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Episode 66 – You DO Have Time & We Can Prove it!

Feb 7, 2018

This Episode

Mark Stephenson & Marc Vila

You Will Learn

  • The “tricks” to finding time during your day
  • What other businesses like yours are doing to streamline their activities
  • The Surprising App that’s making a big difference in one successful business
  • How Colman and Company has increased productivity with Time Budgeting
  • What managing your finances has in common with managing your time

Resources & Links

Episode 66 – You DO Have Time & We Can Prove it!

Show Notes

Your time is completely yours to control, unlike many other parts of your business. All you need to do is decide to control it AND do something about it!
During this podcast we go through Marc Vila’s Time Budgeting ideas, discuss what people IN business are using right now to manage their time – or not – and some apps, software, and ideas that will help you get control.
We mentioned the following apps and software applications:
Trello
Asana
Evernote
Wunderlist
Google Sheets
Microsoft Excel
YNAB (You Need a Budget)
The following books:
4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris
Profit First by Mike Michalowicz

Transcript

Welcome to the Custom Apparel Startups podcast, your best source for information, news, tips and tricks to get you off the ground running, and earn success with your custom apparel decorating business. So, get ready to soak up some knowledge!

Now, here are your hosts, Mark and Marc!

Mark S: Hey, everyone! Welcome to episode 66 of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. My name is Mark Stephenson, from ColDesi.

Marc V: And this is Marc Vila, from Colman and Company. Today, we’re here to tell you that you DO have time, and we can prove it.

Mark S: Yeah, we can prove it, definitely.

Marc V: Well, let me -. Not really.

Mark S: No, we can’t. We’re lying. We put that down, just so you would listen to this podcast.

Marc V: Exactly. So, I would say that we can’t prove that you do, but we’re going to tell you that can. We make time in our lives for the most important things, all of the time. Right? That might be your business, your children, or your hobbies. We make time for very important things.

But time seems to get lost.

Mark S: It does, and just as an example that I read about a long time ago – for example, if there’s a sports star or movie star that you are very much interested in. You love to watch them, you love to watch them play, you’d love to meet them some day.

You’ve got a completely full schedule tomorrow, but they called you up on the phone and said “Marc Vila, would you like to have lunch with me?” All of a sudden, you would have two hours that you could definitely set aside to have lunch with that person that you are a fan of.

Marc V: Absolutely! The thing is, it happens to us almost on a daily basis, with much smaller things. You get invited to go to lunch, because a friend of yours happens to be in your area of town. Or you go to pick up supplies, and you spend 30 minutes talking to your friends that work at the shop.

All of these things come into play, whether they’re small grocery store interactions, the phone rings unexpectedly. You always have this time, but it begins to disappear.

This falls directly after the budgeting episodes, because time is money, right?

Mark S: Yeah, and honestly, that’s how we started on this. This kick is because we were taking that budget idea. You need to budget, from the personal side, and the Profit First from the business side. Then, you started a project inside Colman and Company, of budgeting time.

Marc V: Yeah. I got a hold of some, I guess money management, meaning like tracking money differently. I’m getting a hold of this, and I’m learning it. All of a sudden, I was – let me back up slightly.

I’m doing it, and I have this epiphany moment, because I had said “When am I going to find the time to do all of this budgeting, tracking what I spend, checking my bank account, making sure? When am I going to have time to do that? I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”

So, I’m doing it on a daily basis. It’s not taking up that much time, but I’m doing it every day. I was like “I did have the time for this!” I said “Well, if time is money, and I’m budgeting my money, why aren’t I budgeting my time?”

It was one of those moments in life where like three seconds was like a 30-minute long conversation in my brain. I just figured it out. I was like “I need to budget my time, the same way. What am I using my minutes for, every day? Where are they going?”

Mark S: That’s good, because one of the phrases that I really liked from the last two podcasts, that you brought up, is that every dollar has a purpose. And the way you apply that to every minute has a purpose, in your organization of Colman and Company, and the activities, is brilliant.

I really like that. And if you don’t know, Colman and Company, our whole Dale Mabry campus of ColDesi has how many employees? About 18?

Marc V: Roughly, yeah.

