Episode Summary

Are you struggling to keep up with everything on your to-do list? Do you ever get to the end of a workday and wonder what you actually accomplished? 

In this podcast episode, Melissa Swink discusses the six hidden time-wasting activities that can dilute your results and keep you from reaching your goals. After defining each of the six time-waters, Melissa talks about the importance of spending time on impactful work that creates results. Tune in to learn how you can save time and increase your productivity! 

Key Highlights:

• Spending time on impactful work is crucial for achieving business goals.
• Identify and eliminate busy work that can be streamlined, automated, or delegated.
• Minimize time spent on the six time-wasting activities.
• Focus on quality over quantity when it comes to your work hours. 

About Our Guest: 

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

Thanks for listening!

If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!

Subscribe to the podcast

If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.

Leave us an Apple Podcast review

Ratings and reviews from our listeners are really valuable and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review.

Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about six hidden time wasters that are diluting the results that you're getting in your business and ultimately delaying the achievement of the goals that you've set for yourself. In preparing for today's episode, I did a little research because I was curious,

you know, how much time the average person is spending on a day -to -day basis on productive work versus non -productive work. And I came across an article by Inc. And in their study, an average worker is only productive for about two hours and 53 minutes out of an eight -hour workday. And so when we take a look at that through the lens of life as business owners and CEOs of our companies and organizations, we can assume...

that about less than half, maybe even only less than a third of our time spent on a day -to -day basis doing our work is on impactful work that actually creates the results that we are looking to achieve. And so that is the whole purpose of today's episode and something that you're gonna hear from me over and over and over again. I talk a lot about time and the way that we're spending it because ultimately what we spend our time on,

directly impacts our results. results. It is a key determinant of whether we achieve our goals, if we achieve them, when we achieve them. And the other thing is that the way that we spend our time in our businesses is always going to be evolving. The way that you're spending your time as a solopreneur, the person wearing many different hats in your business in these early stages, maybe you're working towards your first 100K in sales.

life and the way that you spend your time looks very different than somebody who is leading a small but mighty team or somebody who is a CEO of a large organization. The way that we're spending our time does vary based on the state of our businesses and kind of where we're at, but it is something that is always evolving as time goes on. So with that in mind, I wanted to explore some hidden time wasters that

I have discovered in my own business that I have seen in many clients' businesses and ultimately heard other business owners and entrepreneurs share about when they talk about how they are getting the results that they want to accomplish in their business and taking a look at how they're spending and structuring their time. So I want to start with three obvious time wasters in your business.

And the reason why I'm sharing these is because I think it's always a good reminder to go back to some of these basics and take a look at are these ultimately having a negative impact on the work that I'm trying to accomplish on a day -to -day basis. And the first one, and the obvious but good reminder category of hidden time wasters is busy work. So this is something that we talk a lot about in the Make Space for More framework when we start taking a look at.

here are the most important things we need to be doing with our time, what do we do with everything else? And one of those things is taking a look at the busy work that we're doing in our business. These are things that are often repeatable, where they need to be done on a regular basis, not necessarily something that only we can do. So when we take a look at busy work in the business, we take a look at a couple of different things. Number one, is it necessary to begin with? And if it is,

Are there opportunities to streamline or automate it just to reduce the overall manual work that is being done in our businesses, whether they be us or somebody else? Or number three, can it be delegated to somebody else on your team or a virtual assistant or an executive assistant or what have you? So again, take a look at your to -do list on the average day or maybe what you've got on your plate for this week and be honest with yourself.

Is there busy work that's still on my plate that somebody else could take over for me? That is one of the major hidden and I would say not so, it's an obvious time waster, but again, something that kind of sneaks up on us over time. I can share with you that when we start working with clients as a virtual assistant team, the client often has this list of, I would consider low hanging fruit.

