time management

Eliminate, Automate, and Delegate

April 6, 2010 By takethestairs 2 Comments

We live in a time where serious time management is needed. Keeping up with emails, messages, past clients, referral partners, family, new prospects, new recruits, business planning, budgets, and just the daily requirements of running a household is something that has so many of us stretched thin. And as just another guy who is “in the stairwell” struggling through these same issues with you I’m always attempting to find new ways for ultimate time management.

I have realized that it’s virtually impossible to keep up with all the things we could be doing and so we’re forced to have the discipline to figure out what are the most important things we need to be doing. In other words, discipline is not just about doing things right but about doing the right things right. And so I’ve been implementing my own system to help me gain some sanity and clarity about my time. Hopefully it will work for you, too. It’s called Eliminate, Automate, and Delegate.

Eliminate – This strategy is often overlooked because it’s so simple. But basically it just means that we need to clear our schedules of some of the things we spend time doing because we think we’re supposed to or because we’ve always done those things. Pay particular attention to “time-suckers” (tasks or people) and consider just straight up getting rid of them. Be asking:

What can I eliminate completely from my schedule? What things are not directly income-producing? What distractions can I avoid getting caught up in? And how can I get better at saying the word “no”? [please post a comment below of any simple phrases you use to tell people “no”]

Automate – Automating is an empowering skill because it makes you feel powerfully productive. To automate is to systematize and to organize without having your real-time involvement. Here are the questions to ask yourself:

How can I automate routine parts of my schedule? What are the things that I do over and over again that could be wholly or partially taken over by a machine, a computer program, or someone else (or a different department) here in the company?

Delegate – Many successful people are overloaded because we tend to be control freaks. We got to where we are by doing things on our own because we can do it fast and to high standards. However that is a losing long-term strategy because there is a point of diminishing returns as your work piles higher and higher; especially if you’re building people and/or a company. So you have to learn to let go and to empower others and you can start by asking:

Who can I delegate to? What are the things that I spend my time doing that someone else could be doing? Realize that at $100k per year your time is worth at least $48 per hour so ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing right now worth paying someone $48 to do?” If not, then try to think creatively about finding ways to get someone else to do the task.

As I’ve mentioned before I am a big believer in virtual assistants because you are building a personal team to support you and you provide additional jobs meanwhile forcing yourself to let go of tasks – which is healthy in and of itself – and develop as a leader who can more powerfully build others. If you need advice on how to train and work with your assistant, you can find more here: Working with a Virtual Assistant.

Please comment below to share hard core time management strategies you’ve employed to help you lead a more disciplined life.

For information on booking motivational speaker and self-discipline strategist Rory Vaden please visit us at www.roryvaden.com

For information on sales coaching, sales training, or sales consulting please visit www.southwesternconsulting.com

Have a college-aged student in your life that you want to introduce to success principles, entrepreneurship, and leadership? Have them check out The Southwestern Company paid internship at www.southwesterninternship.com

Join motivational speaker Rory Vaden’s Take the Stairs Tour:

Click Here

See you in the stairwell,

Rory Vaden
Take the stairs – Success means doing what others won’t.

Filed Under: Time Management Tips, Video Lessons Tagged With: mastering your email, time management, working with virtual assistants

3 Ways we lose time and what to do about it*

February 9, 2010 By takethestairs 9 Comments

* This is an excerpt from a live coaching call with one of my clients recently.

What I’ve discovered is that there are 3 primary ways we lose our time. And they are different than most people expect or realize.

A. Not knowing where you’re going next

Don’t waste a second – ever. Don’t let your goals and dreams fall victim to unplanned events. Anything that isn’t a part of your schedule is a distraction and should be minimized at all costs. Don’t be rude to people; just know that you should “always have a meeting to be at” in the next few minutes. There should always be somewhere you’re going next.
Have a written schedule and stick to it relentlessly. Your results are very often the output of your schedule. Do what is on your schedule all the time.

B. Fatigue

Physical – You need at least 6.5 hours of Sleep and if at all possible get 7-8. Vince Lombardi said “fatigue makes cowards of us all.” If you’re not energized you won’t be efficient.
Physical – Get your booty to the gym. Don’t let your body feed you the BS that you’re too tired to work out. Your body recharges from working out. Even if it’s 30 minutes for 3 days a week. Just get there! We see consistently that people who can just get their body into the gym can usually get motivated to do something once they’re there. Do it. Once you are physically there then get yourself amped up to crush it! Dominate your workout and hit it hard. Then go home and go to the next thing.
Emotional – Some of the best managers in the country forget this and they don’t realize that one thing that is holding them back is they never get emotionally recharged. If you’re pouring out into others you need to be refilling your emotional fuel tank. Find what fills you up spiritually and emotionally.
- Positive reading: John Maxwell – 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, Ken Blanchard – One Minute Manager, T Harv Eker – Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, Dale Carnegie – How To Win Friends and Influence People, John Maxwell – Leadership Gold, Jim Collins – Good to Great
- Read the Bible each day – at least 1 chapter.
- Church on Sunday with no excuses. Just go do it.
- Family – I find that spending actual time physically with family is very recharging. Sometimes on the phone it’s not always. Try to get some place that makes you feel like home and especially reconnecting with parents and letting them know how much they mean to you will naturally recharge you.

