How to budget your time - properly

Transcript

This week we’re talking about what makes a difference and picking the activities that we want to be able to do that actually make a difference. And I’m going to walk you through my own thinking about how I’m doing this for my own business. Hey, my name’s Mike. Welcome to Lone Wolf Unleashed.

So this podcast is one of the things that I’m doing for my business, is going to help me grow my business.

There’s all this traditional business advice that goes into talking about, oh, you need to be on all these channels and you need to maximize your reach and you need an X, Y, Z.

And this is coming from people that I suspect don’t know what it is to actually do all those things in the time that it takes to actually do all of those things. Unless you like, 100% full time dedicated to it.

But this is a problem because I have a life outside of business that I want to live, and I’m assuming that you also have a life outside of business that you want to live.

And so that means that we have to be very intentional about the things that you and I have to do on the things that actually make a real meaningful difference. So I’m going to draw your attention to a conversation I had with my producer about this, Neil.

We were talking about social clips because he’s very kindly done up some social clips for me. And I looked at them, I was like, I don’t actually know that I even want to use these.

And if I’m going to use them, then I’ll probably want to tweak them to be different or whatever that is. And yes, I could create video templates and all that sort of stuff to do that and then use those to post to the different social channels.

I really rely and trust in Neil’s experience when it comes to growing podcasts. Right. I said, I’ll have to play with the format.

I’m not convinced that people are going to really like this and I’ll have to play with a format that I like. And he said, that’s fair. You’ve got to be happy with what you put out. But I’ll push back one more time and then leave it with you.

It’s easy to overthink this stuff. Remember, social media clips are less than 1% of your podcast traffic. It’s more about social channel engagement that shows activity than anything.

So don’t invest too much time on perfecting this. Neil knows who he’s talking to here. I am really about managing my time and doing the stuff that makes A difference.

And so I basically said, well, I’ve been thinking about ditching socials altogether actually. And he says, wow, that’s a 180 and a half right there. I said, I don’t know, what if I just focus 100% on the podcast and newsletter?

And he said, those are definitely your biggest needle pushes. And I would say, along with your YouTube.

So I then made the point that I don’t just want to spend 20% of my time on something that is going to move the needle 1%. Here’s a couple of principles. If you’ve been in business for five minutes, you probably will have heard of the 8020 principle or Pareto’s principle.

And basically what it talks about is the fact that you get 80% of your results from just 20% of your activity, which means that if I want to maximize and get to a hundred percent, I then need to use 80% of my energy to get the last 20% of those results. I have a lot of stuff going on, right. I can’t just look at my business in isolation of everything else in my life.

I need to be very intentional and very deliberate about how I spend that time. Because this whole lie about business, life integration, it’s not even the same order of magnitude. You think about fruit.

My kids have learned this relatively early on because we do a lot of wordplay at home. You know, we talk about apples and oranges or bananas and things like that stuff that we have around the house.

Apples, bananas, oranges, they are all what? They’re all fruit. It’s a different order of magnitude.

And when people try to put business and life next to each other, it’s not the right order of magnitude, is not a fair comparison. Life is a higher order magnitude than businesses. And so business is just a component of your life that you need to try to make work together.

So, you know, if I’m just talking about this in terms of my business, posting to socials doesn’t actually make a whole lot of sense for me. You know, if I have a Look at my LinkedIn reach, these are my post impressions over the last seven days. It’s down significantly. 40%.

825 members reached. My post engagement has not been particularly good. Then I take a look at how much time my social posts take me to do.

It doesn’t take me a whole lot of time, but it probably takes me just as much or a little more effort than doing the podcast episodes and doing my newsletter, which is kind of crazy when you think about it, because if I Look at my podcast stats. I’m going to air my Dirty Laundry here. So at time of recording, the first two episodes have been released.

Over that time, I have almost 1900 downloads across two episodes, plus the trailer. And I’m getting yesterday 28 downloads. And my downloads to listens at the moment is basically a one to one relationship.

So, I mean, that’s pretty good. Last week, episode one did around 650 downloads, which is really nice, right? Overall, really great.

And I’m gonna hazard a guess here and say that the listens of this podcast are gonna be a much higher targeted audience for who I want to be my future customers than that of LinkedIn. Because I got most of my followers on LinkedIn when I was posting very frequently in 2020, 2021. But they’re all people like me.

They’re all process professionals, they’re all business analysts, they’re all project managers. They’re not my customers.

If I’m really interested in sitting down and working through here about what that means for how I conduct my activity in the future, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for me to be posting to LinkedIn. Not unless I want to be growing a focused audience on LinkedIn. And quite frankly, I don’t love it. You know, I’m on there a lot.

I could live without it. If I’m to be really honest with you. That’s got me thinking, do I actually want to be spending all this time over here on socials?