These are the things that aren't getting done. These are the things that I wanna take off my plate. These are the things that I don't enjoy doing. And we start working on those with the client, but then we need to frequently relook at where the client is spending their time. What else can we take off their plate? Because there's always more that can be handed off. Because again, our businesses are always growing and evolving, and so is the way that we're spending our time. So busy work. Take a look at what you've got on your plate and determine,

How much busy work am I doing throughout the course of the day to day? What can be handed off so that I can spend that time instead on the much more important things that I need to be doing as the owner and CEO of my company? Okay, another obvious, but a good reminder of hidden time wasters in our business, email. There are so many pieces of information coming at us on a day to day basis.

And I wanna make sure that we take a minute and examine our email habits because email is something that I know I personally and so many other business owners can get sucked into and then it causes us to be in reactive mode all day long. So what I like to do is put some parameters around when are we checking email and when are we leaving that inbox behind and focusing on the other work that needs to get done.

So I highly recommend carving out time, maybe not very first thing in the morning necessarily. Certainly want to reserve time for your morning routine, maybe some of the more creative work and this varies a little bit by person to person and when their ultimate best thinking time is throughout the day. But we want to make sure we're protecting that time. I also know that in order for me to really focus on my work, and I know others have shared this as well, that they really like to kind of get into the email,

triage it a bit and see, you know, is there anything that is important and urgent that I need to get off my plate and get resolved sooner than later in the day, you know, just seeing if there are any questions that have come in, things that need to be taken care of sooner than later. So I recommend carving out some time, I would say relatively close to when you start work for the day is typically my preference when I'm going in.

and triaging my email, again, not going through all of my emails to get to inbox zero or to significantly reduce the unread emails in my inbox, but just kind of taking a scan, seeing is there anything that needs to be addressed now, and then moving on to kind of preparing for my day. I also like to check email and reserve more time to go through it and get back to people towards the end of the day, kind of that daily wrap up.

And maybe there are times, you know, in the middle of the day before or after lunch that you want to hop in there and check as well. But the reason that I say that email can be a hidden time waster is if you are one of those people who has it up on your computer or constantly going off on your phone, which we'll get to in a second here, it's something that can be easily distracting and pull you into reactive mode. And we want to avoid that.

One tool that I have shared when it comes to email and managing the inflow of communications that are coming at us all day long is an app called Boomerang. I know it's something that's available for Google Workspace. I believe they have versions for Outlook and other email platforms as well. But when I go in and do my very intentional email check, I can pause my inbox with Boomerang.

so that no new emails are coming in. That way if I need to send emails or if I need to go back into my email to reference something, I'm able to do that, but I'm not getting distracted by new messages that are coming in. So again, try to put some boundaries in place when it comes to your email because it's really easy to get sucked in and derailed. Okay, the third obvious but good reminder in terms of hidden time wasters,

throughout the course of our day are phone notifications. This is something that I have been renewing my focus on personally because again, these habits can sometimes creep up where we're doing really well with it and then we get a little bit lax and then we find ourselves getting sucked in again. So one of those things for me has been phone notifications. And particularly, I have been more diligent about placing my phone.

in an area that I can't easily just grab it and take a look at throughout the course of my day. So right now it is across the room from me. I have it on do not disturb mode. I do have my ringer on. So if a family member or if my daughter's school tries to reach me, it will ring. I will hear it. I will go and take that call. But by having my phone away from my line of reach,

I'm far less tempted to grab it and mindlessly scroll. I caught myself doing this, and maybe you've done this as well, where I would be doing some of the impactful CEO work that I need to do in my business. Maybe it's planning one of these podcasts, or maybe it's creating some new content for a program for our clients, something like that. And I get to that point where my brain just kind of stops because I'm like,

I'm not sure how I wanna do that or what's the best way to roll this out. You know what I mean where you're working on something and your brain just kind of like hits that point? Well, I would just all of a sudden pick up my phone and check my email and say, did that order ship or has that been delivered? And then I would find myself mindlessly checking things on my phone. I'm like, what am I doing right now? I need to get back to what I was actually supposed to be doing. And so limiting the phone notifications by putting it in focus mode, do not disturb and removing it.

from your line of sight, your line of reach will be immensely helpful for keeping your brain focused on one thing at a time. I know I grew up hearing the concept of multitasking and I know I've seen that on several job descriptions as well back in my corporate days, like the ability to multitask, the reality is is very few of us are actually good at multitasking and our brains are far more efficient when we focus on one thing at a time. Okay.

