Molly Beyer digs deeper into the benefits of time tracking in your business in this episode. Last episode she explored why time tracking is so useful as a pricing tool, helping us figure out how much time we spend on products and services to ensure we price them correctly. This time she goes a little deeper and talks about why time tracking benefits goals and productivity by highlighting opportunities to innovate, automate, and delegate tasks.

When Molly separates her processes into “buckets” of time to identify everywhere she’s spending time, she also color codes those buckets. Her categories are things like administration, professional development, client work, and so on. Color coding them enables her to assign a specific color that relates to her zone of genius, her areas of strength, to tasks that she needs to keep doing while also identifying those tasks that maybe could be automated and those that definitely need to be automated or delegated.

With green as the zone of interest, yellow as can do but maybe later reassign, and red as must delegate or automate, a simple graph will detail exactly how much time we are spending on things we don’t need to be doing. This is where time tracking helps us with what to delegate, what to automate, and what to focus the bulk of our time on. Are we doing things that a virtual assistant or team member could do? Are there tasks our CRM could do automatically? Where are we losing time on things others could do and how do we realign our time distribution? Join Molly to answer those questions and grow business productivity.

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Contact Molly Beyer:

• MKBeyerBooks.com
• MKBeyerConsults.com
• Facebook: MK Beyer Books
  
  

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Transcript

Molly Beyer: [00:00:08] Hello, hello, I am Molly Beyer, host of The Ambiguous &: Business Basics and Beyond, a podcast where we have frank discussions on the basics of business with a holistic focus on everything that helps business owners define and find success. There are so many ands that impact being your own boss. Join us as we explore all these ands and more. Like, subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts and let's explore these ambiguous ands.

Molly Beyer: [00:00:38] Hello and welcome to The Ambiguous &: Business Basics and Beyond. I'm your host, Molly Beyer, and I'm here to lead you through frank and holistic conversations on the basics of business. Last time we talked about time tracking as a pricing tool, really diving deep into how much time you're spending on products and services to make sure you're pricing them correctly. Today, we're going to go a little bit farther and talk about time tracking for goals and productivity by identifying opportunities to innovate, automate, and delegate. So to jump back a little bit into time tracking, it's really important to create buckets of time for yourself to track where it is you're spending your time. When you're creating buckets, you want to think about all of the things that you're doing on a regular basis and break them out into categories. Again, mine are things like administrative, client work, and professional development, things like that. And especially my big one that I try to focus most of my time on is my rainmaker or CEO visionary space.

Molly Beyer: [00:01:53] Now, when we're using these to highlight opportunities like automate, innovate and delegate, visualization becomes a very valuable tool. Now I've color-coded my buckets for clarity and have kept that consistent through all of the areas that I use for task management: my email, my to-do list, and then again in my time tracking app. So when I'm looking through all of my data, I know what colors I'm looking for. For me, when I was creating mine, tasks that I wanted to eliminate are marked in red. So when I see that color, I know that I am working on a task that isn't necessarily in my zone of genius. And we're going to talk about that in just a minute. But a great way that I've heard a number of people use - my colors are a little different, again, my reds are definitely those things that are the things that are not fully supporting my business in the most effective way. Green is a great color to use for things in your zone of genius. Yellow are those things that they kind of cross over, maybe you're the right person to be working on them now, or it's more cost-effective for you to be working on them now, but they will likely eventually need some innovate, automate, or delegate. And those reds are definitely those things that need to get off of your to-do list.

Molly Beyer: [00:03:24] So the zone of genius. What do I mean when I say that? That's really that sort of marriage of your unique abilities and your interests. This is your really high-value space. When we talked about the Pareto Principle, that 80/20 rule, 20% of your tasks are going to generate 80% of your outcome. So what we need to do is find that 20% that is best suited to you. What are the things that you are doing that either only you can do or that you do best, as well as they are things that interest you, that fulfill you, that excite you. When you find that space, that is where you want to focus the most of your energy, because you are going to get immense return for that time that you spend. And then that's where you're going to prioritize spending your time. Things that are outside of your zone of genius, those 80% things, those are in those yellow and red categories. Those are things that need to be delegated automated, or find some sort of innovation to move beyond those. For me, when I started time tracking, particularly in relation to creating proposals, developing pricing, it took a lot of time. We use a project-based pricing system as opposed to an hourly based, and I realized that the amount of time I was spending creating each proposal for each client was astronomical. And in the beginning, when it was just me and I had just a couple of leads and just a couple of clients, that was fine. I had the time to do that. But as the business has grown, I don't have time to do that anymore.

Molly Beyer: [00:05:29] So I needed to find a way to take the particular pieces of that fall into my zone of genius, like very quickly being able to identify patterns and discrepancies, areas for improvement within the data sets that I'm reviewing, as well as being able to very quickly look at something like a chart of accounts, which is, you know, all of the areas that you're categorizing your accounting and see where it can be tweaked. I can identify very quickly where it needs to be tweaked, how it needs to be tweaked to make sure that it's most optimized for taxes, as well as making it most optimized for the business owner to use when they're running their business. So I can do this very quickly. What then becomes less quick is taking that view and moving that into the pricing. So we talked a bit about pricing last time when recognizing how much time we are spending on individual little tasks, we were able to break out and create a pricing calculator because we know how much time it takes to reconcile a bank account on average, we know about how much time it's going to take to handle a certain number of transactions.

Molly Beyer: [00:06:53] We know how long it's going to take to deal with certain payment processors. So when I can take all of that information, put it into a ...