By guest poster, Pete Williams, whose productivity tips and work hacks are transforming how I do business, LITERALLY!
To be totally honest the title of this article is a little misleading.
Saving 86 days of work per year can be achieved but only if you change ONE element of your work processes.
If you change MULTIPLE elements of your work then you can save more time.
Much more time.
Just imagine how much more focus you could put into growing your business and making it more profitable if you were able to reclaim whole weeks or even months? worth of effort.
And by the end of this article you?ll know exactly how to do it.
At this point, the more sage among you will be waiting for me to introduce the ?O? word (hint: it begins with ?o? and ends in ?utsourcing?).
But I?m reluctant to do this because I don?t want you making assumptions about the content of this article and tuning out before I get to the good stuff.
I know you?re probably sick and tired of hearing about the ?O? word but that isn?t because it?s a bad idea to hire people to help you run and grow your business.
It?s simply because most people are doing it wrong.
When someone says we should hire someone to do XYZ, we balk because we think it?s going to be too expensive or because we assume that the by the time we?ve found someone who has the skills to do the job properly, we might as well as have done it ourselves.
This is warped thinking.
Despite what some would have you believe, business principles that work in the real world are almost 100% transferrable to the online world.
What works offline, generally works online as well. The Internet isn?t another dimension; it?s just a different location with a few quirks of personality.
Imagine for a moment that you?re opening a restaurant and you want to create a really nice-looking menu. You speak to a few design companies and discover that the cost is going to cost a few hundred dollars.
Would you decide that this is too expensive and, instead, try to knock something together on your laptop?
Of course not. You?re a restaurateur, not a graphic designer. Anything you produce, no matter how much time you spend on it, is going to look amateurish and create a bad impression for your diners.
The price you have to pay for a beautifully-designed menu is small compared to the amount of business you?d lose by refusing to invest in quality and expertise.
What about waiters? You were a waiter for six years before you progressed into management and you know, for a fact, that you?re not going to be able to find someone who can do the job as well as you can.
So what? Are you going to wait on every single table yourself?
Of course not. Finding the time to hire competent people and training them to your required standard may take time and money but that?s just the way business is done.
And in the long run you?ll end up with a team of superb waiters that will turn your diners into regulars and make you more money.
When we frame the argument in real world terms, it makes perfect sense. It?s only when we start talking about Internet business that people start to get flakey and nervous about the idea of hiring people to look after the busy work.
As the owner of an Internet business your sole concern is making your enterprise profitable. You should be focusing on the jobs that further this end, and nothing more. Everything else is sapping your time and energy, which is pointless when other people could be doing this work for you and, in many cases, doing a more professional job.
To make the differentiation clear, I like to talk about CORE and MECHANICS.
CORE work is anything that requires your personal knowledge, skills, and experience. MECHANICS work is anything that someone else can do on your behalf without detrimentally affecting your business.
For example, speaking at an event is about raising your profile and promoting your business and is absolutely something you need to do in person. That?s a CORE job.
But creating the slides for your presentation? A graphic designer should be creating these on your behalf. That?s MECHANICS.
This leaves you with more time to work on what you?re going to say in your lecture and perfecting your delivery.
As soon as you?ve finished reading this article, grab a pen and paper and list all the tasks required to keep your business operating and growing. Next, separate everything into two categories ? CORE and MECHANICS.
Once you?ve done this, you?ll have no excuse. You?ll know exactly which work you should be doing and which work you should be handing off to someone else.
This in itself will save you huge amounts of time that you can reinvest into doing a better job of your CORE work. But, believe it or not, we still haven?t got to the part where you can save a minimum of 86 days of work per year.
To accomplish this feat you need to study your CORE work, break it down into individual components, and then identify and strip out the MECHANICS.
As an example, let?s briefly consider forum marketing.
This method of marketing is really important for me. There are a number of forums I like to frequent and by responding to people?s questions and taking part in discussions I?m able to establish myself as an expert and maintain my profile in my primary customer base.
But this is a time-consuming job; browsing through all the different categories and message threads in multiple forums, figuring out which conversations to focus on, typing out the messages, and so on. This can easily suck up 3 hours or more a day.
At least it used to.
Now it only takes me about 20 minutes.
You see, although forum marketing is CORE work because it requires my knowledge, most of the process is actually MECHANICS that I can assign to someone else.
Here?s how:
Every day my assistant browses my favorite forums and picks out message threads in which she thinks I may want to get involved. She copies the URL of each message thread into a document and emails it to me.
I view each URL and pick out 5-6 that I think are important. I record an audio message for each one, describing what I want to say, and then email the audio files back to my assistant.
My assistant turns the audio content into well-written messages and posts them to the corresponding forum threads on my behalf. If my forum post generates additional forum activity, this information is included in tomorrow?s email.
Breaking a CORE job into a mixture of CORE and MECHANICS, in this instance, has allowed me to turn a daily 3-hour job, into a daily 20-minute job.
Now do the math.
20 minutes a day instead of 180 minutes a day means I?m saving 160 minutes.
Multiply that by 5 days a week, 52 weeks per year, and I?m saving? 41,600 minutes.
That?s 693 hours.
Or 86 work days (assuming I work 8 hours a day).
I can?t think of a better argument to support the concept of giving up working on the MECHANICS than the fact that you can reclaim almost three months of work time per year, just by creating a more efficient system for ONE task.
And this system doesn?t just work for forum marketing. If you study any of your CORE jobs carefully and with the right attitude, you?ll discover MECHANICS that can be given to someone else.
All you have to do is create a system, similar to the above example, and you?ll be stunned how much time is freed up.
This is how I organized my work to the point where I had the time to focus on the strategy required to found and grow multiple offline and online businesses.
I see no reason why you can?t do the same.
Just forget about the ?O? word; it?s distracting. Focus instead on the CORE and MECHANICS and you?ll do fine.
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Pete Williams, described by the media as ?Australia?s Richard Branson,? has founded numerous successful businesses, is an International best-selling author, and is determined to break down the wall that prevents aspiring entrepreneurs from recognizing the truth?
There is no online business.
There is no offline business.
There is ONLY business.
Pete is sick and tired of certain online gurus putting a wall around Internet marketing and limiting their student?s ability to grow their business. This is a revelation that can and should revolutionize your potential.
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For more hacks on reclaiming your time and more importantly, your life?check out the ?Emergency Training Video Series? by Pete & Rich Schefren by clicking here <<<==
*** And if you had an a-ha moment or thought this was useful ? please tweet, like, +1 and share with your email friends too! Thanks for helping us reclaim valuable hours for business owners everywhere! ***
Source: http://carriewilkerson.com/how-to-work-86-less-days-per-year/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-work-86-less-days-per-year
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