Mastering the Summer Juggle: Becoming a Strategic and Intentional CEO
Acknowledge the Reality: Where Are You Right Now?
The first step towards managing the summer chaos is to acknowledge your current situation. As Amy suggests, it’s essential to ask yourself, "Where am I right now?" Are you working 24/7 but feel like you aren't making any progress? Understanding your current state is crucial for making necessary adjustments and setting realistic expectations.
Conduct a Time Audit: Understanding Your Time Expenditure
A time audit is your new best friend. This involves tracking how you are spending every minute of your workday. Often, we feel overwhelmed because we’ve lost focus. Amy emphasizes that scattered focus leads to scattered results. By being crystal clear on how you're spending your time, you can shift into a more productive mode.
1. Track Your Day: Spend a few days jotting down what you do every half hour.
2. Identify Time Wasters: Recognize activities that drain your time without adding value.
3. Focus on Key Activities: Pinpoint tasks that are crucial for business growth and mark them as non-negotiable.
Automate and Delegate: Leveraging Technology and Support
Why do it all when technology can shoulder some of the load? With new automations emerging daily, it’s important to stay informed about tools that can streamline your operations. Amy encourages solopreneurs to explore and leverage these tools to free up time.
1. Explore AI Tools: Regularly search for new productivity tools or ask your network for recommendations.
2. Test and Implement: Try out new platforms to see if they meet your business needs.
3. Delegate: If possible, delegate tasks that don’t require your personal touch.
Maintain a Consistent Routine: Treat Your Business Like a Business
Consistency is key to any business’s success. Amy reminds us that treating your business like a business requires showing up day in and day out, even when the tasks become monotonous.
1. Daily Non-Negotiables: Identify and stick to tasks that are essential for your business.
2. Regular Reviews: Consistently review your analytics and data to make informed decisions.
Use Awareness to Improve: Transforming Time Management
Awareness is a powerful tool for improvement. Amy shares her personal experience of a day gone astray due to the tempting scroll of social media. Instead of berating herself, she used this as an opportunity to perform a time audit and refocus.
1. Be Non-Judgmental: When you stray from your path, use it as a learning experience without self-criticism.
2. Refocus and Adjust: Adjust your approach based on what you learn from these audits.
Strategic Focus: Collapsing Time and Boosting Efficiency
The magic happens when you become laser-focused. Amy suggests that being intentional with your time can make previously time-consuming tasks more manageable. This strategic focus is the essence of collapsing time and boosting efficiency.
1. Intentional Planning: Plan your day focusing only on activities that drive growth.
2. Zone of Genius: Spend your time on tasks that you are uniquely equipped to handle.
Conclusion: Promote Yourself to CEO
Navigating the summer months and avoiding the summer slump as a solopreneur doesn’t mean sacrificing your business’s growth. By conducting a time audit, leveraging technology, maintaining consistency, and being strategically focused, you can handle the chaos and still advance your business. As Amy concludes, these practices help you transition from a solopreneur to the CEO of a successful company, creating the impact you desire.
So this summer, take a moment to reflect, adjust, and strategically plan your daily grind. Here’s to making the money you want while enjoying the sun!
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Transcript for Episode 330. Did You Hit a Summer Slump?
Amy [00:00:15]:
Are you starting to feel overwhelmed by the summer juggle of all of the things happening in the world? I just feel like during the summer months, life is busy, it is chaotic in the best way. But when you're working from home, especially as a parent and a solopreneur, that chaos can get to be a little overwhelming. And this is something I experience in my own business. And the really funny part is, this isn't my first summer as a business owner, as a full time entrepreneur, working from home, navigating kids, home from school, navigating all of the fun things that happen during the summer months. So when that overwhelm starts to kick in, how do we manage it? How do we control it? What do we do to ensure that we're staying on track and still treating our business like a business? Because this is essential to growth. You can't just stop altogether and lose all that momentum that you have gained. And I don't want you to take this the wrong way. I'm not saying that it's not possible to slow down during summer, but what I am saying is that you need to really be strategically focused, especially during the summer months, so that you can enjoy life, so you can actually enjoy your summer without the hustle, without the working 24/7 so I think step one is just really coming to terms with, where am I right now? Where am I right now? Amongst the hustle, amongst the chaos? How much am I working? Am I working 24/7 because I'm constantly being interrupted? Am I finding that I'm multitasking day in and day out because my kids need me 24/7 right? They're constantly coming in, asking me, hey, I need a snack.
Amy [00:02:22]:
Hey, so and so is mad at me this, that the other. We all get it. We've been there. I mean, even when you're working from home, if you don't have kids, the dog needs in and out. Your spouse may be home from work more. So there's that demand that seems so much more. I don't know. A big demand.