The answer to that is no, of course not. Again, intentional. Be intentional about what we’re doing.

We have to form up a plan here about what the different channels are going to be that I’m going to be using. And then I’m going to have to work out a plan on how those channels are going to work and interact with each other.

I’ve done a little bit of this in Obsidian already, but I’m going to work through a little plan here, just on the social side of things, on the marketing side of things. So I have three buckets here that I basically want to start to work through. There’s the newsletter goes out twice weekly.

There’s the podcast, which goes out once weekly. And then there’s YouTube, which I have not started yet. I’ve started the channel but done nothing else with it.

If I have one or two days a week, that’s all I have time for in managing these things. I contract three to four days a week elsewhere. And that means that I only realistically have two, one or two days to work with.

But because my processes are really good for these first two, I know I’ll be able to kick up this third one really well. And the reach is going to be really good because of the research and preparation that I do for it. Have a think now about how this could apply to you.

What are the things? It doesn’t have to be just social media or marketing. It can be the types of services you offer. It can be what you spend your time on.

Think about how you do that for yourself. What are you spending time on that really is only moving the needle? Not much.

If it’s not moving the needle much and it’s taking you two hours a week, it may not even be worth doing. We’re talking about setting up a life of freedom.

Why did I start this podcast is to help solopreneurs, solo operators out there, manage their time better so they can spend time living and not working. Remember that why you started your business in the first place? For freedom. Right. How many hours did you work last week? 60? 70. Have a think about it.

If we really do want to live a life of freedom, then we need to be very intentional about the way that we’re spending our time. I’m going to put in a bucket now. How much time do I spend on each of these things? So this one is going to be about 30 minutes.

Yes, you read that, right? I only spend about 30 minutes doing newsletter issues each week. And then the podcast I might spend an hour a week, which is not a whole lot.

I’ll make it an hour and a half. What is it, 90 minutes? If I have six hours of work, that is enough for me on this day because I’ve got other things that I want to be doing.

So just being available for my family, you know, If I got six hours, six times six is 360 minutes. Then on Thursday afternoons, which is the day that I normally record this stuff, I also see a client one to one in the afternoon.

Realistically, I’ve got less than six hours to work with on a Thursday. Let’s call it 240. How can we do this on 240? 240 minutes. 240 minutes a day, right. So this is 120. That’s half already spent on newsletter and podcast.

What’s the last one? The Last one is YouTube. That means that we have only 120 minutes to work with for recording and editing and whatever of that.

So my question now is where is the leftover time here for socials? I already think that 120 minutes for YouTube is going to be pushing it either. I get way better at doing these other things.

I’m already pretty quick on these things, if I’m to be honest. How do I do this Now? This is just a marketing content.

The next thing I want to talk about is how we’re going to kick up a program to support people to do this. So this means that I now need some more time, which I’m working through now. My contract previously was 32 hours a week.

I’m going to be hopefully pulling that back to 24 hours a week, which means I have another day to work with where I can work on purely and simply curating awesome content for exclusive access. Not just content, but other stuff as well. Now, the Wolf Pack is curated community content, connections.

It’s getting on the same page about what you want out of life. It’s supporting, it’s accountability, it’s all of that sort of stuff.

And I want to make this an amazing experience, which means I need to dedicate the time to it. And if I dedicate a day, a week to do that now, it doesn’t have to be a day all in one shot, right?

But I can split this across multiple days and I can have a constant engagement with people at certain times throughout the week. That works. The Wolfpack will be designed for engagement, for questions. We can talk about pretty much anything in there around saving time.

What your goals are, what your aspirations are and then how you actually build a business that supports those.

Rather than running yourself into the ground wondering why you never see your wife and children and wondering why your kids have forgotten what you look like. That’s a little bit dramatic. But it is happening out there today, right? I’ve been part of networking groups. I’ve seen this firsthand.

Marriage is breaking down. Sacrificing your family on the altar of business success. I don’t want to see people do that. I want to see people live fulfilling lives.

I want to see people live intentional lives.

And I don’t want to see people being non player characters in life and business being because that’s what they’ve been sold before as what success is. Don’t want that for me and I don’t want that for you. This is how I’m breaking it down. Right? It’s very, very easy.

How much time do you have to work with? I’m not saying that I have eight hours available a day. It’s a fantasy. I don’t have the availability. I’m very clear of my priorities.

I’m available for School drop off in the morning, I should be available as options for pickup in the afternoon. I don’t work. Certain nights, I’m not available. My wife and I catch up one to one on Monday nights.

We chat, we walk through the Bible together, we pray together, we check in with each other, we see how each other’s going. We actually we form that deep relationship with one another. We’re very purposeful about it. We protect that time together.

