One of the biggest challenges that people face is never having enough time - But why is this? I spoke to the Saint Trade Coaches to see how they help with this.

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🚧 We're busy... but with what?

We are so busy now with meetings, pricing, travelling site to site or just trying to keep on top of running the business - If anything, it's getting busier day by day, not easier. The responsibilities seem to just keep piling up so It was interesting to see where to start.

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We try to start with a time and motion study which does not need to be too complex and works for small outfits all the way to large organisations.

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We encourage people to just go about their normal business and not try to overthink it.

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What we are looking for are patterns, a quick snapshot of a business, to find out, for example, what the routine tasks are and where time is going. Is it planned? or reactive? - Can tasks be delegated or held for a different time?

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When we are working on time audits we ask lots of questions about the whole business, back and forth, we also look past where the time is going and audit inputs but also at processes we can engineer into daily habits or systems to help the business owner to manage and more importantly grow the business without getting overwhelmed.

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So we start with the time and motion study, If you are on the go on site all the time and not office-based use a device like a voice recorder or a memo and record what you are doing on a daily basis and how long it took you, we know this can be hard or seem pointless but you have to really buy in to make it work and get the payback.

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Also if you have people working for you, ask them to record what they do and how long it took them. You can get pushback here as they will think you are checking up on them but if communicated properly they should see the potential benefits.

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Then over time, say 4-6 weeks we look back and review the time spent. It’s when you invest this much time in the process that you really do see little indicators.

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We now use this information to identify what's working and what we could be doing better. No blame. Just think of it as a new starting point.

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Could we outsource some of the trivial things and routine duties to save time especially if this could give you back 2 days a week to focus on growing the business for example or time out?

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Sometimes you may be astonished when you record that it took that long on an order or that 3 days pricing a job or on a call to someone close who you were going to see anyway.

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We look to bring in new habits so you shift the lower-end tasks to your least productive times, i.e. we are at our most productive in the morning so we now leave all the dead head stuff till the afternoons so we get more done and can churn through the more routine tasks later in the day.

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You also slowly start to self-check if you are using your time in the best way.

When you are all old and retired, more time is the only thing you cannot buy regardless of how rich you have become so treat your time with great care and focus on what you now do and prioritise your day very very carefully like the expensive commodity time is.

If you are more office-based as opposed to site try to work in 15-minute blocks and you can start to see how time slips even on simple things like replying to an email.

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This will help you and your staff to become more selective of their time and therefore become more productive - but will also show where you may or they may need help. Just because you can do the task, does not mean you should be doing it.

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We all know the saying on site of that task took longer than we thought - well that's now a great insight so we start to really record and can review how long things took to see if we are pricing and planning well enough. It's okay if we are not on target, this is a process to improve things.

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A benefit of time planning is to have written proof in black and white so we can face up to some uncomfortable facts we may have been ignoring about how we really spend our day, not just a rose-tinted version of how hard we work, what we are looking for are the moments when we need a bit of self-love, so we are better rested and not so exhausted.

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Demotivators that slowly chip away at our belief system making us think we are not productive, again just because you can do a task, does not mean you should be the one doing it. If it's not working change it - Get help, time management is about making better choices with our time and personal skill set.

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All that was needed sometimes was in fact being able to unlearn the existing habit of doing everything yourselves and start to be open to sharing more. It's well proven you cannot do it all yourself and still grow the business or take time off.

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Isn’t that the reason why you started on your own with the business so you could have a better life, as a business owner not a worker in the business? So start thinking more like an owner. You need a good time balance to stay motivated and fresh.