So those are obvious but good reminders that I'm gonna continue to remind you about because I know that I need them. I know that so many of my clients need them as well. Busy work, email boundaries, phone notifications, those are things to re -examine and put into place or to fine tune if you find that what you currently have in place is not quite working for you as best as it could be. Now, moving on to three.

less obvious time wasters in our businesses. And these are some things that I personally discovered by doing an audit of where I spent my time. I wrote a blog article about this in January where I did a calendar audit for 2023 where I went through and I looked at every single thing that was on my calendar and I put it into one of three categories. Worth the time, money and energy?

not worth the time, money, or energy. I think I even termed it waste of time, energy, and money. And then self -care and happy things. So I went through and it probably took me about two hours to fully go through my calendar and categorize this. And then I was able to take a step back and look at what were some of the things that I really enjoyed that were really impactful.

that really grew my business this year or made my life better this year and what were some of the things that just were not? And I can tell you that I discovered that the list of waste of time, energy and money was a lot longer than the worth it category. And a lot of my clients who worked through this exercise made the same discovery. And it was a little bit disheartening for them as it was for me because these were things.

that we poured a lot of time into that some of us had invested in. Who hasn't invested maybe in a marketing campaign or ad campaign or maybe some type of coaching relationship or course and just really didn't get that return on investment? It's okay to admit that. We all have been there. We've all made those mistakes, but it's really good to take a look and reevaluate from time to time so that we're not repeatedly making the mistakes over and over and over again.

So with that being said, here are three core areas that I discovered that I was wasting my time, energy and money as well as clients. And ultimately, these are some of the hidden time wasters that are less obvious that I want to dive into for a few minutes here. Okay, so number one is meeting with and sometimes working with clients, team members, vendors who just were not a fit. So,

You may relate to this in that sometimes we receive a referral or we really want to give that person an opportunity to work with us. And you know, you're not sure if it's going to be a fit, but you want to give it a try. Or maybe there are some requirements that they have or some accommodations that they need in terms of maybe systems or availability and such that isn't

white ideal, but you decide to try and make it work anyway, and ultimately the whole thing just doesn't work out. That's kind of what I'm talking about here. Certainly when we are growing our businesses through building a team, we are going to make hiring mistakes. Or certainly, especially early on in our businesses when we are in growth mode and frankly, we need money to pay our bills.

Sometimes we accept those non -ideal clients and make it work for as long as we can, but ultimately learn the lesson of this is not the right fit for me going forward. So those are some of the things I'm talking about is really diving in and listening to your gut and thinking through is this person, is this company, is this team member really a fit for me and my business with in respect to where I'm headed?

what's aligned, what is not aligned, and listening to that and tuning in and just avoid going that direction in the first place. I can share with you that every time that I have onboarded a non -ideal team member of my company, there's a lot of time and money involved with that because we are taking the time to train and onboard incoming team members. We are often having them work with clients depending on how long they work with our team.

They may be working with clients and then ultimately if they just don't work out and they're not a fit, then we also have that time to offload them from the team. We have time spent in maybe patching up client relationships, rematching them with other team members. There's a lot of time and energy wasted on somebody who's not a fit. So consider, are you having meetings with people or...

Are you working with people who just ultimately are not the right fit for you? Again, going back to the results that you are looking to achieve in your company, the goals that you've set for yourself. Look at it through that lens. Okay, number two of less obvious hidden time wasters in our businesses, creating content and doing activities that really don't meet the needs of our audiences.

