Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 35 - Cut Work Hours In Half With One Simple Exercise
Synopsis:
Ever feel like your business takes up every waking hour?
In this Peaceful Profits episode, Mike Shreeve shares the simple 2-week exercise he uses with private consulting clients to help them reclaim their time.
By tracking every activity, identifying what to stop, streamline, delegate, or finally decide on, you can easily cut your weekly work hours in half.
This isn’t about hacks—it’s about building a sustainable, scalable business that doesn’t depend on you burning out.
Transcript:
Cut Work Hours In Half With One Simple Exercise
[00:00:00] Hello, many friends. Hope you're doing well. Mike Shreeve here. Thank you very much for listening to today's episode. We're gonna be talking about one of my favorite exercises that I learned many years ago for beginning the process of exiting yourself from a business. So anytime I start a new business, the first little bit, you are it, you are everything.
You are the chief bottle washer, and all those kind of funny sayings that describe being a business owner. But eventually there is a point where. You not only want to start working less, but for the sake of your business, you actually should start working less because the kind of behavior, attitude, [00:00:30] mindset, ability, et cetera, that got your business started is not the same skillset that you need to keep it running.
And so a lot of the advice I give to entrepreneurs and a lot of the work I do, especially in private consulting, is me getting them out of the day to day. For the sake of their business, not just to make them happy. Sometimes I'll, for example, many years ago I was brought into a team and the team was just.
I don't wanna name any names, so I won't, [00:01:00] but it was just very much, can you please get this person out of our day today? We'll be able to function so much better, et cetera. And I even in my own companies now, I can tell that, I'll jump into, I'll jump into processes or I'll jump into systems and I regret it almost every single time because the team, the systems, the process that has been built is so much better at what it is trying to do than my skillset can provide to whatever it is I'm trying to do.
Does that make sense? So what it takes to be an extremely successful starter of [00:01:30] businesses, growers of businesses is not at all the same skillset for keeping that thing profitable, sustainable team, et cetera. Okay? So just wanna put that caveat out there. This exercise is a very good way to start down that road, and you probably should start that down that road, not just, you want to start down that road.
Okay? So here's the exercise. Very simple. You have to understand that this is not overnight stuff. It does take some time. It's not like sales and marketing where you can come up with a offer, in an afternoon. Send out an email, make it up as you go along. [00:02:00] This is very different. So a lot of internet marketers, people in the internet marketing industry, people in the online space, they have a higher difficulty with the transition than I think most traditional companies where it takes forever to get anything done, and they're just used to those kind of timelines.
But here's the exercise for two weeks. All you have to do is write down. Everything you're doing for every single minute of your waking life. And yes, even the stuff that you don't think is related to work. I woke up at eight oh [00:02:30] five, reached for my phone, read the news, did an email while I was still in my bed, da.
And you do this for two weeks, you don't do it for two days. People can lie to themselves for two days. They can get out of habits for two days. It's hard to lie to yourself about what your actual habits are. Over two weeks, a couple things are gonna happen. You're going to realize that there is more than one way to reduce the time you spend working.
So once you see, for this two weeks, I like to put it in a spreadsheet. Two weeks of time tracking, you're going to find. All sorts of different ways to reduce [00:03:00] time without even having to have anybody take a look at it or tell you anything. I'll give you some examples. You'll find that over two weeks, there's just some stuff you should just stop doing.
Just don't do that anymore and all of a sudden you have time back. Example. Maybe you spend two hours a day messing around and just BSing and talking bad about whatever. With some, with one of your teammates on your team, and you think it's all cathartic, but then when you see it on paper, you're like, why are we doing that?
That's probably not a good use of time. That's probably not helping. It's probably, et cetera, right? So that might be something. Or how about you wake up and first thing you do is you hit [00:03:30] the phone and two hours later you get outta bed. That might be something you wanna stop doing. So you're gonna find there's a lot of stuff that you can just not do anymore.
And now you have the time, but you weren't aware you were even doing it or you didn't have that objective view of it because you've never sat down to actually analyze what it is that you're supposed to be doing. The second thing that's gonna happen is you're gonna realize that some stuff you do probably doesn't need to take that long and or doesn't need to be done that frequently.
I'll give you a very simple example. I have a lot of clients who go through this exercise and one of the first [00:04:00] things they realize is, oh, I checked my email 29 times today. Now on paper, how long does it take to check an email? Sometimes it takes two minutes and sometimes it. Takes two hours, right?
