, that just the calendar of that and the schedule of that can be really crazy, depending on how the schools run. And that's a whole other story about what kind of school was best for my second child. And those of you who are parents, you get it, right? But for me, I was able to uncover that I was really using this story of, well, if I only had more time, I would be more successful. Like, that's the reason that I'm not more successful or that I haven't gotten, like, literally, I could use it for everything, right? Fill in the blank. Only I had more time. I could see more clients. If I had more time, I could figure out how to be a better marketer. If I had more time, I could. You. You fill in the blank. Anything could be put in there. And eventually I had to call myself out for that. I think I got sick of dragging that story around. And I came to a point where I realized a few things. The first was it hit me. I. I've talked about this before, but it hit me like a ton of bricks when I realized that time is not actually my most precious resource in business. I think time is our most precious resource as a human being. We can always make more money. You can't make more time. So I do think time is your most precious resource as a human being, having a human experience on earth. But in your business, time is very, very important. Don't get me wrong. And how you use your time is what we're gonna talk about, but it's not the most important, number one resource. My brilliance is your brilliance. Your genius and how you leverage your genius is actually a more valuable resource. I'm talking about your ideas, I'm talking about your creativity, I'm talking about your thoughts, all of these things. This hit me, like I said, like a ton of bricks when I realized it takes no time at all to have your next amazing idea. It takes two seconds. We've all been there, right? Sitting in the drive, like the pickup line at school, something hits you. Sitting at a traffic light, walking your dog, washing the dishes, whatever it is that you're doing, your next big idea can hit you, and it can take one second. So your brilliance and how you come up with your ideas and your ability to be an innovator and your ability to be a leader, first of all, has nothing to do with time. When I changed that story, that is the exact moment that I started to see my business grow and grow fast, like doubling year over year is when I decided to let go my stories about time. So if you're carrying around time stories like a big old heavy bag the way that I was, maybe you're ready. Maybe you need to hang on to it for a while. God knows I did for a long time. And you know, I always say that when we are hanging on to a story, you're get, be, be sure you are getting something from telling that story. For me, it was a cover and it was something I could point to when I wasn't happy with where I was in my business and my life. I could be like, well, it's time. It just use time. All right, you might want to hang on to that, like snuggly wubby nubby blanket for a while. I did. But if you're ready to move past that and you're like, I'm. That's where I got to where I was like, I'm really tired of this running loop in my brain that's like, I don't have enough time. And time, time, time, time. It was like my number one thought. It was crazy. And then you know how that goes. When you're at your desk, you're not really being productive. You're just thinking about the time running out and you're watching the clock. I would have this experience of it being 9 or 10 in the morning and having until 3 o' clock on some days and already freaking out about not having enough time, it made no sense. There was literally couldn't be enough time. When you're coming from that perspective of a heavy hardcore belief that there can never be enough time. So I think that's the first thing we have to address is what are your kind of garbage, gunky thoughts and feelings about time? Something I've learned from coaching a lot of entrepreneurs is time is rarely a neutral topic for us. We have a lot of feelings about time. It's a very loaded topic and I think it's really worthwhile to unpack what you are telling yourself about time. How are your stories about time protecting you from any number of things? Doing harder work, doing the work you don't want to do, changing, you know, having to make a decision. It could be any number of things, but that's the first thing we have to do. Like I said, when I uncovered that story that I was telling, it was like my whole world was blown open. And I was like, oh my God, what if. Stay with me now. What if whatever amount of time I have is the perfect amount of time? Because it actually has to be because I can't make any more time, right? So what if, what happened? If I would just get on board with this is the time I have. I'm in a place of acceptance. What if I could get any result that I want with the time that I already have? Other people have done crazier things, right? We. There are stories of people who've had multiple six figure, even seven figure businesses in the margin of their day, waking up early in the morning, doing it at night side hustle, right? I'm not saying that's what you need to do, but the possibility exists if the p. If it was all about having the most time, if the people who had the most time was the biggest predictor of business success, then we would see the biggest businesses, the highest revenue businesses would be the people with the most time. It would be a simple equation. The more time you have, the