Guide: From Busy to Impactful - How to Gain 5+ Hours Each Week for What Counts
The Truth About Your Time & Attention
Choosing what’s important to focus on week to week, day to day is not a passive process. If you don't decide what's most important to you, how your time gets spent is determined by anyone and anything other than you.
The End Result?
Your day is spent on busy work rather than what’s truly important to you. This can leave you feeling overwhelmed, in a rush, and even slightly agitated. And no amount of extra work hours or late nights will solve the underlying problem. If you go through your day without a planned focus of what you want to get done, it's hard to expect great results.
So, what's the alternative?
Get better at making decisions about what's important, and follow through.
Get better at responding to changing circumstances, without losing sight of your goals.
Treat your time as a precious resource you can use for greater success and impact.
Structure your work week for what counts and for results.
If you are looking to
spend each week focused on important work rather than what's noisiest
better purpose your time for impact and results
Then this guide is for you.
So, how do you go about gaining 5+ hours each week for what counts? And why bother?
So, Why Bother?
“You have to live on this 24 hours of time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use … is a matter of the highest urgency.”
Invest and allocate your time for the things that truly matter.
Things like:
Spending more time with your loved ones
Serving more people and making more money
Improving the quality of your life and those around you
Cutting down on the amount of stress-inducing busy work that fills up your schedule
Spending time on passion projects and things you looove to do
Developing the high-leverage skills and capabilities necessary to build the life you want
The Compound Effect
Consistent, small, positive actions can create significant results over the long term. Over a month, 5 hours spent on what counts each week adds up to 20 hours. Over a quarter, it turns into 65 hours. And over a year, it’s 260 hours.
That's an extra 11 days a year for what matters most.
That time could mean more income, an extra vacation each year, or more quality time with family. Over time and with practice, you could continue to gain more and more time each for what matters most.
The Steps to go from Busy to Impactful
(Note - check out our short blog “The Principles of Going from Busy to Impactful” here to maximize your results.)
Clarify Your Situation
To gain 5+ hours for what counts each week, first-order priorities must come first.
Clarify what's important and your priorities based on your current commitments and goals.
What priorities are most important to you that you are not getting to?
List them out.
Here are a few business examples
creating business partnerships to expand capacity
Sales prospecting and relationship building with your top customers and donors
Speaking and being the face of the business or organization
Creating inspirational marketing and messaging content
2. Understand what actions you have to do to move your priorities and goals forward.
Based on your priorities & goals, what tasks are most important for you to do daily/weekly?
List them out.
“You can do anything, but not everything”
Make sure each task you list is actionable and specific rather than generalized or vague.
Pro Tip
Once you have your priority tasks defined, consider your level of skill at each. You may be a great writer, but not so hot at designing. Or you may be great at getting the newsletter in the hands of your target audience, but not so great at writing. It's important to know what to do to make progress and how well-suited you are to complete each step in the process.
3. Understand how many hours each week are for hard commitments, and how many hours you have to self-direct your schedule.
Each week, you have hard commitments to fullfill. You also have flexible, self-directed time, where you get to choose what your focus.
It's helpful to know how many hours your hard commitments take up, and how many hours you have to decide what to do with.
Write down your hard commitments and guesstimate how many hours you need to fulfill them each week
Next, take how the total number of hours you work each week, and subtract the hard commitments. The hours left make up your self-directed time that you can purpose.
Here's an Example from Cal Newport's book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love."
At this point, you know:
Your priorities
What tasks you want to focus on to fulfill your priorities and drive results
The total hours you have available to purpose each week
Create Your Plan
Next,
Think through how much time you’d like to spend on each priority task you have each week, ideally
Next, decide how long each session will be to do the task well (30 m, 60 m, 90 m, 2 hours as examples)
Tip
It's helpful to reserve time for deep, uninterrupted work. Learn more.
Once you’ve done this breakdown for all your priority tasks, add up the total weekly hours.
Check that your total hours is on par with the number of hours you have for self-directed time.
Visualize Your Ideal Week
It’s time to connect the “what” to the “when.” Visualize a new weekly schedule to ensure priority tasks come first.
Visualize an ideal week where your priority tasks and activities take place. Do this by creating a new calendar or filling out a worksheet and scheduling your activities on it. Feel free to add your hard-to-change commitments and things like breakfast, lunch, wakeup time, etc. onto the ideal calendar as well.
example ideal week sheet
Go From Ideal to Real
Your ideal week calendar is a tool to help you plan your time and direct your focus on what counts. With it, you can set your personal schedule each week to be more in alignment with the life you want to live.
Look at your upcoming workweek
Using your ideal week as a reference, add priority tasks as events to your personal calendar. Shift 5+ hours for priority tasks.
With your week planned, it's time to experience less busy work and more time for what counts.
Gain 5+ hours For What Counts
Doing these two things will help ensure you spend more time on what matters most and cut down on busy work.
Each day during your week, focus on two things.
Spending time focused on the priority tasks that count
Increasing the number of sessions of focused, uninterrupted work you do
Doing these two things will ensure you spend more time on what matters most and cut down on busy work.
Track Your Progress
Each day, track:
total time spent on priority tasks and activities (example - 4 hours)
the number of sessions you completed (example - 3 focused work sessions)
how performing your priority tasks helped you progress towards your goals
Here's an example of a daily tracker you can use. It takes 5 minutes to fill out at the end of the work day.
Tracking will help you figure out how much time you’re gaining on what counts and what to adjust going forward.
“Measure yourself based on “did I do what I said I would do, for as long as I said I would do it.””
Continuously Improve
For best results, reflect and refine your approach each week.
Review your calendar at the end of the week to see what activities you prioritized.
At the end of your week, take a few minutes to reflect.
Were you able to shift 5+ hours from busy work to impactful work?
What went well? What didn’t? Why?
Check your results, how many hours did you gain?
Note which activities you did are in alignment with your priorities and goals, and which are not.
Based on your reflection, what could you change on your ideal week calendar to make it more accurate and useful?
Reflecting will help you continue to focus more on what matters most going forward.
Repeat the process from the “Go From Ideal to Real” step. Plan and structure your upcoming week, and continue shifting time for what counts.
What adjustments do you want to make to your personal schedule next week?
Aim to spend more time on priority tasks and activities producing results.
Everything You Need to Focus on What Counts
Blog guides are great and all, but if you made it this far, you want results. We’ve made it easy for you to apply this process to your work week.
Click here to get our do-it-yourself workbook and gain your 5+ hours each week.
Join our automated newsletter with each step of the blog broken down into bite-sized steps to help you shift your five-hours.
Hop into our slack channel - Busy to Impactful. Share insights, strategies, and ask questions.
Interested in 1 on 1 help? We’ve got you covered.
“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.”