Sometimes you check your email, you get the, now you're on this rabbit hole, and now you're going over here and you're doing all this stuff. So that little two minute quote, unquote, I'm just checking my email, just checking my email turns into this two hour thing, right? One way you can give yourself a ton of time back is not trying to turn yourself into a machine that checks an email and then never does anything about it, but just to say, okay, I'm allocating.
I can check [00:04:30] my email twice a day, and I'm not gonna pretend that I can check my email for just five minutes. I'm gonna stop pretending I saw the past two weeks of my life. I'm lying to myself if I think I can check my email for five minutes. What I'm gonna do instead is for two times a day, I'm gonna give myself an hour to check the email, right?
So I got two hours, and then what you're gonna find is that most of the time. Because you have those very tight and realistic time constraints because you're reducing the number of times you're allowing yourself to be interrupted, or the number of times you're devoted to checking a thing that the overall time invested in that [00:05:00] particular activity all of a sudden reduces quite significantly, right?
So that's one example. Another example, checking your phone, checking your money, checking your phone, checking Basecamp if you use it. All these sorts of checking type things that can add up to a lot of time. But there also might just be some stuff that you think is adding value because you do it so often, but then after an analysis of two weeks and then really diving deep into the data, you realize it's not contributing anything at all.
And you can either get better at that thing or not. I'll give you an example. [00:05:30] Sometimes I go into a team and they tell me something like, oh yeah, we have a 45 minute meeting every single day, and here's what we talk about and da. And then after two weeks you look at them. I'm not saying daily meeting isn't effective, I'm just, this is an example.
They have a 45 minute meeting every single day after two weeks. We take a look at how much of their time was devoted to that particular meeting. And then we ask, okay, what was the result of that daily meeting? What did it actually bring that couldn't be brought in a five minute meeting or a 10 minute meeting or et cetera, right?
Or for [00:06:00] example, I sometimes have clients who do things for their clients that their clients don't even want, right? So for example, I, I have coaching clients, meaning clients who are coaches and they think that their clients wanna call twice a week. And I think to myself. They probably don't, it.
It's very difficult to be super effective on a call two times a week, right? It probably means you're not assigning your coaching students enough work in between the calls to, to make any progress. I like two calls a month. Personally, I wanna give my people [00:06:30] two weeks worth of heavy duty, solid work to make progress before you check in again, et cetera, and et cetera.
So first off, you're just gonna find that there's stuff that you should just stop doing. Then you're gonna find stuff that you should just do less of or just work on becoming more efficient at. And already we're talking about chunking off hours per week, if not hours per day already. Then after that, we start looking at, okay, what can be delegated?
Very simple rule of thumb that I learned from Perry Marshall many years ago in his book 80 20 Sales and Marketing. It's very simple. Whether you get paid for it, [00:07:00] every hour of your time has a different value. So for example an hour of copywriting might be worth a thousand dollars to your company.
You write this promotion over time, it generates a hundred thousand dollars. It took you a hundred hours to write it. Okay? That's a thousand dollars an hour activity. Some activities in your business, take. Or generate $10 an hour or $5 an hour, admin, customer support, that kind of stuff, right? And so after you've eradicated all this stuff, you shouldn't be doing anyways after you become more efficient at the things that you feel that you should be doing, but maybe you're being really inefficient at them.
So we're already starting to compress time. Now we can [00:07:30] start to delegate. Now there's a couple of different ways to delegate. You can delegate through software, you can delegate through systems, and you can delegate through people. So already we are we're chunking off major amounts of time in your weekly work schedule by eradication, optimization, and now delegation.
And you have three options in delegation. So oftentimes there's this idea that the only way to work yourself outta the business is if you hire a huge team. That's just not true at all. We've already, like I said, reduced a massive amount of weekly hours that are [00:08:00] spent working in your business, and we only, one of the three options of the three options is team.
Then there's a couple more things that we like to do with this activity. But the last thing that we'll mention in this episode is that there's also, so we've got just eradicating something. We've got, optimizing something, we have delegating something, and then we have something that I love to do and that's to just decide on something.
It is really incredible how much time, energy, effort, focus, [00:08:30] resources go into. Undecided things inside of a business. So for example, that thing you're thinking of launching that you work on every once in a while, that you have someone on your team working on every once in a while that you spend time talking about, that you spend time thinking about, that you spend time worrying about.
If you just made a decision about it, you could either eradicate it or execute on it. And the decision whether it was right or wrong, will free up a significant amount of your [00:09:00] time. I can't tell you how often I'm able to give myself an extra five or 10 hours a week by just deciding that we're gonna do and then rallying the team around that idea or deciding that we're not going to do something. Just recently, we shut down something rather large in our peaceful profits company because it just, nobody was fully committed to it. And so you had a lot of hands, half committed, half bothered, half engaged, half thinking about.
