29. 4-Day Entrepreneur Order of Operations

You an entrepreneur that started your business so you could have more income and more freedom? And have you yet reached those objectives? Or are you simply considering that that's something you'd like to do in the future? Many entrepreneurs I talked to have figured out over the years how to make the money they need to make to earn additional income, to earn a higher lifestyle, and yet they've not figured out how to turn that into a better lifestyle, how to get more freedom from themselves. Very often, they're caught in that trap of I'm the small business owner, the business becomes more successful, I make more money, I get more clients, people count on me more, my life becomes crazy, and I really can't let go of clients. If I have two little clients, I don't have enough money. If I have too many clients, I'm too busy, and I'm either in a situation where there's not enough money coming in, I'm trying to hustle make sales happen, or I have too many sales coming in and I'm too busy, I don't have time for my family, my friends for fun. There's a simple order of operations you can use to get you to a four day work week as quickly as possible.

Now, you might remember in math, we had that order of operations, please excuse my dear Aunt Sally, parenthesis, exponent, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction. There you go. Well, there's an order of operations of how you can do things best with this. And this is really a summary of the key to how you can make more money in less time. The first thing is to subtract everything you can eliminate from your schedule. Now, a lot of people have a hard time with this because they'll say, Well, wait, I'm already doing everything I need to do. I don't do anything that's making me no money. Really? Look at your schedule. Do you know how you're spending your time? No, wait, I really don't. Do you know how many hours you invest in each of the different streams of income you have? I don't know, wait, I don't know if I have streams of income. Give you an example. Let's say you sell apples, oranges, and bananas. Some people would say, Wait, I just make money selling fruit. Well, let's look at that. Let's say your apples made you a certain amount of money. Then your oranges made you a certain amount of money, and your bananas made a certain amount of money.

Let's just pick on bananas just to be mean. Let's say bananas just weren't painting out for you, but you're dividing your time evenly between apples, oranges, and bananas. You might decide, You know what? If you really looked at it, Gosh, the bananas, I'm not making money there. Maybe I just need to focus on my apples and oranges. There's a lot of things that you can eliminate that simply free up time for you. And so to again, use the apples, oranges and bananas example. Let's say one day a week, you're selling apples. One day a week you're selling oranges. One day a week, you're selling bananas, and the other two days of the week you're running your business. Well, if bananas aren't making money for you, knock out the bananas. You're working a four day work week. So sometimes it's as simple as eliminating what doesn't work. I've seen small business owners go from 70 hours a week to 30 hours a week in a very short period of time. And when the change is that dramatic, very often it's because there was some marketing pet project or advertising thing that they were hoping would work.

They were so optimistic. They were so convinced that the marketing gods were going to give them results. The entrepreneurial gods were going to look down upon them favorably and say, Yes, you're a good boy, you're a good girl. You've spent money. We shall give you abundance. It doesn't work that way. Sometimes we work on projects and they don't work. I invested or wasted 600 hours and about $18,000 trying to make iPhone apps. Would have been better off just working on my golf game or something like that. But I had to track it. I had to know that, and once I found that, I subtracted that. Second thing, divide the responsibilities you have with delegation. There are certain tasks you have that are low dollar tasks, $10 an hour tasks, $15 an hour tasks. If you're making $30 an hour average, so to put that in the context, if you work 2,000 hours in a year, that's 40 hours a week times 50 weeks, and if you're making $60,000 in US dollars or any dollars for that matter, then you're making $30 per hour. That's if that's your take home. Well, then any work that you have that's $10 an hour work, you should be delegating that to somebody else, finding somebody can do that for you if that's something that can be delegated.

Delegate as much as possible, responsibly. There are certain things that don't seem to make you money that your name is on the door or you're the boss and you have to do them. But there's many things you can let go of if you're focused. Third, multiply your focus and your results by focusing on fewer tasks. Again, the apples, oranges and bananas example. If bananas aren't continent, just focus on your apples and oranges. Most people have only two or three things that they do that really make them money. Athletes are very clear about this. Performance are clear about this. If I'm a singer, I really make money when I'm on stage singing. I don't make money in the time I'm practicing. Now, I have to practice, but I don't make money if I'm setting up the stage, perhaps. I don't make money if I'm doing these different things. I might save money by setting up the stage, but maybe if I'm getting paid a higher amount for my singing gig, maybe I need to pay somebody else to set up the stage for me so I can have more singing gigs and that can have more energy.

Whatever it might be, there are usually higher dollar and higher impact tasks you can be doing and lower dollar, lower impact tasks. Most of the time, the higher dollar, higher impact things are more challenging. They're more fun, they're more engaging. T hat are a better way for us to invest our time. And last, add focus, not additional tasks. Very often when people free up time, the first thing we think is, Oh, my God. I've got to I've subtracted something, Wade, on step one. I got to add something back. Not necessarily. What if you're overworked? It might be that you just need to take a day off, especially if you're working six or seven days a week and you're working 60, 70 hours a week. It might be as simple as stop working Saturday and Sunday, subtract 20 hours of work and add rest and come back focused. We work, many of us, in fields that are based on intellectual information and knowledge and processing. If you were a laborer and you worked with your body, you would understand that your body gets tired and it's perhaps at times easier for us to see or feel when our body gets tired and you'd know, Okay, I just can't work right now.

Or if you got an injury, it'd be easier to see. You might be limping because you hurt your leg. But when our brain is off focus, it's not as easy for us to detect. We as a species haven't figured that out yet. So very often adding focus can be as simple as having less task so that when you do a task, you really focus in on that. You don't do your email at that time, you don't do something else. You focus in on whatever that task is, and you do just that for a small period of time. Usually, it's best when you do things like that first thing in the day when you have your most energy, most focus, and you can always get to your reactive things, your email and other things like that later. So subtract, divide, multiply, add. The simplest way to get you started in moving towards a more productive business, whether you're an employee or an employer, some of these things maybe you can't do. You might say, Wait, as an employee, I can't subtract everything, but what about the things you do that are not productive? You might say to your boss, Hey, boss, I'm doing these things.

They're not getting us anywhere. Can I stop doing those? And can I start divide, get some of this stuff to the new guy or the new gal who is cost you less per hour than I do so that I can get better results and have more focus? So this is not just an entrepreneur thing. This is about being more productive and getting better results. Hope you found that helpful. If you're looking to create your plan to create a four day work week, whether you're an entrepreneur, a business owner, an employee, at some point you're going to have to decide and map out what's it going to look like. Best place I know to start is with a four day game plan. Go to 4day gameplan. Com and you can get the training videos and the tools to help you set this up for free. If you have any questions in this, let me know. As always, I look forward to helping you make more money in less time. Do what you do best. Thank you.