How to manage your time effectively

Hey, friends. I’m Dan Foster, Vice President and Principal Coach here at Building Champions. I want to take a minute and say thank you for watching another one of our Virtual Coaching Tips. If you like what you see and hear on these videos, please subscribe to our channel and be sure to give us a thumbs up, a like, and even share the video.

Today, I want to talk to you about the most unique resource that we all share — time. Now. What makes time such a unique resource? Well, first of all, we all have the same amount of it. 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in every minute. I can’t change that. You can’t change that. We all have the same amount.

Two, it’s completely perishable and it cannot be stored. I can’t bank the eight hours that I spent sleeping last night and plan to use them in a couple of days on special projects that I have.

Third, time is irreplaceable. When a team member leaves, we can maybe replace them. And when we run out of online storage space in the cloud, you know, we can go and purchase more. There’s no substitute or replacement for time, though. And finally, everything we do requires time. It is the one true universal condition that we all share.

You know, the problem for many of us though, is that we believe we can manage time as if we control it somehow. But the truth is, we can’t time keeps on moving and we have no control over it.

There are a few things though that we do have control over, like identifying our priorities — those key relationships and areas of our life that matter most to us. We have control over the activities that we choose to fill our calendar with each day, each week, each month.

We have control over the boundaries we set to protect those priorities and to ensure that we do activities that are going to allow us to live and lead with greater purpose.

You know, working with clients for over 20 years now, we’ve found it useful structure to help them use their time wisely. And what we have our clients do is look at time in four different categories and for them to fill those categories of time with high payoff activities.

So, let’s take a quick look at each of these categories of time.

First is “in” time, and this is reserved for the activities that help you to produce your product or deliver your service in the best way possible. These are the day-to-day activities that are unique to your role and its requirement for success.

Second is “on” time. This is when you pull yourself up and out of the daily activities, you look down on your business and you’re asking yourself, okay, what do we need to plan? What do we need to strategize? What can we do differently? It’s where you’re looking down on your business and just trying to figure out where is there room for improvement.

Third there’s “growth” time. This is where your time is filled with activities that help you to grow your business, to win new customers, expand into new territories.

And finally, there’s “off” time. This category of is reserved for activities that are not work-related. You want to use this time to connect with loved ones, rest, exercise, focus on your personal priorities.

Here’s the thing, your time, it’s your most valuable resource, and you have to choose to use it wisely because you cannot replace it.

Now, I hope these four categories of time I shared today help you to think about your time differently and allow you to be more productive and purposeful in your leadership role.

If you want to learn more about how we work with clients to live and lead with greater purpose and intentionality, hey, check us out at BuildingChampions.com.

Thanks for subscribing. Thanks for sharing and liking these coaching tips and thanks for taking the time to watch today.

Make it a great day. We’ll see you soon.