Amy [00:02:44]:
Is that. Is that even a thing? But it gets to be overwhelming. So I think that you really need to adjust your expectations that, you know what? If I am a parent working from home this summer, I may not get as much done in the timeframe that I once did. So really, starting with a time audit is key. And this is something I start with all of my clients, and I really break this down inside of the CEO method book, which you can grab for free if you go to amytra.com freebook and a time audit. What it's doing, it's bringing awareness to how you're spending your time. Oftentimes when we feel overwhelmed, it's because we've lost the focus, because we're no longer being intentional and trying to do all of the things. But scattered focus leads to scattered results.
Amy [00:03:43]:
But when you're so crystal clear on exactly how you need to be spending your time, what you need to be doing with the allotted time that you have available, what that does is it shifts you into a more productive mode, because you know exactly what you need to focus on to move the needle forward versus being busy. Being busy. We all do this, but it's such an eye opening experience when you take the time to reflect back and look at your day. How did I spend my time? What was I doing? Was I working on the things that are necessary? And I encourage you to really hone in on what are those non negotiable items, those things you need to do on a daily basis, that when life lives, that if you get nothing else accomplished, your business will still move forward. We're treating our business like a business. It requires consistency, the consistent action, showing up over and over and over, doing those tasks that get boring, looking at the data, looking at the analytics, that's what it takes. That's what it takes to grow a business. But when you reflect back and now you have this awareness as to how you're spending your time, this is eye opening because it allows you to see, okay, are there things that I need to just delete off my schedule that really don't even matter? Are there things that I can automate in the back end of my business? Because new automations are coming out every single day.
Amy [00:05:31]:
I always encourage clients, google it. If there's something out there that you're like, you know what, I'm doing this over and over and over. Google it, put up a poll, ask people, what are you using? How are you navigating this? Because you don't have to figure it out alone. And a lot of the technology that I use, a lot of the AI I'm using in the back end of my business, I've gotten because of friends, because of fellow entrepreneurs that have told me, hey, I started using this new platform. It's really helping me. So then what I do is I go in and try it out for myself to see, okay, will this actually support my business? Will this take some of the load off of me? Or is this something that is just another shiny object? So I think that's really, really important to leverage and reflect back on exactly what we're doing. I had an incident last week where at the end of the day, I was exhausted. It was just one of those days where the kids were cranky.
Amy [00:06:37]:
It's really hot and humid here in Ohio right now. And it just, everybody was grumpy. I was grumpy and I sat down at the end of the day and I go, you know what? I felt like I got zero, zero things checked off my list. Nothing accomplished. So what did I do? I used this awareness to do a time audit. I was like, okay, I'm feeling this way. So let's look back and see how I actually spent my time today. And the way I spent my time was I was really off target.
Amy [00:07:10]:
I got sucked into social media. I was scrolling. I was breaking my own rules. It's easy to preach this day in and day out, but we're human. Social media is designed to keep us on the platform. So what do we do? We subconsciously go back to old patterns of behavior. And that's exactly what I did. And because I was scrolling, my brain thought I was doing something.
Amy [00:07:36]:
I thought I was actually working, quote unquote. But no, I wasn't doing any of my daily, non negotiable items. I was spending my time consuming instead of creating, instead of really being laser focused on those simple tasks that would move the needle forward. But when you have this awareness of what you're doing, you need to be non judgmental. It would be easy to be like, oh gosh, like, I suck, right? Like, oh, I'm doing all these things. I just wasted a whole day. Well, no, we're human. We're human.
Amy [00:08:16]:
So now I have the awareness. So now I use that awareness to be able to improve how I'm showing up, how I'm consuming, what I'm doing and how I'm spending my time, it all goes back to strategic focus. We all have the same 24 hours in the day. We all do. But when you are intentional with how you are spending your time and what activities you're spending your time doing, that's where you begin to collapse time. That's when you're so hyper focused on exactly what needs done that you get efficient at it. And all of those tasks that used to take you 8 hours to complete, now you can get them done in an hour. So, yeah, during summer, I don't work as many hours intentionally, but what I'm doing is I'm being very strategic about how I'm focusing my time.
Amy [00:09:25]:
So, friend when you're listening to this, I encourage you pause and take the time audit. Get curious as to how am I spending my time? Am I spending my time doing all of the things, or am I spending my time doing those things that can only be done by me? Because this is what is going to help you promote yourself to CEO. This is what truly is the difference between a solopreneur and the CEO of a successful company. Knowing your zone of genius, maintaining that strategic, intentional focus, that's what's going to get you the results that you desire. Until next time, I am here cheering for you. Cheers. To making the money you want so you can create the impact you desire.
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