Mark S: Roughly 18 to 20 employees. It’s got a sales office, it’s got shipping and fulfillment, it’s got its own marketing personnel. That’s where the Accounting personnel sit. So, there’s a lot of opportunity. The more people that you have working together, that like each other, the more opportunity there is to waste time.

Marc V: Yes.

Mark S: Both socially and everything.

Marc V: This is what happened. I decided that I was going to create some sort of time budget, and basically just borrow the concept from what we just spoke about. So, I put together some rules for time budgeting. I created a little Excel spreadsheet. I’d love to share it, once I dial it in a bit more. Maybe by the time this podcast comes out, we’ll be ready to share it.

Mark S: That would be great!

Marc V: I think so. So, I created all this, and I brought in a few members of the team, a few select people. I said “Hey, I want you guys to do this experiment with me, if you guys are good with it.” And I showed them this time budget. It’s just an Excel spreadsheet; Monday through Friday, all the different things that you run into during the day, and how many minutes we’re going to spend doing them.

I said “I’ve got some rules that we’re going to follow, for this time management budget.” I said “Let’s just start with it.” Immediately, everyone just thought that that meant that I thought that they were doing nothing all day.

Mark S: It’s that self-defense thing. But you didn’t ask “How much time are you wasting every day? We need to use that better.” Right?

Marc V: Not at all, because that’s not the point of it. It was “Well, you know that it takes a couple hours to do this thing on social media,” or “But shooting video takes -.” “Good! If it takes three hours to shoot a video, it takes three hours.”

Mark S: Just write it down.

Marc V: Yeah. And the same with people listening. If this shirt job is going to take four hours to do, it’s going to take four hours. You can work on honing that down to three and a half hours, once you get past this first level.

This comes back to budgeting money. The first thing that people think to do is, for my business or personal, “I need to reduce my expenses. How can I reduce my expenses?” Then, you try to go through this on a deep level. But you’re not even aware of how much is in all of your accounts.

You didn’t even realize how much you were spending. So, before you reduce expenses, what do you have to do? You have to shore up all of your data, take some note of it, and then you see all of your bills.

Mark S: You’ve got to write everything down.

Marc V: You’ve got to write everything down.

Mark S: Just like you have to write down everything that you do on a daily or weekly basis.

Marc V: Yeah. So, I said “Everyone just get into this experiment with me. What we’re going to do is we’re just going to list all of the things you want to do today, or you need to do, how many minutes you think they’re going to take, and then put them in a sheet, and they should add up to an eight-hour day.” If you’re working eight hours today, you say “equals eight hours.” Every minute needs to have some budgeted-in time.

So, Stephanie over there, she started doing it with me. She came back, and she said “I did two things.” She just got an Apple watch for her birthday, and it has a timer on it. She said “I had a timer really handy, that was really easy to start and stop. I was curious on something. I was curious how much time was spent with people just stopping by my office and asking how I was feeling,” because she was sick a few days before.

Then, she was timing out little breaks, like when she would get water or use the restroom, or whatever. So, she started doing that. “Yesterday,” she said, “I spent about 25 minutes, throughout the whole day, on little breaks, meaning getting water, I used the restroom, I grabbed a snack, I needed to blow my nose, all of these things.”

She was like “It was interesting, because I need to factor in that time, throughout the day,” which I was like “That is interesting.” Which is fine. Right? You’re working. You should be taking breaks.

The other thing she said she noticed is she said that it was over 20 minutes of people coming in, it totaled out, “How are you doing today, this morning?” She said “I really should have done something.” I didn’t have to tell her “Don’t waste time on having conversations with folks about how you feel.” She saw it as that was too much time. “I don’t want to be doing that with my day.”

So, I said “That’s it! Just like your money.”

Mark S: I like that. Because what we talked about in the other podcast was the fact that just the act of thinking about your money, and paying attention, causes you to be better with it. Just the idea that you’re going to be watching the profit on your jobs, regularly and systematically, makes you more profitable, because you’re paying more attention.

Marc V: Yeah, and this is what’s happening with your time. What I would want to say is I would like to maybe, if you’re okay with this, Mark, share my five rules for maximum time budgeting.