more successful you are. It's not what we see at all, is it? That's not actually how it works. So I think that's the first thing I want to just ask you to inspect. I shared my dirty time thoughts, my dirty little secrets about time. What's yours? What are you telling yourself? It's really important that you do this work before you go into the next step here, which I'm going to share with you. How to actually start shifting your relationship with time and how to feel like you have more time. Because that's what I the, the crazy paradox of this is that by accepting that I only had as much time as I have, by accepting that the time that I had was actually enough is the moment that I started to feel like I had more time. And I'm going to share how I created that for myself. But that you, you literally won't be able to solve your time problems if you are carrying around the belief like it can't be done. I don't have enough time. No matter what I do, there's not enough time on the calendar to get stuff done. You can see how that wouldn't work, right? If you're, if you're really attached to that belief, you won't go to the next step that I'm going to share, which is being open to. Maybe you aren't using your time in the best way. You have to be open to that thought that the reality that you're living in right now might feel like you don't have enough time. And that's a very Real feeling. I'm not trying to, you know, minimize that experience. Like I said, it was very painful and very powerful when I was going through it. And I still do sometimes. Let me just be real. We all feel that way. But the thing that really set me free was having the thought, I want to figure this out. I want to figure out. It actually was so liberating to think to myself, I want to figure out how to have everything. I want every goal, every revenue number, every, you know, client experience, every time with my kid. I want it all. I'm going to figure out how to do it with the time that I have. And as soon as I even accepted that that could is when I had a totally new attitude and I was able to get to work of figuring out what was going on and really investigating and deep diving and telling myself the truth about how I'm using my time. So that's gonna be the next step that we talk about here, is starting to learn how to tell yourself the truth about the time that you do have and how you are using it. Because here's the deal. This has been really powerful for me to consider as well. Time is currency. We've heard time is money. You heard that expression, time is money? You never, at least for me, I never really knew what that meant. But I've started to literally think about, like, the way that we are so precious with our money and the way that we have a budget or we're supposed to have a budget. You know, you're supposed to kind of really, like, be scrupulous with your. With your dollars. We don't do the same thing, really. Maybe some people do, but I have not found that most people are as precious and as vigilant and as disciplined with their time as they are with their money. And once I started approaching it that way, I was like, whoa, this could get really interesting. It's like if you have a financial budget. Like, I meet with my accountant and my bookkeeper every single month to go over the finances, right? Is this, like, something I have to do as a CEO? Why don't we have a time budget? Why aren't we responsible to ourselves or to anyone? Why aren't we doing time accounting? Maybe some of you are, but I know a lot of you aren't, because I coach on this, okay? So the very first thing I want want you to get thinking about is what if you really started to see those minutes as equivalent to dollars? Like, the same way that you spend dollars, you spend your minutes. 10 minutes. Here is $10. Right. 50 minutes. Here is $50 and so forth. It really does start to reframe. When you look at how long you're spending on things, you'll be like, am I comfortable with how many minutes I just spent on that? As if they were dollars or however you want to look at it in terms of denomination of money. But think of it as spending. We use the phrase spending time, but I don't know if we think about it as carrying as much weight as spending money. And I think it's because. My theory is because when we go to sleep tonight and we wake up, we have the privilege of waking up. Time feels like a renewable resource. It's like, oh, the clock resets tomorrow. I don't have to worry about it. But we. That doesn't take into account how finite our experience on Earth is. It actually is even more precious than the money that you have in your bank account. So I think it's time for us to treat it with the gravity and the seriousness that it really deserves. Not to hyper fixate on and freak out or become unhealthy, but just to like really have a look at that. I'm gonna go. This is gonna kind of set the table for. We're gonna talk about here. The first thing with this, with this mindset is to really do a deep audit of how you're spending your time without changing a thing. This is the first thing that I did. I used toggle T O G G L. I believe it's free. And I just didn't even try to. I didn't try to behave myself. I didn't try to like perform. I just literally went about my life for a week. Okay. And with that, what I recommend, and this is what I tell my clients to do, is to divide the work that you are doing into some key categories. I use four, and I think these are pretty universal. And you could use them for yourself. The first one is CEO. Your CEO