The Power of Blocking Out Your Time for Business Growth

The Power of Blocking Out Your Time for Business Growth

Today, I’m going to talk about the power of blocking out your time. I feel like this is probably the third time I’ve addressed this, but it’s such an important subject that it’s worth revisiting.

I was doing an Entrepreneurs’ Organization meeting recently and one of the topics we discussed was productivity. One thing I brought up was blocking out and being very intentional with your time.

Learn More: The Best Way to Be as Productive as Possible Every Day

As you get older, more experienced and better at what you do, more people are going to want your time. They’ll want to pick your brain. They’ll want to take you to coffee and pay for your $5 coffee in order to get massive value in return, which is probably not a great trade for you (because your time becomes increasingly valuable).

That’s why I try to block out time for emails. So at 10 a.m. I’m checking emails for the first time that day. Then I might check emails again at 1 p.m. or so. I might spend 30 minutes on that each time. Having a calendar blocked out with what you’re doing at any given hour is super important.

I block out time for my one-on-one calls. I block out time for writing my book. I block out time for meditation in the morning. Oftentimes, I’ll miss some of these things, but to have it in the calendar where it’s constantly being repeated and constantly being reinforced helps quite a bit.

Related Content: The Entrepreneur’s Dilemma: How to Juggle Multiple Projects and Have a Life, Too

Let’s say you’re a business owner on Friday afternoons or all of Friday you just block out time for a strategy session where you can think about how to improve operations. I actually know somebody who blocks out his whole Wednesday just for strategy, and he delegates more client work that day. Those days are really important, because that’s when you come up with great ideas that you can implement for the business.

I cannot stress this enough—blocking out time is super important. Make sure that you do it.

Here are a few more ways I block out my time. For “Webinar Wednesdays,” I try to block out time to do live webinars. When people try to schedule a call with me, I’ll send them my ScheduleOnce link. Typically, the call will only be for 15 minutes because I find that you’re able to get to the point in 15 minutes. Let’s be honest—some people like to ramble. That’s why you keep it at 15 minutes and use a scheduling solution like ScheduleOnce or Calendly, which will sync with your calendar and even build in delays between calls if you need that.

ScheduleOnce

Learn More: 10 Ways Successful Entrepreneurs Stay Productive All Day Long

If your calendar is not set up and if you’re not being intentional with your time, everything’s just going to be all over the place. Before you know it, it’s already 5 or 6 p.m. and you were just shuffling around little tasks that don’t really move the needle because you’ve been focused on compulsively checking and answering emails.

But if you start blocking out your calendar, if you start being intentional with your time, and you do it for over a year? You’re going to reap the rewards and your life will be way better.

Learning to block out your time is free, but the returns are priceless.

This post was adapted from Eric’s Facebook Live videos: Growth 90 – DAILY live broadcasts with Eric Siu on marketing and entrepreneurship. Watch the video version of this post:

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