Mark S: Please do! I’m going to flip this over, and take some notes.

Marc V: And I’ll add a sixth rule, which the rules can always change. So, I’m going to make that actually as rule number one. The rules can always change on this, because this is a new project. For me, it’s a new project for you, so you’ve got to make your rules for your time malleable, so you can get it right for your business.

But every minute needs to have a task, for your day. My tasks for today, for example, looked like – let me bring up mine. Two hours of shooting video. These are minutes, actually. 120 minutes of video, 60 minutes of preparing for videos, 30 minutes on emails, 30 minutes on reviewing advertising, 100 minutes on meetings, 30 minutes on new ideas, 30 minutes on fixing problems, 30 minutes on staffing, 20 minutes on reviewing email marketing.

That’s my day. That’s an eight and a half hour day, by the way, that I budgeted for today. That’s my time. So, I gave every minute a job.

The next is a YNAB rule from [inaudible 10:47] rule, roll with the punches. I just stole that rule.

Mark S: I like that. Now, we’re lying and stealing. We lied that we could prove they had time, and now -.

Marc V: So, roll with the punches on your time. What does that mean? That means if you have a t-shirt job that you think is going to take you, let’s say three hours to complete, and it takes you three and a half hours to complete. Now, you need to do the job. It needs to be done. It took longer.

You need to go and look at how much time you have left in your day, and move it. So, where can I remove 30 minutes? The good thing about time is you can add time, for free. But you still have to remove it from somewhere. That’s what people forget about.

So, you can kind of, time can be easier to move than money, sometimes. It can be harder, but it’s the same rules. If you’re budgeting eight hours to work, and maybe you have to take out 30 minutes, what does that 30 minutes mean, later? Are you not going to watch a TV show? Are you not going to cook dinner, and you’re going to go out to eat?

You need to think about these things. Roll with the punches on that.

Prepare for the unexpected, which is pretty much a YNAB rule, as well, which is a little bit like when Stephanie had said “I should put in 20 minutes for just some random break stuff.” I told Maria – she was like “Well, one of the things that eats up my time is Mark sends me a message, and he asks me for something that he needs right away.”

Mark S: I do.

Marc V: So I said “Budget for that. How much a day?” “I don’t know.” I said “What do you think?” She was like “I don’t know.” I said “You’ve got to put a guess. Then, you’re going to roll with the punches, and change it. Let’s start somewhere.” So, she said “30 minutes.”

I said “Great! Start with 30 minutes. If Mark gives you 45 minutes worth of tasks, mark it as 45. Then, the next day, keep it as 45, and see how it goes.”

The next is another YNAB type of a switchover to time, but to age your time. What that means is that if you can budget in time to do a project – let’s just say you have a shirt order that’s not due for two weeks.

What do you need to do? You know everything you need to do. You need to get the art done. You need all of these things. It’s all kind of in place. Let’s just say this scenario, for the sake of argument. The customer has kind of finalized everything. It’s all good to go. They just don’t need it until February 14th.

So, you do nothing, until when?

Mark S: February 13th, at 5:00.

Marc V: Yeah, or when you have time. “I’ll just get to it when I have time. I have three weeks before it’s due.” What you do is you start budgeting in some time to do that work, now. You say “I’m going to be ordering t-shirts today. I’m going to spend an extra 15 minutes to finalize this t-shirt order, and get that order in.”

Now, you just bought yourself 15 minutes in the future, where you don’t have to order those shirts. Maybe you can finalize your art. Maybe you can – whatever you might do, for prepping your order. Some folks will separate the sizes out, they’ll verify, they’ll do their counts.

Do all of that stuff. Age out your time ahead of time, and start doing it now. This way, next month, you’re not doing that time, then. You’re doing the next thing. You’re working in the future.

Mark S: You’re planning, and you’re using future time. You’ve got time available, that you are putting toward a future project.

Marc V: Yes. Budget out some future project time. Then, what you’ll do is you’ll get ahead. Then, when you have to roll with the punches, and prepare for the unexpected, you’re prepared, because you bought in maybe three, four, five, ten hours’ worth of time, of things you needed to do in February. They’re done, now.

Mark S: It’s like keeping an emergency fund for personal expenses, or business expenses.