This one specific thing, and what happens when you have things that don't have the appropriate attention? They cause more problems [00:09:30] than they're worth. Things have to be managed. Things have to be looked after. Things have to be cared for. Things have to be held accountable. Things have to be monitored, measured, and improved, all these types of things.
And so when you have undecided. Whether it's campaigns or assets or offers or ideas or whatever it is, they tend to be a lot more draining for time, energy, effort, resource than most people realize Until we take a look at their two week time tracking sheet and we start going line by line asking, why are you, what's [00:10:00] this?
Why does this keep showing up? It has not moved you forward in any way. We need to get rid of it. So anyways that's a fond exercise. You can, again, I like to have my leadership team do this exercise once every 90 days if possible. There's a lot of elements to it that we didn't talk about in today's episode.
Like during that time you can also identify what are the things that are actually moving you forward so you can do time replacement. So the new time you have found you can actually focus more efforts on the things that will free you up even more later on down the road. There's things that you can do, which include.
Taking a look at your time and [00:10:30] predicting what your next 90 days will look like based off of the time that you have allotted, asking yourself if this time is actually the stuff that makes you happy and et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot more that's involved with this particular exercise, but what we've talked about today so far, I think is a good start.
If you haven't done it. Or you or if it's been a while since you've done it, it's so quite a common exercise. I recommend that you do it now. It doesn't take any extra effort other than noticing and being aware of what it is that you're doing. So even during those two weeks, you will find a different sense of productivity just by being more aware of where your [00:11:00] time is actually going, which you could say and argue.
And sometimes I do. When I see somebody's two weeks come into me and I think to myself, you knew people were watching, so this is a little bit different than what your two weeks actually isn't it? That kinda situation can happen. My recommendation is that you really try to have a normal two weeks because that's the best way to engage what's actually going on.
Alright, my friends. That's it for today's episode. Let's get to the plug. Now, as at the time of this recording, which again, I record these episodes pretty far in advance, but by the time that they go live by the time of this episode. We do still have a few open [00:11:30] spots for my private consulting offer.
I only come out once a year to promote this. It's that time of year Now the private consulting offer is 10 to 15 clients maximum. I will not take more than 15. And I'm quite picky about it. Not to sound like a diva, but the reason that I'm picky is because of what we do. So it's a year long engagement and we do four things.
One, we double your revenue. Two, we double your margin. So how much money you actually get to take home at the end of the day, which is beautiful. Three, we create three months of cash reserves in your [00:12:00] business. This is for emergency and it's based off the cash flow of your business, which is to say that if you were to have three months of no sales, you'd still be able to pay everyone, including yourself.
I cannot tell you the value of that in and of itself in your business, whether we get to be a private in a private consultation arrangement or not. I recommend that you do whatever you can, especially this year, to make sure that happens for you, your business, and the people who rely on your business staying afloat.
And then lastly, of course, which is very topical for what we talked about today. I like to make sure that everybody who goes through this program is [00:12:30] working a minimum of 15 hours less per week in their business, is often much, much more than that. But those are the four things that we work on.
And those, each of those four things is guaranteed, which is why I'm so picky about who I work with. It is a guaranteed service. It's a private consultation. It's a year long, it's a lot of fun. Once a year, we call out for clients, 10 to 15. We all gather up in a cohort. It's a really good experience.
I love it. It's my favorite offer I've ever done in 15 years. So glad to be launching again this year. So if you are interested in that particular offer, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at [00:13:00] support@peacefulprofits.com. We've got a brochure you can take a look at with all the information, pricing, details, et cetera.
If you like what there's an application that you can fill out. It's a fairly lengthy application. As I said, I don't really wanna do this for anybody. I can't help. So there's some information I'm gonna need to find out if I can help you, if I like what I see in the application, we'll have a chat, you and I to see if we wanna, do we vibe?
We're gonna be working together for a year, so let's see if we like each other. And then and then from there once you have. Signed all the paperwork and all that kinda good stuff. We can get started as soon as you are ready, including same day. So lots of good [00:13:30] stuff. With the private consulting offer, again, I only do this once a year.
10 to 15 clients maximum. Lot of fun, lot of good stuff. Double revenue, double margin, three months of cash, and 15 hours less per week of work. And that's all guaranteed. So if you're interested, support@peacefulprivates.com. Thank you all very much for listening and I'll see you in the next one.