Find TIME

SHORT ANSWER:

You have to prioritize. You are going to start with just 15 minutes.

Where did you spend 15 minutes today that could have been used to work on your business?

Were you watching videos? Standing in line? Walking the dog? Listening to idle gossip? Hanging at a store?

Somewhere in your day you have 15 minutes.

Identify just that first block of time and use it to begin researching your business idea.

You will soon find you enjoy spending time on your business, and those 15 minute blocks will become available throughout your day.

LONG ANSWER:

Find the TIME to Start Your Business is about Redirecting Minutes towards your Goal

Yes, you are going to have to prioritize. We will not magically event a 28-hour day for you. You are going to have to decide whether you want to really be an entrepreneur and live your dream lifestyle or do you want to waste another day and lose another opportunity.

To find time you must understand what time is, literally.

Remember this Chinese proverb: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

You have time. All the time available going forward. But you have to get started.

At Ready Entrepreneur, we handle time differently than most people. We believe you have plenty of time. And we believe this because we use of time systematically to maximize efficiency with every minute. Do not be alarmed that you are going to have keep a timesheet and clipboard and walk around all day tracking every minute. The way we do this is so straight-forward – you will be able to run the practices in your head. And before you know it, you will have all the time you need for your business.

You will find time from the time you are using now to do whatever it is you’re doing.

In other words, there will be trade-offs.

You will be giving up an activity, for example movie night, and using the time to work on your business. You have to understand and be committed to making changes in your life to find the time you need for your business.

To Find Your Time:

Take the schedule, activities and habits you already have and re-purpose those events towards your business building goals.

Easier said than done?

How about: Said now Do!!

Your objective is to remember why you are making these changes: You want to be an entrepreneur running your own business to achieve your entrepreneurial dreams. You are going to find the time from your existing resources and redirect those minutes to your business.

How to Think about Time

Factually…

Remember from school, the 24-hour clock for the day is based on the rotation of the earth. The concept is a natural as well as a man-made understanding. That is the earth is going to rotate. And we as humans have decided to track this spinning world. You may also remember, the months of the year are based on the revolution of the moon around the earth, and the year is based on earth’s orbiting around the sun.

Time is real, and humankind has determined time by counting. We are counting the natural cosmic movements of earth, sun and moon – to keep track of our own existence. The cosmic movements are real – the counting is our added man-made contribution.

Each day you have 24 hours, and each year either 8,760 hours or 8,784 hours. This is the yearly time you have to work with to find your time to launch your business.

Are you seeing already where you might be able to grab a few hours here and there – from the nearly 9,000 available each year?

Subtract: working and sleeping = 4,992 hours

Assuming you work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 52 weeks of the year. You are dedicating 2,080 hours to labor.

In general if you sleep 8 hours a day, 7 days a week for 52 weeks of the year – that’s 2, 912 hours (I know no working woman gets that much sleep but let’s keep it simple).

You have 3,768 hours left to do everything else.

3,768 hours is nearly half the year. In fact, it’s 22 weeks, more than five months.

What is everything else? eating, exercising, playing with the kids, date night, walking the dog, housekeeping, groceries, , studying, movie night, weddings, holidays…and launch a business.

You have the five months. The time may not be clearly visible within your day but you are going to find those five months, scattered throughout the year and use that time to launch your business.

Prioritize every activity that is not critical to your business building objectives.

As an entrepreneur, for example, you are going to dedicate time to your business over time spent socializing. All of the partying your friends are doing is not critical to your business – unless your business is based on observing partying. Which sounds interesting, so let us know what that’s about if that’s your business idea.

But in general, watching the latest popular show or going to a movie are not critical either. But going to the movie at least once a month may be critical to your relationship with your spouse. Or celebrating a friend’s wedding may be critical to your friendship. But not every event is critical.

Where does time go?

Maybe you’re saying: I can’t believe I have five months of unscheduled time each year. I feel like I’m working and at least trying to sleep all day.

You must figure out where your time goes.