Marc V: Yeah.

Mark S: Or an opportunity fund, where you don’t know what’s going to happen. So, let’s put away some cash now, for the following things.

Marc V: I love that idea. I think what you do is you look at everything you’re going to do today, and then say “What can I spend 15 minutes on, that I need to do another day, today? So, I don’t have to do it then.”

If you’re consistently doing that every day, then you’re forcing yourself to pay attention to that time. Then, when an emergency happens, like for example, your role model comes into town and wants a two-hour lunch with you, you don’t have to worry that you literally can’t do it, because you’re so stuck with doing things that are due tomorrow.

Mark S: It’s kind of the positive side of rolling with the punches.

Marc V: Yeah.

Mark S: You find yourself, you’ve completed something early, or you find yourself with an extra hole in your day. You can fill it up with things that you know need to be done, and you know they need to be done, because you did this time budget of everything that you have to do.

Marc V: Just think about, what would you rather do with the time? Oftentimes, what can happen, especially as a business owner, you’ve got a bunch of work to do today. You finished early, so you take the afternoon off, maybe. I’m sure plenty of people say “I wish I could ever do that,” but you’ll find that you do, if you pay attention to it. Most people do.

So, you take that time off, and what did you do with that time? Maybe you binge on Netflix.

Mark S: Did you follow me?

Marc V: Yeah. Or you just did nothing. You literally sat and did nothing. You played a game on your phone. I don’t know what you did, but you didn’t do really anything productive with that time, at all.

So, on that time when you were going to take that half day off, what if you just said “Can I do anything for tomorrow, and maybe split some of that time? I can probably do like one hour of tomorrow’s work. Then tomorrow, I bought that time.”

Mark S: I like it.

Marc V: Then, the last rule is just to change your time budget over, as the time moves on. So, change your time budget. If you are consistently saying that you’re doing certain things, and you buy new equipment, or you decide to offer a new service, you’re going to have to go in there and figure out where the time is going to come from, or where it’s going to go.

Also, when you’re changing your time budget, that’s where you start to figure out where you can save time, save money. Can you get an app, to help you do something? Can you buy something that works faster? Can you buy a folding machine? Different things like that.

That’s where you kind of get into start saving your time, or start reducing the amount of time you’re using. But that’s part of changing. You’ve got to do everything else, first. And you’ve got to do all of them, every day.

Mark S: I like that a lot. When it’s ready, we’re going to put a link to your time budget spreadsheet in the show notes for this episode, which is cool.

When we were first talking about this, I had more envisioned, like we’ve had some business owners out there who had their whole business worked out. They organized, “I’m going to spend this afternoon on marketing. I’m going to spend this afternoon on doing the books. I’m going to spend this afternoon on education, getting better at my stuff.”

You know, I had this kind of overall idea in my mind, that some of our customers would be really on top of this stuff. And what I found instead, was that most of them are like me.

So, when I asked the question in our Custom Apparel Startups Facebook group, I said “Hey, group. We’re considering a podcast on scheduling and time management. Do you have a system or a schedule that you follow? Please fill in your answers.”

And I suggested some answers. The first one was “I wish!” And Trello, and a few others, and people filled in the rest. We got 50 responses, and the number keeps going up. 64% of the people that answered were in the “I wish” category. So, the majority don’t have anything.

The second number was using a Google spreadsheet or an Outlook calendar. There was one app, which was Trello and Shopbox. It’s another software. And the rest of the people use like white boards and desk calendars.

Almost every response, though, was geared toward their production schedule. That was the sum total of their time management, is how they organize when a job is due, and to get the job out on time. There was no other allocation of time for anything else that it takes to run your business.

Marc V: So, job management and to-do’s are different than managing your time.

Mark S: Right. Job management, for example – some people had some great solutions that we’ll talk about in a second – was what do you do when an order comes in? And how do you track it through the process of fulfilling that order and getting it out?

In other words, I get a shirt order in, and I have to order the shirts. So, I set my calendar for Wednesday, to make sure the shirts are here. The shirts are here. On Thursday, I do my production. It’s going to take me this long. Then, on Friday, I get it all boxed up and shipped. On Saturday, I call the customer and let him know.