C. Having focus diverted across too many things

Imbalance is the new balance – The way most people think about balance is absurd. We tend to think of spending an equal amount of time on all different types of activities. Balance is not equal time across equal activities; it’s APPROPRIATE time across critical PRIORITIES. In other words, don’t try to be all things to all activities or try to do everything. Instead figure out what things are most important to you and imbalance your life in those directions.
Keystone Goal – Have 1 overarching goal that ties all your others together. A keystone goal isn’t necessarily the most important; it’s just the one that if you accomplish it, all of the others will happen as a bi-product.
Batching – multi-tasking means juggling lots of priorities; it doesn’t mean doing many tasks at once. Don’t try to be on Facebook while doing paperwork and taking cell phone calls. Doesn’t work. Focus is power. Blitz it hard. Paperwork for paperwork time. Gym for gym time. Family for family time. Pounding the phones during phone time. That simple.

Your results are just a bi-product of your schedule. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. You be consistent and relentless about your schedule. Work the system and allow the system to work for you. Put your self-esteem into your work habits and let the rest shake out as it may.

For information on booking motivational speaker and self-discipline strategist Rory Vaden please visit us at www.roryvaden.com

For information on sales coaching, sales training, or sales consulting please visit www.southwesternconsulting.com

Join motivational speaker Rory Vaden’s Take the Stairs Tour:

Click Here

See you in the stairwell,

Rory Vaden
Take the stairs – Success means doing what others won’t.

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Filed Under: Coaching Call Summary, Time Management Tips Tagged With: balance, efficiency tips, Motivational Speaker Rory Vaden, raising your performance, recruiting, Rory Vaden, Self Discipline Strategist, Self-Discipline, Take The Stairs, time management

Working with a Virtual Assistant: Part 2

November 27, 2009 By takethestairs 2 Comments

Remember that a major part of the objective of having a personal assistant is that he or she will hopefully become an extension of you. It’s the closest thing to being able to be in two places at one time. You want to train them to think as much like you as possible and to process things the way that you would process them.

Here are some key processes that will help you create a strong communication system of SOP (standard operating procedure) with your assistant:

Morning Call – Make sure that you talk the first 15 minutes of every day if at all possible. This is especially crucial with your very first assistant and during the first few weeks of working together. They can only accomplish what you direct them to and the more time you spend with them the more apt they are to start thinking and acting like you.
The “Don’t Forget” E-mail – Each morning you should get 1 e-mail with a list of bullets that simply state what times and with whom all of your scheduled and confirmed appointments are at for that day. Sometimes it helps to have your significant other CC’d as well so that they have an understanding of what you’re doing.
Daily Stats (Previous Weekly Stats on Monday) –Each morning you should get 1 e-mail with all of the activity stats of your entire team from the day before. That way you can quickly go through it and identify any “situations.” On Monday mornings there won’t be any stats, of course, so what you want to do is have him or her deliver a statistical recap of the prior week including daily performance, weekly totals, and totals to date for whatever period you are monitoring.
V-mail E-mail – Have your assistant check your voice-mail always and send you a bulleted list of who called and what actions were taken.
Master Travel Itineraries – Have your assistant think through all aspects of a trip when you head out of town including weather, special packing needs, addresses, phone numbers, air transportation, ground transportation, notes on payments that must be made or received upon arrival, etc.

Next is winning at the e-mail battle! One of the main items that your assistant can help you with is managing the flow and control of all of your incoming e-mail. Please read my article called “Don’t be a Digital Pack Rat: Winning the E-mail Battle.” When it comes to e-mail your goal is to get your inbox down to zero each day and you’ll want to do a couple things (this is how my assistant and I process such a large volume of e-mail each day):

Master E-mail (Mid Day Master E-mail) – this is basically 1 email from your assistant that consolidates all of the items that have hit your inbox and what actions have been taken on them. After some training he/she should be able to effectively complete 80% of your e-mails without your explicit instruction and then you will just see the action that was taken on the master e-mail. Typically I’ve requested 1 e-mail per day except when first working together at which time I ask for 2. Also, after time and trust has built you don’t even need to get this e-mail every day from your assistant because you can trust and know they are just taking care of stuff for you and then you would only need one on very high e-mail volume days or days where you’re not in front of a computer at all which may only be once in a while. Remember to forward e-mails to him/her out of your inbox with instructions on how to process each one. It is the #1 METHOD OF TRAINING for a virtual assistant. Give them very detailed instructions and have them catalogue certain types of e-mail instructions as SOP which should one day become a training reference guide for all assistants (you’ll need more as your business grows).

