If You Could Take Back Time… If You Could Find A Way… (To Focus)

As a business owner, does your “thinky time”/”working ON the business time” get moved all over the calendar? You find yourself canceling or “rescheduling” (in order to cancel later) this time more often than not.

And/or, you know the value of taking this time to get into deep focus, but right now your staff and your clients and your vendors are used to contacting you whenever they feel like it. You’re not entirely sure how (and maybe even if) to set these times without upsetting people.

As a reminder, as the business owner, work ON the business can only be done by you. It can’t be delegated out or automated, and it plays a major factor in how successful your business is and how well it thrives.

So if you’re not scheduling this time on a regular basis, not only are you shortchanging yourself, but also everyone who deals with your business. Right? This is isn’t selfish time, this is time necessary for a thriving business.

Is it time management or procrastination?

I think we’ve all pushed things around the calendar because we don’t really want to deal with them. I’ve done it myself: rescheduled and rescheduled and then finally said to myself, Ugh, I hate this, I’m never going to do it. Then I delete it, but I’ve wasted quite a bit of time thinking about it.

However, some things are necessary for the running of the business. Forms and finances, obviously, but also strategic direction.

Setting aside time for working on your business is non-negotiable, and it’s critical to schedule it at the right time for you – when your brain is best able to handle deep focus work.

Because it’s so critical to the health of you and your business, focus time is a Big Rock (if you’re familiar with Stephen Covey’s theory). It should be added to your calendar first and then let other appointments fill in around it.

That means no one, not even your best team member, supplier, or client, gets to infringe on this time.

Knowing what you want to accomplish during this time can help you get into the habit. Maybe there’s a project you’ve been wanting to finish. Maybe you want to review your business on a weekly basis and check in with your dashboard and make some prioritizing decisions. Maybe you want to write a book to help bring in more clients and build your authority. By consistently dedicating time to it, you’ll finish it.

Time management for Big Rocks

Now, you might be feeling that there’s no possible way that you can set aside even two hours a week, much less each day, for this work. 

(If you haven’t been able to make this time stick, start with a two-hour block each week, at the same time and same day, and then add more if you think it’s necessary.)

I hear this a lot from lawyers, who know I come from the financial world and aren’t sure the legal field can make it work. If litigation is your specialty, you’re at the court’s whim on scheduling. 

But what about the days you’re not in litigation? You could still set aside time on days when you’re not in court. It won’t be as consistent, but you’ll still get some deep focus time.

And this kind of thing absolutely can be done by lawyers. I know a family law practice whose team only works from 9 to 3 and they only respond to emails, no phone calls.

How does THAT happen?

Simple – communication of expectations upfront.

Like a lot of people, you probably assume that people will be upset if you tell them that you aren’t available at 8 pm for their thing. That everyone expects an immediate response to any contact they have with your company.

Yet in real life, most people are pretty reasonable. And if you frame it in the right way, in terms of what’s in it for them, they may actually applaud you for setting those boundaries. Or they might say, That sounds great, I wish I could do that! (At which point you send them my way, of course.)

It’s just managing expectations.

When I was a financial planner, clients would often send me their necessary documents at the end of the week, on Friday afternoon. None of them actually thought I would be doing the plan at that time; it was just their “let’s get everything out the door so it’s done and I can enjoy my weekend.” 

If you haven’t launched your business yet, think about what expectations you want people to have. You can be effective and deliver excellent client service without burning out yourself. That does mean you cannot be taking people’s calls at 7 pm unless you either don’t start work until noon or later, or it’s a genuine emergency.

Think about how you want people to contact you. For me, texting is fine if I’m meeting someone for coffee/lunch so we can coordinate more easily. However, I hate, hate, HATE when people text me about business, especially with forms to fill out. Send an email, thank you very much (yes, I’m Gen X.) 

If you’ve already launched your business and your phone is blowing up and you get calls at all hours, don’t worry, you don’t have to live this way any more. You will, however, need to explain the new framework to everyone. And probably more than once until it’s become the new norm.

Communicating your new time management schedule

If you’ve been allowing the focus time to move around willy-nilly, or you’ve never scheduled it at all, it’s a good idea to tell your team that you recognize this is different from the way you’ve been doing it.

Make clear that from now on, at thus-and-such time/day, you will not be available to them, to clients, to anyone, because you are working on things that require your focus. People are going to recognize this and agree that this is an important time that they will not broach, and then they’ll forget and try to move it or interrupt you.

If people persist in this mistake, then make them responsible for cleaning up the mess they created. For example, if they scheduled a client during your focus time, they have to call the client back and apologize and change it.

You also need to let suppliers and clients know that there are a couple of hours each day or week where you are unavailable. Since you’re the one paying the vendor, it shouldn’t be too much trouble to let them know. You might also give them the contact info for a staff member who can take care of things while you’re focusing.

The clients are what most people are worried about. But again, right now you’re probably assuming they’ll be unhappy. I suggest the following:

• Come up with the message you want to send. You might want to let your customers know that this is something you’ve been carefully considering, and have decided to go forward with it so that you can focus on client needs outside of this block of time. It’s important to mention somewhere in there how the clients will benefit from this.

• After you’ve got the message down, think about how you’ll communicate it. You might just send it in an email to all your clients. Or you may want to personally call your VIP clients to deliver the message. Maybe your staff members can talk to others. However you think it’ll land best with them.

• Schedule the outreach.

• Separately, add an autoresponder on every email/text you receive that says you’ve received the message. Most people just want to know that they’re on your radar, and this is an easy, automated way of doing that. But first you need to communicate as discussed above – if you’ve been answering at all hours, they’re used to it and probably won’t even notice the responder.

Recap (tl;dr)

You can carve out blocks of uninterrupted time to do deep work even if you haven’t been able to make it stick yet. Communication is key.

If you want a schedule that works for you and allows you to work reasonable hours, schedule your Laser Focus Accelerator session by clicking here.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash (and apologies to Cher.)