All of those kinds of things seem to be taken care of in a variety of different ways. But very few people are actually – as a matter of fact, no one volunteered the fact that “I have it on my calendar, every Friday afternoon, I do two hours of marketing work.” Or “Once a month, I look at my website, and make sure nothing’s broken.” None of those things are built in.

Marc V: So, the focus that seems to be, when I’ve talked to people about this, that are apparel business owners, and when we ask, it seems to be order workflow and order management, rather than time management.

I think it’s very important to separate those two things as being, like your workflow management is part of how you get the best out of your time.

Mark S: Right. And it’s very important, to make money.

Marc V: It’s very important in making money. It’s very important in preventing mistakes. It’s very important in keeping customers happy. But that doesn’t mean that during that workflow, you’re not completely wasting tons of time. You’re moving things along in the right order, but if you’re consistently wasting time on things or spending time on things you’d prefer to not do it, your workflow is fine, but your time isn’t.

You can have a perfect workflow, and perfectly broken time.

Mark S: Absolutely.

Marc V: It’s true of everything, and every industry can be like this, especially in a production industry like ours.

Mark S: I’m going to go back to the difference between running your business and making your product. What happens is – and you can tell. If you’re already in business, and you look back at your last year, if you can see that one month you do awesome, and the next month you don’t do well. And the next month you do awesome, and the next month you don’t do well, then I can tell you what’s happening.

When things are slow, your production bucket is not filled, so you don’t have anything planned to do with your time. So, you use that time to make sales calls, or you go out and drum up business, or you go to networking events, or work on your website, or create a special or do designs.

Then, once that’s done, you put that all out there, and you get a lot of orders. So, you stop doing all those things. You produce your orders until the orders are all out again, and you take a look at what I need to do, to get more business for the next month.

That is completely a function of how you’re managing your time.

Marc V: Yeah. You’d prefer to prevent feast, famine, feast, famine type, first of all, in your time and in your money, and your sales. It’s not comfortable. It’s stressful. One of the biggest stressors that business owners complain about is the fact that owning a business is just so full of waves. There’s ups and downs and ups and downs, and everything.

You can prevent some of that, by managing your money and managing your time.

Mark S: I love that. We’ve got kind of a list of things that our customers said that they’re using, and some things that we might suggest that are just interesting, and you may want to look at them for order management, but also things that we use, to organize our time.

Marc V: Alright. A couple things that I had pulled up – I was looking up, and some things I’ve used throughout my career, and life as well. Use apps on your phone.

Mark S: Okay.

Marc V: If you have an iPhone, or an Android, actually both, they come with a built-in reminder app, to remind you to do something at a certain time. They come with built-in calendars that you can fill in. So, start using that stuff. They’re free. They’re right in your pocket. You can start using them right away.

They might not be the perfect solution for you, but if you just start saying to yourself “Make sure to do this before the day is out, so I’m going to hit a reminder for myself, to make sure those shirts came in by 4:00 PM,” just put it in there. You get a reminder. It buzzes in your pocket, and you look at it. It’s such a simple thing that can really affect you quickly.

Mark S: This is something that I do all of the time. We use Outlook at work, and I use Google at home. I’ve combined those two calendars. So, when I look at my week, I know that every Sunday morning, I do my reports. Every other Tuesday, we have a management meeting. I send out our reviews internally to the staff, the good and bad, to see how we’re doing.

All these regular activities that I do on a weekly or monthly basis; scheduling out the podcast recording time, I will put that in my Outlook calendar. And I’ll set it so I get a reminder of that. I can look at a week view, and I can see that I have these tasks organized.

Not just production, but I actually have time set aside for doing things like content review. I have time set aside for reviewing our social media platforms. If there’s a list of activities that you do every day, it’s a great idea to put it into a standard calendar app.

Marc V: Yeah. A calendar app is great. There’s Evernote. It’s another one of these apps that it does so many things, but you can use it for managing tasks and time, and things like that. I don’t personally use it for that, but it’s often recommended.

Mark S: I use Evernote all the time, and I use it for that application. What I like is that if I’m on my laptop or my phone or my desktop computer, and I want to make a note and get a screen capture, keep track of something, that I know that if I write it down there, that I’ve got it on all of my platforms.