And what we found was that our audience by far enjoyed the behind the scenes content of what we were working on our businesses, what our clients were working on and things like that versus kind of the nuts and bolts of how to work with a virtual assistant, how much do they charge and all that sort of thing. Those performed far better. And so when I looked back at the analytics and I could see where the demand was for the type of content we were creating,

I, of course, if I would have looked at that sooner, I could have course corrected a lot sooner and no longer spent time creating content that really wasn't landing with my audience. Another example that I realized was not the best use of my time were some of the events that we were doing. I really wanted to do a quarterly event for our clients and their guests.

where we had open networking time and brought in speakers to come in. And these were great events, don't get me wrong. I really enjoyed the connections. I enjoyed all the information that was presented. Our clients who were able to attend enjoyed them as well. But when I took a look at how many clients were actually able to attend these events, very few of them were able to participate. And when I sent out a survey to ask, hey, is this something that you're interested in?

Many of them said it kind of depends on the topic or ultimately like mice this just does not fit into my schedule right now and so I think that sometimes when we can take a step back and Review the results that we're getting or the analytics or even ask our audience through surveys and things like that That can help us avoid creating unnecessary work for ourselves Putting together an online event as many of you know takes a lot of time and energy

It takes a lot of intention. And ultimately, if it's just not something that is in high demand from our audience, maybe there are other ways to connect with them and to serve them that would be a better use of, again, our time, money, and energy. Just to give you a really open and honest behind the scenes of some of the things that did not work out so well last year for us and our company. You probably have your version of this as well. So keeping...

Keeping tabs on what your audience needs from you, what are they enjoying most from you, what are they not enjoying or what's not taking off and being really honest with yourself, doing more of the things that are impactful and less of the things of course that are not. Okay, the last but not least, less obvious hidden time waster in your business, attending events and participating in groups that are no longer aligned.

I realized that some of the networking that I was doing last year was challenging for a couple of ways. Sometimes I wonder if it is better to attend a networking event with a business bestie or a friend where you can introduce each other to other people that you know in the room and it just makes the event more of a fun kind of experience. But then sometimes,

my ideal client was not necessarily in that room or my peers in terms of where I'm at in business were not necessarily in those rooms. And there was absolutely no shade at all to any of the groups I participated in or any of the events I attended last year. But I needed to get really honest and see, you know, was this aligned with me and my business in terms of where we are headed?

And that may be the case for you to take a look at as well. I know that I have a client who for many years participated in a networking group here in our area. And this person just would renew over and over and over. So year after year after year, they're participating in the same networking group. And they really had admitted to me on several occasions that they weren't enjoying the experience anymore. It felt like been there, done that.

I know the people and I love the people who are in this group, but it just feels really repetitive to me and it's taking time out of my work every single week. And, you know, it was time that I encouraged them to maybe look at taking a break from that group or maybe look at joining a different group where you can form some new relationships. Again, no shade to the other group that they were a part of for many years, but maybe it's just time to move on. And so I think...

If you can take some time to take a look at what events are you attending, what groups are you participating in, are they ultimately aligned with where you're headed as a person and as a business owner in the future? And if they're not, maybe look at some other opportunities to explore groups that are better aligned, or maybe there are better ways of networking that are more aligned for you. So all of that being said, those are the six

hidden time wasters in our businesses that I think we need to be taking a look at and reviewing and considering on a regular basis as we continue to grow and evolve and expand our businesses. So all of that being said, if you know a business owner who has goals and is juggling multiple responsibilities in their life and business and every minute counts in their day, please consider sharing this episode with them. Really, my goal is designed to help you

take a more quality over quantity approach to the activities that you're doing in the way that you are spending your time. So thank you so much for joining us today. Tune into the next episode of Make Space for More for more tools and information to grow and scale your business in a way that's aligned and authentic for you. Have a wonderful day.