Most 5 star CPA Google reviews in Canada
Helping Canadian businesses beat the odds!
Hi. Thanks for joining us for another edition of ask spurl CPA. Today we’re talking about scheduling for productivity. I Have Laura here with me again. So Laura, any, uh, any finance coming up for the spring or summer studying? Anything besides studying at all? Taking a trip to DC trip to BC. Okay. Beautiful. BC. Everyone wants to get away from Alberta to BC. But, um, the quote that we have here today is from Zig Ziglar. If you don’t plan your time, someone else will wasted for you. Edmonton Business Coach, so the statistic is, you know, we all have 168 hours in the week, but some people are getting drastically more done than others. And the story that we have here is, you know, business owners, they’re busy but they’re not accomplishing any of their strategic goals that they’re putting in a ton of work, but they’re not growing their business and they probably don’t know why. So Laura, what are the questions that these business owners should be asking if they want a schedule for productivity? Most important email in your inbox. Yeah. Here’s the people working from their inbox as we call it. You know, whatever shows up in the email and that’s what they’re going to do. I have never had a client yet who emailed me and said, Hey Josh, have you done your marketing objectives today? Because I really just want to make sure that you still have customers next week.
Lauren, you check the emails here. Have you seen this one happened? No, I don’t think this is, this has never happened customers, but we’ll never remind you about your strategic objectives there. They’re just not going to, uh, to do it so that you know the, the, the most burning fire that’s in your inbox is probably not going to be the number one objective of the corporation. It might be very important to that customer and we do have to have time to deal with it. But you know, if all we do is work out of our, our inbox, we’re never going to do the real important strategic objectives of the business. What is time blocking? So time blocking is the exercise of setting aside specific blocks of time in the future to accomplish specific tasks. So it, it’s not, you know, someone calls up and says, Hey, I want to meet with you.
And then you say a lot, you know, three o’clock. It’s actually having blocks of time saying these are, when I do my client appointments, these are when I have time to do the administrative tasks of the business. These are one and a half time to do the strategic work in marketing of the business. So time blocking is actually assigning future blocks of time in the future, you know, locking them in. So we’re tackling, you know, specific items at specific times in the future. Is it okay to be unreachable during certain timelines? 100% and in fact, you almost should be unreachable for some time blocks for sure. You shouldn’t be 100% reachable all the time. You’re just going to simply cut down on your productivity. You know what? I can take up to 23 minutes to get to your peak level of, uh, uh, intellectual capacity after being interrupted. So you, you should have certain time blocks where you are unreachable unit. You don’t want to be knowing your customers. It depends on how big your team is. Is there someone else who can address the query as well? You know, you’re doing that focus work, but you know, you should definitely have some time blocks that you are unreachable. Um, and that’ll just make you more productive on that task at hand.
Why is it important to have time set aside for marketing even when you’re busy?
Yeah, marketing needs to be one of your time blocks. Edmonton Business Coach, because the marketing of [inaudible] that work, you know, the initiatives that work, our marketing initiatives that you do consistently. So if all of your marketing is based on a stop and start, I do it now, I get busy, then I don’t do it, then I started again. You’re actually going to have to invest more time to get the same result. So it, whereas if you know marketing objectives that work or ones that you consistently do, you’re consistently running. Those ads are consistently pulling it by pushing out content. You’re consistently contacting your ideal and likely buyers and people who can refer it to you. Um, it’s that consistency that actually is a efficient. So if you don’t time block, uh, those marketing initiatives and you know, you get your market initiatives, they’re not going to work or they’re actually gonna take more time.
How does time blocking checklist and template improve? Same time.
Yeah. So if you actually have blocks of time set aside to do checklists and templates, you’re going to save time because now these checklists and templates, they make your job easier. They’re going to reduce the number of errors that you make. They’re going to increase the level of satisfaction that business that your customer is going to have because you know, the certain things that you can’t think you do in every single mall do you have, you have a checklist of things to remind you. Or if you have a really good email response, uh, to a particular, you know, frequently asked question or something like that, you’re just going to deliver to a higher standard and you’re going to have less of those burning fires to put out because the customers just going to be happier with the product that they’re receiving.
What happens when people think admin and other tasks will get done in free time?
Yeah, so the, the, the kind of the fallacy that that happens, sometimes it business owners, they think that all, yeah, those tests, I’ll do them when I get home when I’m s, you know, when I’m laying in bed at night when I’m trying to watch Netflix and do these set, uh, at the same time, or I’m going to do these at the, uh, at the kids’ hockey game. Or, you know, when this happens, I might do this. If you don’t have a specific time set aside, what happens is the task don’t get done. And often those tasks are the more strategic tasks. So often they’re the ones that, you know, the, it’s not the customer, you know, calling and asking and asking for something that you need to give them. That’s, you know, top of mine. It’s the things that actually need to get done in order for you to, to grow your business and get more customers or deliver the, the service at a higher standard or build the team that’s going to be necessary to help you deliver this a, a product and service at scale.