I qualify that as kind of a time saver.

Marc V: A time saver.

Mark S: Evernote is what it’s called.

Marc V: Wunder, which is W-U-N-D-E-R.

Mark S: I don’t know that one.

Marc V: It’s one that I’ve seen before. I downloaded it. I didn’t use it too much, but it’s an organization app for yourself, and again, organization is part of time management. iPhone has the reminder app. Those are a few to look at. There’s so many of them.

The important thing to do is to get on your phone and go the App Store or the Google Play store, and just search “time management.” Search that, and look at some. Look at something that seems to strike you as something you would want to use.

You could also go into Excel, and you can find time management templates that are free.

Mark S: Yes, you can. Google Sheets.

Marc V: Google Sheets. These will all have something. Then, Google search apps that you can download. There’s free and paid ones. So, find something.

Mark S: We experimented with Trello. One of our respondents to the survey said Trello, as a time management and a production tool. And the last one that I’ll mention is Asana. We use that internally a lot. We’ve got a lot of people that work for us, and we kind of meet in Asana, to keep track of projects, and those projects moving forward, as opposed to managing our time.

Marc V: Yeah. What we’re finding out here, as we’re having this conversation, is that managing your tasks and time management are very, very related to each other.

Mark S: Yes. But they’re different.

Marc V: But you want to make sure that you’re looking at both of them, in a different way. So, I want to really make sure that people don’t lose focus of managing some time, for the sake of the fact that they’ve got all of their tasks done.

This is the exercise that I think – a simple one that you can do. You don’t need any Excel sheet, to do this. Just put how many hours a week you’re going to work, this week, whatever that number is. If it’s 80, it’s 80. If it’s 40, it’s 40. There is no right answer.

Mark S: But be honest with yourself.

Marc V: Yes.

Mark S: Don’t say it’s 40, if you know it’s going to be 60. And don’t say it’s 60, if you know it’s going to be eight.

Marc V: Exactly. Put in a number that you really think you’re going to work, as close as you can guess. And don’t play the game “Well…” Come on. Just come on. Pick a number.

Now you’ve got 40 hours’ worth of time, let’s say, or 50 hours’ worth of time. If you’ve got 50 hours’ worth of time, then what I want you to do is list all of the things, as many as you possibly can. Just continuously write everything that you do in a week, that you consider your work hours.

So, ordering supplies, doing production, talking to customers, answering emails, doing Accounting work. Everything single thing that you can think of, that you do in your business, I want you to write it all down.

Then, write down next to it, how many hours you think that equals up to, or how many it should, or you would like it to. Like you mentioned reviewing your website. Maybe you want to do that just a half hour every week. You put 30 minutes. Right?

So, you write all of this down. Take out a calculator or do the math in your head. How many hours does that equal to? It’s not going to equal what the amount of hours you worked is. It’s either going to be way high or way low.

But you need to write all of that down. With that, add some things that are on your wish list, that you’d like to do. Maybe you would like to spend an hour a week, just doing marketing research, so you can continue education on marketing. Write that down, and put “One.”

That’s kind of the beginning of the time budget, right there. You wrote down everything you have to do, and everything you’d like to do. Then, you put down hours. At this point in time, the next step you can do is track that week. And guess. Then, write that down, as well. What happened, at the end?

Mark S: I just want to say that I know this sounds like a lot, and I know that you guys are busy. I’m making air quotes. You’re busy, as opposed to being productive, because – I think now we can prove that you have the time. So, you’re going to make the time to do this exercise. Humor us. Just do it for a week.

Go through the exercise, and write everything down that you do, you need to do, and you would like to do. Just like Marc described. Drop it into a spreadsheet, write it down on a desk calendar, do whatever you have to do. Then, look at the end of that time period, at how much time you actually spent doing those things.

Marc V: And then, be self aware of time that was – air-quoting – “wasted.” What is wasted time? That means that you were in the middle of doing something, and your friend called, so you kind of paused your production work for 30 minutes, to chitchat about -.

Mark S: Let’s call it non-work.

Marc V: Yeah, non-work time. So, you did non-work time during work time.