category is really anything that's like CEO related tasks, you know, so that would be if you have a coach, if you're getting coached, you're in a mastermind. That would be CEO time. If you're meeting, having that financial meeting with your tax person or your accountant, that would be CEO time. Okay? That's one bucket. That is not to be confused with admin time. Admin time is a different bucket. This is those low level tasks, okay? Clearing out your email, responding to Instagram dms, like the little piddly things. You guys know what admin means, right? Those are two categories. Now the, those are not the two heaviest hitters. Here come the heaviest hitters in your business. Sales and marketing is a category. So anything front facing in your business, making this podcast right now for me is a sales and marketing activity. Being on social media, launching, teaching, a webinar, having a sales call, you know, doing a consult call, going to a networking event, all of that would get a sales and marketing category. And then finally we have client delivery. So coaching your clients, working with your clients, creating your course, building out your modules, anything actually related to the delivery of what you sold people should be client delivery. Okay, so what I would do is open up my toggle I actually like. If you use Google Chrome as your browser, you can set this as a Chrome extension and it's super handy. You just start the timer. Now the trick is to remember to stop it. It's okay if you're like me and you wander off, you're like, shoot, I left my timer running. You can just come back and like, you can actually adjust it. You can be like, roughly what time did I stop? And it's okay. It doesn't have to be perfect. This is gonna, even if it's imperfect, I want you to have the thought doing this imperfectly is gonna blow your mind. Okay? So you run the timer and this is gonna give you two pieces of information. The first one is just how much you're actually working. So every time your butt's in the seat and you're working, you're starting the timer and you're stopping the timer. Okay? Every time you get up, you go for a walk, you eat your lunch, you take a call that's, you know, from not related to work, you stop the timer. Okay? The first thing that's going to happen, if you are anything like me, is you're going to get to the end of the week and be like, OMG, I don't work 25 hours a week. I don't even work 20 hours a week. I work 15. And I've been telling myself this story of, oh my God, I only have 25 hours and it's not enough. It's not enough. It's not enough. Well, yeah, yeah, it's not enough. You had 25 and you actually used 15. That was my experience. The first time I ever did this. It, I'm telling you, it blew my mind. Ten of those hours just like sort of vaporized into the wind. I think I was scrolling here and there. It adds up, guys. Don't judge me. It adds up. It wasn't like long Scrolling sessions, but every time you pick up your phone, you know I'm stopping the clock, right? I like to do voxer with my friends where we talk, you know, do voice memos, we talk back and forth. I do it during the workday that was taking up my time. All different kinds of things. Chatting with my husband. Who knows? Who knows? You guys get it, right? Like, just thinking that I was spending more time working than I actually was. A lot of you will have this experience, and I don't want you to shame yourself if this is you. My experience with this was like, this is excellent news. I've been telling myself I don't have enough time. Well, guess what? You just won 10 hours back. I've been telling myself I'm maxed out. No, I'm not. I'm just not using my time in the best way. Even though it feels like I'm having the experience of sitting at my desk and working all day. Kids are out of the house. I feel like I'm sitting at my desk working. But when I told myself the truth, it wasn't what was actually happening in reality. So that's the first thing. Now, that's not going to be everybody's experience. That's not you. If I have had clients who've done this and they're like, no, no, no, the clock is going and it's 30 hours, it's 40 hours, don't worry, I'll get to you as well. But at least 50% of you are going to have, probably more are going to have an experience like mine where you're like, okay, so we have some work to do in terms of optimizing our time. It's not that I believe that every single minute has to be optimized, but I do believe in telling ourselves the truth about where the time is actually going. So that's the first thing. Which leads great into the second piece, which is I said that you're going to get two pieces of information from running this experiment and running this audit. One is how much time you're actually working. The second is where your time is going. So I had a client who. And this has been multiple clients, but I'm thinking of one in particular who realized that she was spending like 8 hours or 10 hours on her podcast every single week by doing this audit. And this is an example of a client who was but in seat working for a lot of time. I can't remember if it was 30 hours or 40 hours, but she was. She did not have the reality of, oh, I Thought I'd like I'm working less than I thought. She was like, no, no, I'm. I'm working. But this podcast is taking me like 10 hours a week to produce. That is also incredibly valuable information because I want you to be able to figure out if you are truly working butt in seat for all the hours that you are telling. Like, that actually lines up