image from http://www.teenbusinesscentral.com

As we approach the holidays, there is nothing more important than having time to spend with those we love. As such, today I will share a way to actually create time in our lives so that we can have more of it for the season as well as the rest of the year.

The method for creating time is a threefold process. The first is something that I can do in my life. The second two are great to keep in mind for my future as well and I wanted to share all of them with you. So how am I going to create time?

The first and most important step for me is simple. Sacrifice time now so that you have more free time in the future. To me, this means finding those things in life and business today that I can invest a block of time in today, so that I don’t have to worry about them in the future. In its most simplistic form, this can be a 1:1 exchange so that we can enjoy time in the future without worry. For me, this means front-loading my work. Finding all the things I need to get done between today and say, the New Year. I utilize the success compression techniques to get that all done in the next week so that I can live through the holidays without those things preying on my mind. That doesn’t create time though, so how is that useful for this lesson? Well instead of just looking for things that are a 1:1 ratio, I need to find those things in my life where I can spend a block of time now so that I can repeatedly save that time later.

Let’s take cleaning the kitchen.  My wife obsesses about others seeing her kitchen a mess. So if we are going to have company over, the entire kitchen needs to be cleaned first.  So one thing I do is make sure that I wipe down the stove top and the counters every time I do dishes.  This takes me about 2 minutes more time than just doing the dishes each week but I have learned that it saves about 2 hours of kitchen cleaning time before I can have friends and company over without freaking out my wife.  Since I enjoy having company about once a month, those 8 minutes I invest in wiping off the counters and the stove each month, creates 112 minutes of time I no longer have to spend helping my wife clean the kitchen that I can spend enjoying time with my friends and family.

The second way to create time is something that again works for anyone and it starts with realizing what our time is worth. To do this we need to focus on our goals. How much do we want to be making from our business on a yearly basis? For anyone that wants success, $250,000.00 a year might be a minimum. Then take that number and divide it by the number of hours worked a year, 9000 for a normal 40 hours a week. This will leaves me needing to make $125 an hour to meet my goal!!! I don’t know about you but I haven’t found a 9-5 job yet that will offer me that even with my BA.  This brings s me to step 2 in creating time, which is to delegate.  Now that we have an idea of what our time should be worth, we can find those activities that we do regularly that does not make us this income. Maybe we simply hire a professional to get all that done for a fraction of our hourly wage, say $10 an hour, so that we can focus on the things that do earn us that $125 an hour that we need. There is a secondary benefit to this for me. I am not an expert at filling or anything along those lines, so it takes me a large amount of time to get those sorts of things done. Someone who is experienced and a pro at it can get it done in a fraction of the time. As an example, let’s say that I have enough filling to get done that it will take me 4 hours to do. This filing is costing me $500 dollars to do, if I am working at my desired hourly rate. Instead I hire a professional at $10 an hour to get it done and due to their expertise; they get it done in an hour. I have just saved myself $490 and 4 hours of time. That means I just created 4 more spare hours in my life.

The third way we can create time is to create structures in network marketing we even create funnels. Repeating activities over and over again without well laid out structures uses far more time than if we invest some time to create a structure for those items. If my wife had to contact me and ask me every week what we needed for groceries and I had to figure it out from scratch, she and I both lose time as we figure it out so we created (ok she created) an online shopping list so that she never has to ask me because we fill it out as we realize we need things.  Once we create a structure, or workflow to use a business term, we can get those repeated activities done far faster since we are not starting from scratch each time. That time we just created with the structure is time that we can be using elsewhere to live our life. Now we have a bleed into the second step of delegation here as well. We have a structure for those repeated activities and a framework for them so that if we want, we can hire someone else to do them for us, creating even more time. (my wife loves the idea of hiring someone else to do our grocery shopping but she is also enjoys doing that shopping so I have no idea when, if ever, we will be able to do that.)

These strategies will allow anyone to get far more done in less time than they would otherwise be able to and that translates directly into my goals of spending more time in the pursuits that I love. Combine this with the Success Compression and I have a recipe to not only create more time for my passions, but to do so in a far more productive manner than I would otherwise.

So where can you create more time in your life, using these techniques and tricks so that you can live your passions instead of just dream about them? Tell us in the comments below.  

-Dominic

Life’s too short to have bad days!  What are you doing to make today FANTASTIC?