Mastering Your Productivity: Day 3 of the Unplugged Challenge
The Importance of Analyzing Your Time
Effective time management starts with self-awareness. Understanding how we spend our time allows us to identify opportunities to eliminate, automate, and outsource tasks. The key to this is conducting a time audit.
*Time Audit and Self-Questioning
* Why am I doing the tasks that I'm doing?
* Do my actions align with my goals?
* Am I spending time on tasks that will move me towards my goals?
By asking these critical questions, you create awareness about your daily activities. Often, we find ourselves busy being busy rather than focusing on what truly matters. It's about bridging the gap between what we plan to achieve and what we're currently doing.
Introducing the Power Hour
Once you've analyzed your time, structuring your day effectively is paramount. Enter the Power Hour—a concept designed to ensure you focus on high-impact activities.
The Three Pillars of Power Hour
* Engagement: Nurture relationships with your audience by welcoming new followers, replying to comments, and networking.
* Visibility: Strategically position yourself where your ideal clients are to stay top of mind. Leverage both online and offline channels to ensure your presence is felt.
* Content Creation: Build your authority by creating and repurposing valuable content. This goes beyond social media to include blogs, podcasts, emails, and guest speaking opportunities.
Implementing a Daily Review
A vital part of this process is the Daily Review—a practice that fosters massive self-awareness.
Steps for a Daily Review
* Emotional Check-In: Evaluate how you're feeling. Are you stressed or overwhelmed? Awareness of your emotional state can influence your productivity.
* Task Assessment: Reflect on what you did to move your business forward. Did you complete your non-negotiables? How were you visible today?
* Identify Distractions: Recognize what distracted you and plan to minimize these distractions moving forward.
* Celebrate Wins: Acknowledge and celebrate both professional and personal achievements, no matter how small they are.
* Tomorrow's Focus: Determine one thing to improve for the next day, ensuring continuous growth and learning.
Utilizing the Clarity Cycle
In conjunction with your daily review, the Clarity Cycle (outlined on page four of your workbook) is a continuous process for refining your focus:
* Acknowledge: Recognize your current state and activities.
* Assess: Evaluate the alignment of your actions with your goals.
* Act: Implement necessary changes and strategies.
* Analyze: Review the impact of these changes.
* Adjust: Make further modifications for improvement.
This cyclical approach ensures that you are consistently improving and adapting to better achieve your business objectives.
Conclusion
The practices of analyzing, adjusting, and implementing a structured Power Hour provide you with the tools to gain control over your business. Remember, this journey isn't just about unplugging for a weekend; it's about creating lasting habits that generate momentum and produce results. So, take time to incorporate these strategies into your daily routine.
Episode Links
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Transcript for Episode 348. The Unplugged Challenge Day Three: Regain Control of Your Business
Amy [00:00:02]:
Congratulations. You made it to day three of the unplugged challenge. And if you haven't taken the time to do so yet, make sure you head on over to amytraw.com unplugged to join the completely free challenge to reset, refocus, and regain control of your business. It's also linked up below in the show notes. But what are we talking about today? Today is all about analyzing and adjusting, analyzing and adjusting that awareness of how we are spending your time, taking those results of our time audit and figuring out a way to intentionally refocus our time so that we can grow our business to achieve the goals that we so clearly have now set. So this awareness of how we're spending our time, what this does is it allows us to identify opportunities to eliminate, automate and outsource. So from this time audit, how do you go about doing this? Well, you need to start asking yourself questions. We're getting really curious.
Amy [00:01:16]:
The first one is, why am I doing the tasks that I'm doing? So take a look at that time audit and ask yourself why. Again, we're getting curious. We're seeking to understand by asking why we start to unpack that. And then we can ask ourselves, do my actions actually align with my goals? Because all too often there's a huge disconnect. We say we want this, but if we're spending our time doing that, how do we bridge that gap? Awareness. Awareness is key. Asking ourselves, am I spending time on the tasks that will move me forward towards my goals? And if not, what adjustments can I make in order to achieve my goals? When you start to get curious and ask yourself questions like this, that's when you gain even more clarity that will move you forward. And in our business, we tend to be busy being busy.
Amy [00:02:28]:
We've talked about this before, and I want you to take your workbook and flip to page nine. We're going to develop what's called a power hour. This has been a game changer in my business, and when I'm working with clients 90% of the time working on our business, there are three things as service providers that we can do every single day in order to move the needle forward. Other than the amazing service that we provide, other than the forward facing client work. And these three tasks can be accomplished in under an hour. So what are they? Number one, engagement. So as a business owner, how are you nurturing? How are you engaging with those people that are already opted into your world, those people that are already in your ecosystem? Are you taking the time to welcome new followers? Are you taking the time to reply to comments? Are you taking the time to get into different networking rooms? Are you taking the time to check in with your referral partners with current and past clients? How are you engaging on a daily basis? Next is visibility. How are you getting seen by your ideal client in order to stay top of mind and move people onto a list that you own so that you can continue to nurture them? Now remember, visibility isn't about being everywhere.