Mark S: We’re not judging.

Marc V: Don’t count that.

Mark S: Right. You really didn’t spend 45 minutes doing task X, if during that time, you got your coffee and you talked on the phone with your friend, and you responded to eight Whatsapps.

Marc V: Yeah. If you went to go pick up something from a customer, and you allotted, say an hour for doing that, but while you were there, halfway through there you stopped at your friend’s house, and you spent 20 minutes chatting with him or her, and then continued on, you wasted 20 minutes there. Did you need to do that? I don’t know, but that’s what we’re talking about.

It did not take you an hour to do that task. It took you 40 minutes, and you spent 20 minutes doing something else. Be just self aware of that, while you’re doing this task. You don’t necessarily have to write that down, but if you’re adding up all of this time, you have to be very self-aware.

Mark S: Agreed.

Marc V: There is one other thing that I wanted to mention here. I kind of had some notes up here. You know – I know you do – Tim Ferriss, right?

Mark S: Yeah. Four-Hour Work Week. He’s my hero!

Marc V: Okay. He has a book. Well, he has many things that he’s written and done; many, many. His most famous is the Four-Hour Work Week, I’d say. We’ve mentioned it on the podcast before.

Mark S: It’s been a while.

Marc V: Yeah. It’s been a while, but we have. He has a bunch of tips and tricks that he recommends for time management. I like a bunch of these, but one that I really like is he says to start your day by writing down your intentions, which I think is part of what the exercise is, what we just said.

So, what you should do, if you want to start managing your time, is write down everything you want to get done today. What you’ll do is you’ll either feel really good or really bad, as the days go. It’s very similar to how we talked about tracking your food or tracking your money. As soon as you start paying attention to it, you’re going to want to gravitate toward doing the right thing.

So, that’s one of the things. And he said, the one that follows up is focusing on doing the right things, which means that you need to prioritize. Production is more important, if it needs to be delivered tomorrow, than say, chitchatting with somebody, and not doing work time.

Mark S: I agree. And you have to be honest with yourself about that, too.

Marc V: Yes, absolutely. This is self-reflection, in addition to time management. What else do we have for this? Because we’ve got other things to do with our time, today.

Mark S: Yeah, I know that’s true. So, I’m not going to waste a lot of time. I’m not going to invest a lot of time in wrapping this up. But what we will do is this. We will encourage you on a regular basis, to just like with managing your personal finances, managing your business finances and profit goals, to manage your time, as well.

Just the act of looking at the way you spend your time, and thinking about the way that you might most productively use your time, is going to improve your business and your personal life.

Marc V: Absolutely! If you have these things that eat time from your day, that as you become self-aware, you’re going to notice that, turn them off. Make them harder to access. Facebook might be one. People will get onto Facebook.

Mark S: Hang on! Hang on! Let me finish this post!

Marc V: Right! They get sucked into it, and they lost 20 minutes. They weren’t going to do anything, but they saw this one post, and they had to comment, when they got riled up and they got upset. How do you solve that? Maybe just make it harder for yourself to access Facebook, by logging out. You know, log out of it.

Now, if you instinctively click the app or open up the website, you’re not logged in. Now, you have to physically log in. So, you can make things a little bit harder to reach.

Mark S: Unless you feel like something might have happened on Colman and Company or ColDesi’s Facebook page. Then, if you feel the urge, you should log right in! It doesn’t matter what else you do.

Marc V: That doesn’t mean don’t do these things. Pay attention to them. Make things harder to reach, and really just put a focus on what is important, what’s right, and what’s really good. You’re going to be happy. Being self aware is going to make you much happier.

Mark S: Cool! I like that. Well, I think that’s it. Thanks very much for listening again. If you liked the podcast, we’d appreciate an honest review on iTunes.

Marc V: Absolutely! We appreciate you listening. Any feedback that you have for us, of some things you would like us to chat about, or topics you’d like us to discuss, definitely let us know. Reach out to us on Facebook groups or email, however you reach out to us. We’re here for you.

Mark S: Alright! This has been Mark Stephenson, from ColDesi.

Marc V: And Marc Vila, from Colman and Company.

Mark S: You guys have a great business!

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