with reality. You need to look at what you're doing and where your time is going. I help my clients get their podcast out the door in. My goal for them is an hour or less. And, you know, for some people, it's more like two, and that's fine. But eight or 10, there's like, that's a flag, right? And again, it's never a judgment. It's just, we have work to do. We can kind of figure out what is going on here so that we can get her down from 10 hours to 2 hours, even 3 hours, even 5 hours would be great. That's how you start to get that time back. Okay, so that's the second piece of information is you're really gonna see if, for example, if you don't have clients, if you don't have clients and you're like, I don't know why I don't have clients. You can look at your time audit and ask yourself, how much time am I doing sales and marketing activities? Is it an hour? Is it zero? Is it five hours? Maybe you can look at that and be like, ah, okay, I'm not getting clients because I'm not doing enough sales and marketing activities. Wherever the problems are, you're gonna see it show up in how you're spending your time. So you might be thinking, you know, this sounds really tedious. I don't wanna do this. It's really not that big of a deal, y'. All. I promise. And it's also so freaking empowering because it's so much better than the story of, I don't have. I don't have enough time, and I don't know what to do to fix it. This is gonna give you the information you need to solve problems to either use your time better in scenario A, or in scenario B, look at the time that you are spending and get better at skills you can. You know, for my. My client who needed to learn how to do her podcast faster, that could be a skill issue. It could be a delegation issue. Maybe she needs to get some help with it. Right? Could be a combination of the two, but it'll help reveal what actual problems you can solve. So that's the first thing is really starting to be like, what is the reality? What is the base level? What is my baseline for how I'm spending my time? And then from there you can start actually organizing how you're going to spend your time. You can start planning your time. So if you have, you know, 20 workable hours and you want to spend 10 hours a week on client delivery, five hours a week on sales and marketing, that would be an hour a day of money making activities, which is what I teach my clients to do. And then that would leave you five hours left for CEO and admin tasks. That would be a pretty good split of what I would recommend. If you had 20 hours a week, it could be, we could give more time to sales and marketing. We, you know, we could, we could kind of play with the trade off between client delivery and sales and marketing. The more clients you get, the more time you'll spend with them. You could spend more time on your sales and marketing if you wanted to get more clients faster. So you would plan your time, you would sit down and I actually like to pull up my Google Calendar and I will color code my calendar and be like, what are my blocks of time? Where am I doing what? Where am I doing my sales and marketing time? Where am I doing my client delivery? Where am I doing my CEO tasks? And what does that look like now? Sometimes people will tell me, well, Steph, I feel too restricted by this. And then also, maybe even more importantly, because we can coach ourselves out of that, right? I mean, you, you know how to get past. Like we could feel. Sometimes we just have to get on board with this is like, this is our job. This is what we need to be doing if we want to use our time better. The bigger one for a lot of people, I think, is I plan my day, it goes off track, and I'm demoralized and I've planned my whole week and now like, my day blew up and I don't know how to fix that. Here's something I started doing that has fundamentally changed my life for sure, and specifically my productivity and my work. Remember when I was saying that time is current currency and we have a financial budget, we don't have a time budget. Well, this is gonna date me. How, how many of you can remember? I remember going to the grocery store with my mom and she would write checks at the grocery store. She'd hand over the check and right there, while we were standing there, before we'd even go to the car, she would balance the Checkbook. Some of y' all don't even know what I'm talking about, but a lot of you do, right? Like that paper at the back of the checkbook, she would have to balance it. And what that meant was we had a debit account. Just some basic. Let's see how I can do describing basic personal finance. This is dicey. But you have a certain amount in your debit account. You spend money, you have to take the time to be like, I spent $50. So now we don't have 300 anymore. We have 250. Okay. We're not doing that with our time. Most of us, we're not looking at what actually happened. In my day, I budgeted this, but what actually happened, I spent over or I spent under. Right. So I call this reconciling. I call it balancing the books, but it's balancing my calendar. It's no problem if I didn't get to everything right. I just need to look at the rest of my week and say, where am I going to put this now? This is easier if you don't over schedule your week. I do not like super, super minute by minute plan my entire week at a time. I instead decide what are my objectives for the week. What are we. This is old school. Steph Crowder. If you have the 15 minute planner, meth. You know, we talk about big three. I