Do you most people underestimate the time required for recruiting, training and HR? Yeah. Edmonton Business Coach, so most people think that that’s not a time block that needs to go in their schedule, that they can do that, you know, as a need comes up, but you’re simply just not going to find enough people if you always stop and start recruiting. And I always bring it up and I, I liken it to sports and you know, when you say you have a, an NHL team and the NHL team, I think they have 23 men contracts, they have 23 people on the professional roster at any time. And how would you feel as a professional sports team that you cheered for? Fired their scouting staff. As soon as they had 23 people, you would think it was a dumb idea. But that’s how we run businesses most of the time.
Most people run businesses, they stopped recruiting as soon as they have the number of people that they absolutely need. And then the minute they lose one of those people or somebody gets sick or someone leaves or they immediately, they’re, they’re short handed, they don’t have a way to, you know, to overcome this and they end up probably hiring, uh, you know, too early. You know, I have not, I’m seeing enough people and they don’t get a good enough person. And then simply once they get those people and they don’t spend enough time training them or coordinating with them to kind of coach them up to make them better employees, um, and then that person inevitably costs you time, uh, because they, they make mistakes and those mistakes are ultimately, we have to look at them. There are faults. If we’re not spending a sufficient time to train these people said you schedule some extra time during the day for unforeseen event.
Yeah. So you should definitely schedule time for unforeseen events because they’re going to come up. So if you schedule everything and there’s a particular task and everything, but there’s no block set aside to do the things that crop up during that you’re going to get behind on your day. So you can do that in one of two ways. Either you put a specific block in the day to do that or you overschedule uh, particular items. That’s what I like to do. Like meeting times, you know, you make them slightly, he’d give yourself slightly longer to complete that meeting than you think you need. And then that way when that meeting inevitably ends earlier, you, you can talk about something else when those burning fires that popped up throughout the day, what happens when your time blocks are too short? So when your time blocks are too short, you ended up doing a lot of unnecessary tasks switching.
You just switched from task to task B without finishing task a. And although you might have time to come back to task eight, we have to remember that switching tasks makes us less productive. So the less time that we can spend switching tasks, the better. So ideally you need to look at the type of work that you’re doing. And you know, is this really in depth of work? You know, I don’t often put time blocks on my schedule that are less than two hours because a lot of the problems that you know, staff are going to bring to me or things that I have to figure out, they’re going to take longer than two hours to finish. So I’m, why would I, why would I stop, uh, you know, at an hour just to come back to it later. And it takes me a certain amount of time to figure out where did I leave off last time?
Where was I going with this? Where am I going to go now? Edmonton Business Coach, you know, before I get back into it. So you will look at those types of tasks that you’re doing and, and you know also if you have a little bit extra time, that’s one of those times you can, you put it on one of those burning fires too, if you have extra time built into your time blocks. Um, but yeah, I wouldn’t go, he, you, you probably want to err on the side of caution and make your time blocks actually longer. Um, then shorter because if it’s shorter, you’re just going to waste time switching tasks from task aid, task B and then coming back task and figure out where you left off and where you’re going with that. How does having a schedule help the owner coordinate with their key? Yeah.
So having that predictable, you know, time block schedule and avast and of the team starts to know when, uh, they can coordinate with you. So when is your time to meet with your team members that they can ask, you know, items, you know, if they can ask queries about, uh, about how to handle specific situations. Um, they know that they’re going to get training at specific times. It gives them a, a, a little more comfort as well. So they know when it, when am I going to get time to get coached up and you know, when am I going to get time to ask questions? So don’t feel the employees don’t feel like they’re, they’re on an island somewhere and they don’t have any help, but at the same time, um, they’re not just, you know, knock on any door every five minutes and interrupting you so you’re not getting anything done.
It’s the best of both worlds. So you’ve got that, you know, locked off productivity time that’s uninterrupted and your employees always have the confidence to know that, well, okay, we can get in front of, uh, the business owner at this time, uh, and ask these questions. So we’re always going to have the, uh, the help that we need. Uh, and the employees can schedule around that too as well because they know if you’re available at a specific time, they’ll make sure that, you know, what they’re doing is conducive, that they could ask the questions at that time. Whereas if they don’t know when you’re available, you know, you might not realize that they always have other things that they got to take care of and their day too. Make sure you get an Edmonton Business Coach to help grow your business. And if you’re available at random times, we’ll, they’ll never connect up with you and that becomes your fault because you haven’t taken time to communicate with them. Hey, these are the times that I’m available. So that’s what we have here today. Thanks so much for joining us. Again, as always, please hit the like and subscribe buttons so we can continue to deliver you tips on how to beat the odds at business. As always, please leave any comments in the section below and we’ll gladly address them in any future videos. Thanks very much.