As far as specific types of e-mails, here are some more tips:

Batching weekly e-mails with attachments into one – If you have a bunch of people sending you attachments, have your assistant compile all of those e-mails into 1 e-mail with the necessary attachments you need. Or just have him/her store them and ask for the documents as you need them. (You can send a flip drive once a month to have them backed up and sent back to you).
Deleting multiple strings – It’s amazing how many e-mails we receive that we’re CC’d on with many other people. Have your assistant delete all the back and forth e-mails to a large e-mail group of people with the exception of the most recent one.
Social networking e-mails – He/she can accept all friend requests for you and then include in the master e-mail summary who you’ve connected with.
Calendar appointments – A very large number of e-mail have to do with calendar requests; COMPLETELY OUTSOURCE control of your calendar to your assistant. This empowers him/her to take care and process a majority of these with their own discretion. You simply create SOP for what types of activities should happen during what times of each day and what times of each week. For example, every Wednesday night is private date night with just AJ and I. My assistant knows not to schedule anything in that slot. There are many other protected times like church time, paying bills time, prospecting time, etc.

I know there is a lot here but this one thing alone will improve your efficiency and lower your stress tremendously. T. Harv Eker said in Secrets of the Millionaire Mind that middle class people think in terms of either/or; such as, “I can either make a lot of money and have a successful business OR I can have a great family life.” Rich people ALWAYS think in terms of both; such as, “I can make a ton of money AND have a great family life.” These strategies will help.

For information on booking motivational speaker and self-discipline strategist Rory Vaden please visit us at www.roryvaden.com

For information on sales coaching, sales training, or sales consulting please visit www.southwesternconsulting.com

Join motivational speaker Rory Vaden’s Take the Stairs Tour:

Click Here

See you in the stairwell,

Rory Vaden
Take the stairs – Success means doing what others won’t.

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Filed Under: Time Management Tips Tagged With: efficiency tips, raising your performance, Self Discipline Strategist, Self-Discipline, Take The Stairs, time management, virtual assistants

Don’t be a Digital Pack Rat: Winning the E-mail Battle

November 9, 2009 By takethestairs 5 Comments

E-mail and busy work is one of those things that is holding you back. It’s one area you’re sacrificing your business. It’s a challenge that many people have right now and here are some strategies for winning the e-mail battle.*
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Filed Under: Time Management Tips Tagged With: time management

Busy Being Busy: How to use Virtual Assistants to Manage Workload

July 27, 2009 By takethestairs 5 Comments

You wake up. Immediately you notice how tired you are from staying up too late the night before “catching up on things.” One of the first things you do is grab your phone and anxiety sets in as you notice that somehow you already have over a dozen emails waiting for you! On the way to work you anguish over your growing to do list with items carrying over from weeks before. You sit down at work to start answering some of these emails and to your horror you find that they are coming in faster than you can send them out! Not only that but every time you send one out it’s almost like you get two back! Throughout the day you have voicemails, texts, social networking messages, meetings, personal errands to run, client follow ups, and a whole series of interruptions that constantly leave you feeling like you’re behind. Sound familiar? Ever think that just “keeping up” with everything could be a full time job? Guess what? You might be right.

This lifestyle is astoundingly and sadly common among ambitious professionals and it is created by the one common problem that many of us have which is a lack of systems to manage workflow. Fortunately there is a new modern solution; it’s called Virtual Assistants – or what I more appropriately refer to as “Virtual Assistance.”

The days of only top executives having assistants are over. In this internet age hundreds of thousands of people are turning to a rapidly developing trend of working with VAs. They are fairly easy to find, cheaper than you might expect, and if you know “the system” for working with them they can dramatically change your lifestyle. Here is the 6 step process for finding, hiring, training, and working with quality VAs.

Step 1 –Question Yourself critically. If you’ve been following my work for a while, you know that one of the antitheses of the disciplined “Take The Stairs Mentality” is what we call creative avoidance. That is creating busy work for yourself just to avoid doing things you know you need to be doing. No amount of VA will solve your lack of discipline so be brutally honest and decide first if you can eliminate some of these tasks or if there is legitimate admin work that needs more time than you have.

