When I talk to business owners, time is often the biggest obstacle and stressor. There’s never enough of it and entrepreneurs end up working all hours of the day and night trying to get everything done. As business owners, we often come up with ways to move our business forward, but then we add those ways to our already full to-do list and then comes the struggle and the defeat of never getting the important things done.
In this podcast episode, I am speaking with Maya Khanna Le Roy, founder of a coaching and strategy firm called MKLC who help entrepreneurs and leaders get clear and create space for their best work. We get into all the things you can think about and do to make things less dreadful.
When you have a great idea, but can’t find the time to execute it, it can feel awful.
You don't know how to do it. You feel like you can’t do it. You feel bad because you didn’t do it.
It’s exhausting so people avoid it.
If you’re feeling like you are at capacity, I want you to ask yourself these questions… Do I even want to scale? Do I want to talk about how things can change? Do I want to make more money?
If you answered, ‘yes but’… to any of them you aren’t alone.
Acknowledge The Mental Load
Mental load affects all types of business owners. We all have different constraints, responsibilities and goals. We need to be real with ourselves about the expectations and goals we set. That doesn’t mean we should lower or claw back our dreams. We just need to be realistic about how we are spending our day-to-day time if we want to reach the big goals.
We can’t do all the things. Most of us don’t acknowledge that the majority of the things we do end up taking twice as long as we think they are going to take and we are constantly playing catch up.
Understanding
Another big part of it is understanding. Understanding how to motivate yourself when needed and check-in with yourself at the end of each day. There’s no one solution that will work for everyone, we need to figure what works for us. Looking internally is a great place to start. Don’t compare what other people are doing to find your way.
Intuition
There’s also the intuitive aspect of it that’s also important to listen to. You know what times work best for you, don’t be afraid to say when you can realistically show up at your best for that meeting. Don’t schedule something if you know there will be outside sources distracting you. Having a sense of what the ideal day or ideal times for certain tasks are is a really good place to start.
You can use structures and support - like my weekly accountability calls - to create space for what you believe is important. The feeling of progress comes when you get the pieces that are important to you done.
How to figure out what’s important?
Maya loves the Eisenhower Matrix (which is similar to Stephen Covey’s 4 Quadrant Time Management Matrix) to map out what’s important and urgent and what’s not as important or as urgent.
Realizing what those are, spend some time figuring out what is important but not urgent. I see it constantly, people spend all their time putting out fires, dealing with people and not building their business to the next stage because they don’t devote any of their time to the not urgent important stuff.
Other Sticking Points
There’s a need to step into the mindset that you own your time. Say it, “I own my time and it’s up to me to design the way it looks.” Who’s making the decisions about the way your time is structured and planned? You have to step up and take back your time.
What can you do when you feel like you're out of control? What is it that you can do to start feeling like you have a choice and the ability to make choices that are going to control things for you? Start small. Think about what you are missing the most in terms of your time and take one step in that direction and practice that step for a while. This is a challenging time. We have to be realistic about the amount of time we have in a day to juggle everything. Being realistic in expectations is very important.
We as entrepreneurs are optimistic by nature, we need to be more realistic about what we can actually get done in a day. Add timelines next to the items on that never-ending to-do list, it doesn’t have to be set in stone but if it means you are going to get one or two things done by the end of the day it helps. We set ourselves up for an unrealistic outcome if we put 20 things on our to-do list and proclaim they will be done by the end of the day. They won’t. It won’t happen. So instead, highlight two or three things on that list of 20 that you will tackle and it will feel so much BETTER when you actually accomplish it!
Take the time to test out how to best get things done for you and then have a ‘road map’ to follow how you want things to be. Remember that there are so many great productivity supports out there that you can turn to in order to get there.
If you need help working on where to get started to better manage your time for success, check out Maya’s free Time Workbook: https://www.mklc.co/smallsteps.
Resources & Links
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Podcast editing by Eric Wellman