Amy [00:04:24]:
It's about strategically placing yourself in front of your ideal clients. Put yourself into your client's shoes, figure out where they are, and if you need help with places that your client may be, make sure you download my free resource I have on how to market your business without spending a dime. It's all about visibility and how to do exactly this. Visit my website, amytra.com resources and you can grab your free guide. And then lastly, with our power hour content creation, we need something created to create that authority, to create that credibility, to create that know, like and trust. And social media is only one piece of the puzzle. Yes, we can create endless content on social media, but why are we spending so much time on social media when such a small fraction of our followers actually see it? So what I encourage you to do is think bigger. So, for example, I use my podcast as my long form content.
Amy [00:05:33]:
If you don't have a podcast, go on other people's podcasts, ask them for the recording. Repurpose this, break this down. Your content includes your emails. It includes your freebies. It includes guest speaking, creating that content, repurposing the content you've already created that is essential to growing a business. This saves you time. Doing these three things helps you stay focused. These are income producing activities allowing you to focus on the systems and the structure.
Amy [00:06:13]:
That's what will give you the freedom. That's what helps decrease that decision fatigue. So when you're sitting there going, I don't know what I need to be doing, guess what? You're on power hour. This is exactly what I need to do. I spend 15 minutes engaging. I spend 15 minutes creating content. And you don't have to create the whole entire content piece at one time. Create bits and pieces of it, break part of it down, and then how can we get more visible? Spend your time doing those three things and you will see progress.
Amy [00:06:44]:
Once you've taken the time to establish your daily power hour, then I really encourage you to adopt a new practice called the Daily Review. This is on page ten. It basically comes down to self awareness as a business owner, you need massive self awareness as to how do I respond. What are those ingrained patterns, behaviors, beliefs, all of the things. So the way we start to uncover this is by checking in with ourselves. At the end of each day, I really encourage you to pause and ask yourself, okay, number one, how am I feeling? Am I doing okay? Am I feeling stressed? Am I feeling overwhelmed? And again, get curious. Go back to your time audit and look at how you spent your time. It is eye opening.
Amy [00:07:34]:
I'm telling you. It's simple, but it works. As a part of your daily review, I then encourage you to ask yourself, what did I do to move my business forward today? Did I complete my daily non negotiables as we talked about during our power hour? How was I visible? Did I create or did I consume? Did I connect or did I compare and scroll all day long? What distractions were present? Now this one's a big one because life, life. And once we know where those distractions are, then we can take steps to minimize those distractions. Some people work really well in short bursts of time. Other people work well with background noise going on. You have to have that self awareness as to how do I function best? How do I get distracted? I want you to ask yourself, what opportunities exist for improvement? Again, we're getting curious. Look back at how you spent your day and list out your wins for the day.
Amy [00:08:45]:
So often we focus on all the things that we have to do that we forget about everything that we have done. Do this not only professionally, but do this personally as well. Like, hey, I took time away and ate lunch today. I went on a walk at lunchtime. I took the time to really maintain those boundaries by only picking up my phone and using social media for work within this time. And this time, celebrate. Celebrate those wins. That is such an important reframe as a business owner.
Amy [00:09:23]:
And then I want you to ask yourself this final question. How can I make tomorrow even better? What is the one thing that I want to focus on in order to make tomorrow better? This is the game changer, having the clarity that you need of exactly what you want and why you want it. This allows you to shift from being busy being busy to intentional focus. Intentional focus amplifies your results. It gives you control. And that self awareness allows you to develop a rhythm that works for you. And what I encourage you to do is continue to repeat this clarity cycle on page four of your workbook over and over. Acknowledge, assess, act, analyze, adjust.
Amy [00:10:26]:
This will change your life. This will change the trajectory of your business so remember, if you haven't taken the time to unplug for the weekend, make sure to schedule that on your calendar. It will be a game changer. And in conclusion, I want to congratulate you. Congratulations on taking the time to unplugged. But friend, this is just the beginning. Action creates momentum and momentum creates results. And right now, you are creating some awesome momentum.
Amy [00:11:07]:
Tomorrow, I'm going to pop into your inbox one last time and I'll be sharing details about something really awesome that I have for you to create that momentum, to keep that momentum going. Because you are able to achieve whatever goals that you have. You can do it. And until next time, cheers to making the money you want so you can create the impact you desire.
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