Step 2 – Inventory Your Workflow. Okay, busy bee. If you really think you’re that busy, then write out a detailed list of all of the activities that you are currently doing that could be outsourced to someone else. This does two things: it validates your decision on step 1 above and it becomes the game plan for training your VA(s). If your list isn’t incredibly long, then you are fooling yourself and you’re creatively avoidant which means you need to develop more discipline. Fortunately there is a guy who has a great blog full of articles that can help you with that and you can find it at www.takethestairstour.com .

Step 3 – Create Job Descriptions. Working off of the list you just created you can now come up with a list of skills and resources that a person would need to have in order to complete those activities for you. I suggest a two-paragraph simple description that summarize: A. What types of things you need done and B. What skills you are specifically looking for in a VA.

Step 4 – Post To Virtual Marketplace. This is the magic of the internet. There are dozens of websites or virtual marketplaces (almost like digital flea markets) that are free and open 24/7 helping to connect people with skills looking for work, and people with jobs looking for help. My buddy Timothy Ferriss has lots of them listed in “4-Hour Workweek” or you can Google Virtual Assistants or you can use my favorites:

Create a free profile on any of these sites and “post a new job” where you paste in your job description. Set a budget for what you’re willing to pay for a person like this and for the number of hours you want them to work. (If your goal is to make $100k, then your time is worth $52/hr so pony up some dough to help you get there.) Of course, the higher skilled tasks you need accomplished the more you are going to have to pay. VAs are available from $2-$20 per hour. $5-$7 for overseas and $7 -$9 for US can get you some quality resumes.

Step 5 – Identify Key Characteristics. Think ahead of time about what type of person you want representing you. This depends on the amount (if any) of communication they’ll be having with your customers. I recommend you start someone with just a few hours as a trial basis but present the vision of building with them for the long term. Phone interviews are best, skype works, or many of the marketplaces have a live chat function that works just as well. These marketplaces score their providers so you can read testimonials of people who’ve worked with them in the past and how they’ve scored in specific areas on tests.

Step 6 – Begin Outsourcing. Start by delegating simple tasks first. See how your VA(s) manage. If you don’t like one, go get a new one. Create a to-do list each day for your VA to accomplish. It’s simple; create one for yourself first and then look to see which items you can outsource. Of course for some things you need a physical person but it’s amazing how much you can do virtually. Many VA(s) are experienced with online programs that can do things you’ve never heard of. Another simple way to get started is to start forwarding them emails from your inbox with specific instructions for how to complete the objective. If you want more tips on how to work with your VA leave a comment for me and I’ll consider posting more on this.

By the way, this post was written on a plane by me but then emailed to a team of virtual assistants who edited it, posted it, hyperlinked it, social bookmarked it, added it to my social networking profiles, and notified you that it was available. There are few things in my recent life that I appreciate more than my amazing team of VAs. They have given me my life back and improved my ability to do things that generate more money and maximize my passions and skills. They can free up your time so that you can do more important things like TAKE THE STAIRS.

This process does work and it will give you your life back if you have the discipline to implement it with consistency and focus like anything else. Discipline does not mean your life has to always be hard. Remember my theory: the short-term easy often creates long-term difficult but the short-term difficult often creates the long-term easy. VAs are a prime example of how being disciplined to take a step backwards will help you have a more enjoyable and productive life in the long run. There is much more to be learned about working with VAs. If you like this topic and want more information on it please leave a comment and I’ll take the time to explain more.

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Join the Take The Stairs Tour:

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See you in the stairwell,

Rory Vaden
Take the stairs – Success means doing what others won’t.

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Filed Under: Time Management Tips Tagged With: accountability, efficiency tips, focus, Motivational Speaker, performance expert, raising your performance, sales performance, Self-Discipline, Take The Stairs, time management, virtual assistants

Get Control of Your Email -Tim Ferriss' 9 Habits to Stop Now!

June 24, 2009 By takethestairs 2 Comments

Hey Everyone,

Some of you know that I’m a big follower of Timothy Ferriss, author of 4 Hour Work Week. He and I were introduced last year via the National Speakers Association annual convention.

This one particular article that he wrote is so relevant to many of you who are looking to maximize your life performance. It deals specifically with how to control the flow of email and incoming busy work. We always talk about what are the right habits to start developing. These are powerful habits that Tim says you should stop immediately.

Score yourself to see how many of these you are actually doing. This does work!

Read the list here: Tim’s “Not-To-Do-List” – 9 Habits to STOP NOW