If someone comes and asks me whether I can make a business event on a Monday night, my answer is already no. I’ve already pre decided what the answer to that is going to be. Does that cost me business opportunities? It absolutely does.

But people who say that and try to work around that don’t have their priorities right in my eyes.

And during the day for me to be able to have that sort of flexibility, the flexibility I told myself that I was going to have when I started a business, actually build it in, that means I have to be realistic about the total buckets of time that I actually have to work with. Similar to a fuel tank, right? When you go on a big trip, you budget where you stop around how much capacity you have.

You need to do that with your time. I’ve only dedicated myself to 240 minutes a day. There’s only 240 minutes a day to work with.

And if I’ve got two days total a week to work with, then that means I have a total of 12 hours to work with to get these things done. Which means I now have to figure out a way of doing really good engaging YouTube content in just two hours a week.

I honestly don’t know if it can be done. I’ve never really done the YouTube thing before, so we should see how that goes.

I’ve got another day that to really work on exclusive content, to do the really high value walkthroughs and systems work and playing with automation and what AI can do for you and all of those sorts of things. If I’m really intentional about that, then it’s going to be a wonderful experience for people to come into and be willing to pay money for.

This is just me being open with you. The reality is is I’m running a business here.

I need to be able to make money and I want to be able to help as many people as possible make it as accessible as possible. And this is the way that I believe that it can be done. So if you’re interested in joining the Wolfpack, you should totally reach out to me.

You can email me mikeonewolfunleashed.com There is going to be course like thing in there but I don’t want the course to be the reason why people come and stay.

Why we come and stay is going to be engaging with other human beings so that we can support each other in growing lives being empowered by businesses that really work for us in our own circumstances.

The newsletter bros out there will tell you that, oh, you know, every subscriber counts and blah blah blah and whatever it is, a lot of these people are coming through boosts.

And if I look at where people have come from LinkedIn referral 2 Facebook 1 the channels that these people are coming through are just not high enough for me to really justify doing that.

And because they’ve come in off LinkedIn, it’s chances are they’re a person that was is more interested in what I’m doing than being actual ongoing customer. They’re probably not in the space. They may not even be a business owner.

So the answer to my question at the start of this episode was should I be posting to socials? The answer to this is no, I shouldn’t be kill LinkedIn. Don’t post to that.

I’m actually just going to stop and I will Maybe log into LinkedIn to comment on stuff and message a couple of people occasionally. But I’m certainly not going to be spending a lot of time creating content in here because quite frankly, it’s not worth it.

I’m going to go and cancel my scheduling tool because I don’t need that. If I’m just doing these channels here. That should be straightforward enough. That means I’ve saved myself a subscription and I’ve saved myself time.

I’ve saved myself money because I don’t have to fork out each month and I don’t have to be worrying about stuff that is not moving the needle that much. Okay, remember, if 20% of your activity is getting 80% of your results, look at the activity that you’re doing that’s driving those results.

If that activity is driving your results, cut the stuff that’s not. And if you can focus on that 20%, your results should by definition go up because you’re focusing on those activities that really move the needle.

So to wrap up the lesson, spend your time wisely, budget it. Know how much you actually want to be working right, know what’s on on your week, know what you want to be able to do with your days.

Cut the stuff that doesn’t matter, that doesn’t move the needle much. And then when you’ve budgeted your time and you know how much time you have to work with, try to stuff everything you’re doing into that time.

If I’m going to be realistic with myself and only spend six hours a day working rather than eight, then that means I need to stuff all my activity into that six hours for that day. It’s not a whole lot of time, is it? Like lastly, the YouTube is going to be kicking off. Head over to the YouTube Mike Fox Lone Wolf Unleashed.

You can check that out, you can subscribe and get ready for me posting videos over there.

And if you’re interested in joining the Wolfpack, it is a dedicated curated community for solopreneurs who want their lives back, who want to be held accountable for the time that they’re spending in their business and spending on enhancing and enriching their lives.

If you want to figure out how to plan your time better, if you want to talk about automation or platforms or AI or any of those things about saving time, that’ll be the place to do it.

It’ll also be a place to connect with like minded people who want to live life and want to use their business to enhance their life, not have their life run by their business. Thank you so much. I will make sure there’s a resource on my website to talk about time budgeting.

If you go to lonewolfunleashed.com forward slash budget, that is lonewolfunleashed.combudget. i’ll walk through how to actually budget your time. I will even include a little video. So that’s it for this week.

I wanted to thank you for spending your time with me today.

I know there’s heaps of other podcasts and things you could have been listening to, but you decided to spend it with me and for that I want to thank you for your time. If you’re interested in finding out more, head over to lonewolfunleashed.com check out the newsletter and I’ll see you shortly.