decide what are the big three things that I want to have done by the end of this week. Right. It might be recording a podcast, finishing lesson two of this curriculum that I'm doing. And, you know, one other thing. I don't know, like turning in this assignment to my coach. Those could be like my big three for the week. I don't exactly know when I'm gonna do them, but I know that that's what I gotta get done. Then I'll look at my calendar and kind of rough in. I know for me, sales and marketing and deep work I like to do in the morning. I like to see clients in the afternoons. And so I lay out my calendar that way. Okay. Then I go through the night before. You could do it the morning of. I think it's better for me. For the night before. I will do a detail plan of the next day. And I do mean minute by minute. I can show. You could ask Lacy, my ops manager. She will tell you. I do this on my Google calendar minute by minute. Workout, driving. It doesn't take long, I promise. It doesn't take long when? What am I doing during this block? What? What's Happening here. What kind of meetings do I have? And then I have built into my calendar every day a recurring appointment at 3:30 before I go get my son, reconcile and plan tomorrow. So I will look at my day and be like, okay, what did we not get to? Where does this move put it into the next day? Okay, this is how you will actually avoid that. Slide into, I plan my whole week and then one thing goes wrong and now I'm screwed. No, you don't have to be screwed at all. You, you just have to balance a checkbook. Sometimes I'm ahead. I'm like, oh my gosh, like I actually got everything done today. Now I can, you know, pull in a new task from a, from like later in the week or picture this, I could go read a book. I could go like, give myself some me time back into my day. Cause I did everything in my plan, right. But that has been the life changing thing for me is to make the plan one day at a time and then get to the end of the day and be like, what needs to move around? How did I do? I can also be like, what's not working here? Where did I like grossly overestimate? That's the other thing. If you're way overestimating, way underestimating, you will get better at this, at understanding yourself and understanding how long things take. I think that's a skill and we get on ourselves. Like, I always give myself not enough time. Well, you might just need more practice with it. But it's also not that big of a deal if you're not over scheduling the rest of the week. I've had times where I thought something would take me 30 minutes, it takes two hours. It's not ideal. But what I can do is be like, okay, I plowed through this time so I didn't get this thing done. Now we're going to move it to tomorrow. Oh, I have a sales and marketing block for tomorrow. I'm going to put it in there. So my friends, what. I'm just looking at my notes here. What have I not covered about time? I think the last thing I'll say is if you're doing everything that I shared in this episode and you literally can't make it work. You're like, there's just too much on my list. I cannot schedule it all. I cannot get it all done. To me, that would be a sign. Without knowing more about what's going on in your individual situation, I would say off the bat, that's probably a sign that you need to say no to more things. It might be that you need to say no to some offers. Like if you have three offers, you're trying to serve three different rooms. Maybe with the life that you have right now, you need to focus on making one offer amazing. Selling one offer. Right. It could be that you're over committed in your life. Hello, I am the queen of over commitment. In my personal life. I've had to get really good at saying no and being more boring so that I'm not over committed. Where are you not saying no? Oh, for some of my clients, they're blowing past their boundaries with their clients. So a lot of my clients are coaches who give feedback. It could be written feedback or verbal feedback. And they're taking an hour to give one person feedback when they promise themselves they'd do it in 10 minutes. They're telling themselves this story that like that's over delivering. And people love that. And the truth of the matter is all you're doing is collapsing your own boundaries and eating into the time that your business needed you to work on other things. Right. So you're in that case. You would need to say no to letting a 10 minute task take an hour or say no to. Well, this client asked for feedback. It was kind of outside of my regular process. I said yes cause I wanted to make them happy. That's another place where you can say no. I think this whole episode is really about creating transparency into your calendar and your time and how you're spending it so that you can A tell yourself the truth, B, look for patterns and problems and then C, get really honest with yourself about how you want to solve it. So my friends, I hope this has been helpful. Time and productivity and all of our thoughts about time has become one of my favorite topics inside of the sold out group programs mastermind recently. So I'm really excited to bring this to the podcast. If it was helpful, I've would love to hear from you. Let me know. What are you taking away from this? What's worked for you with time? Hit me up because it's always something that I'm personally working on. Okay. Hope you loved this episode. I'll see you in the next one. And until then, I'm wishing you the courage and the clarity to go after what you love.