How to Maintain Time and Energy in Your Business

Do you find that even though we have an endless supply of gadgets to manager our time and productivity that you STILL can’t get anything done?

I suffer from this phenomenon and I know you do too. (even if you won’t admit it)

The problem is not so much that we don’t have enough “time”. “Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein,” says H. Jackson Brown Jr.

Really it’s about keeping your energy levels high enough to ensure that you finish at least one of your most important tasks for the day.

“The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not,” say Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr in The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal . Their message: To be a consistently high performer, you have to manage your energy, not your time.

There’s just not enough hours in a day and it’s not possible to be productive the whole time.

In today’s vLog I talk about a few ways to manage your energy, so you that you can manage your time. Let’s dive in:

• Accept that you do not have to be a morning person to be productive.

Man, do I struggle with this one…..I am NOT a morning person. I’m just not. I like to put my kids in bed at 9:00, go downstairs, pour a beer and watch some Netflix. Around 11:30 I hit the sack and call it a night. When my alarm goes off at the ungodly hour of 6:12am (I do have responsibilities to get a husband off to work as well as my kiddos off to school!) I roll over about 2 or 3 times to hit the snooze button. I hate the mornings. But, since I’m always reading about ways to be more productive, I can’t help but notice in everything I read, they all say to get up early and end early! So I tried it. The only thing that happened was being groggy and worthless until about 9:15 or so.

• Determine the hours where you work best.

To figure out when you work best, take a week and monitor your work habits and tasks. What time did you sit down and work? What hours did you actually complete a task on your list? Also, take note of how you felt during those hours. If you felt energized, vs. groggy, then this most likely is the best time for you to work!

• Block your best hours

Now that you know what times work best for you to get things done, be sure to block them in your calendar. Block them on your phone, your planner, your kitchen whiteboard, wherever. Each day, during those hours, attack the things on your list you need to complete. The rest of the day is left for you to do other things like have coffee with a client, attend a networking meeting, or go to the gym.

• Organize and prioritize your tasks

Now comes the fun part. Take a list (I like spreadsheets) and write down (type in) all of the tasks you do in a week to keep your business going. Enter the tasks that you need to do for the week to make money. Enter the mundane tasks, like social media scheduling, too.

To be effective, you need to be able to separate important tasks from urgent ones and focus on getting important activities done when you are most active.

Urgent tasks are productivity killers.

Urgent tasks are those that need to responded to NOW, on the defensive. Urgent tasks are not always important. When you take a look at the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, you will learn that what’s important is seldom urgent, and what’s urgent is seldom important. Important tasks are things that contribute to your long-term mission, values, and goals. Important tasks also are those that contribute to your bottom line. (i.e. money)

Identify areas of your life where you are wasting time and try to reduce these. Review your most common meetings, interruptions, and other activities and see what you can do to move these out of your most energetic, productive times.

A good way to do this is to log everything you do for a week in meticulous detail and then examine your record to see how you use (or misuse!) your time.

By first understanding your own work habits and style, you will learn time management. Without it, you will end up chasing a never-ending list of tasks, and a feeling of disappointment at the end of each week!

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