Attached to every activity we undertake – even sleep – there is likely a time-consuming ritual. You have to get ready, groom yourself – before going to work. You have to drive or commute to every activity or event. You have to eat and find the time to purchase and prepare your food. You have to manage your bills, taxes and even junk mail. Around the house, you have to look after the yard or shovel snow.

If you have kids, they may be of an age where you have to do everything you do for yourself – clothes, food, grooming – for them.

Or a dog – same story

How much of your time is spent leading up to these activities?

And when you do the activities, how much of the time is actual activity, and how much is busy work because the systems you have in place for getting things done are inefficient?

Could one day of organization save you one hour of time each day for years ahead?

Understand Your Day

How does your schedule work and where is time being used that can be repurposed?

Critically look at your day:

Take literal or virtual note of every single activity you do especially those rituals and habits you have when you are preparing to do something else.

For example, your workday morning ritual may look like this:

7 am – Alarm goes off – you do not get up – you hit snooze
7:15 – Get up – straight to morning grooming – shower, change
8:00 – Make and Eat Breakfast
8:30 – Depart for work – commute
9:15 – Arrive at work

Look at how you use time around each of those activities:

Maybe you take an extra 15 minutes for each of the following:
- To sleep – Is this sleep needed or is hitting snooze an old habit that has just not faded away?
- To get dressed – Have you decided what to wear each day or do you stare at your clothes?
- To prepare breakfast – Do you scramble (pun intended) to find utensils and food in a disorganized kitchen?
- To commute – Are you sitting in the car cursing at other drivers or on a train or bus staring out the window?

If those scattered extra 15 minutes – from just the first two hours of the morning were consolidated – you would have 45 minutes a day, or 8 days worth of available time for the year.

This is just an illustration. But it might sound familiar. Does your time go into habits and rituals you have set-up for yourself that do not maximize the use of time?

You want to be aware of the activities you are actually engaged in as the day goes by because you are looking for the minutes available to you each day to run your business. This may sound like a tedious or even sad exercise, but we want to help you avoid saying you have no time to start a business. We are asking you to do a critical assessment of the time you are using now – to find the time you want for your own lifestyle dream.

Do the same exercise for your workday, evening and weekend activities?

Organize Your Day

Okay, you have been thinking about where your business-related minutes and hours can come from and you are still not sure the time is realistic…this is the point where you can make habit changes in your day to ensure more time by removing redundancies and inefficiencies from your routine tasks.

For example, here are 3 ideas for finding more time at home:

Reorganizing your kitchen to reflect the way you access and prepare your food. Take a couple of hours on the weekend, and reset your cupboards, pantry and fridge for workdays versus other times. This will remove the day-to-day decision-making from your consideration to let you focus on tasks that add value to your life, like setting up your business. Organizing your kitchen may sound like a chore – but it’s a couple of hours chore, one time, to save you several minutes every day over years. And you don’t have to be all Martha Stewart about the task, just come up with a system that removes the decision-making and the contemplation from your daily routine habits.
Set up a permanent location for everyday items – wallet, purse, keys – and stick with it. Put these items in their designated location each day and your other everyday items as well. Do not spend time worrying about where these items are located.
How about – Are you going out every day to buy coffee instead of making it at home? How long does that take? You may argue you have to have coffee to function, that’s fine – but is there a faster way to get that cup. Break routines that use time you want to have available for business start-up tasks.

Any repeated daily activity should be done on a set framework that you do not even have to think about. Free yourself from the beginning by reducing the time you spend on low value added tasks.

In summary, the Ready Entrepreneur practice for TIME:

Critically examine the time you spend on activities each day
Look at the activities leading to activities – what do you habitually do leading up to and after an activity
Break out those snippets of time to use for your business activities

Keep Repeating: I have the time to work on launching my own business.

PRIORITIZE YOUR ENTREPRENEURIAL DREAM

Understanding time and managing your available hours is about resetting how you think about time. And remember these practices do not have to last forever. This is about getting you to the starting line to launch your business.

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