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Sharing a favorite resource. As part of my daily morning routine, I like to read The Morning Brew – which comes in my email inbox. It covers biz / tech news and other major current events. Very easy and quick to skim.
You can sign up here:
https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/r/?kid=644438
Do you have email newsletters that you enjoy reading?
If you like advice straight and blunt, Dan Kennedy will give to you. In his book, No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, Dan does not hold back from laying down the law when it comes down to how to manage time effectively. He is such a stickler for time, and while you may scoff at his unconventional methods (i.e. using a fax machine), his numerous achievements at running multiple businesses and writing numerous books is no joke. He protects his time and gets sh*t done.
It’s a sizable book at 240 pages, I read the eBook version and found it was quite gripping. I couldn’t wait to read more. It got a little bit dry in one section – Chapter 14 where it became a rant about taming technology, but I stuck through it, finished it, and thought it was overall a worthwhile read!
If you are protective about guarding your money, you should be even more protective about your time! I am guilty of letting time slip by innocuously as I endlessly scroll through my phone, sigh.
Anyhow, he emphasizes understanding the worth of your time – even calculating how much each hour and minute of your life is worth. He talks about setting firm boundaries and not allowing “time vampires” to suck away your time. Example of a time vampire: someone who often drops by your office just to ask you something that ends up taking a lot of your time.
Even though he is running multiple businesses and has many private clients, he only has 1 staff person – his assistant who works on the other side of the country. He works from home and contacts her every once in awhile. The reason she is not in the same physical space as him is because then he would get interrupted a lot more. By being in different offices, they limit communication to the specific methods – faxing, FedEx documents back and forth, short check-ins. He used to have a staff of over 40+ people and go into the office on a regular basis. However, he found that when you’re too available to your employees/team, then they ask you for things that they could have figured out themselves. So he finds it best to work at home (no commute and less interruptions) with just one staff person on the other side of the country.
He also guards against interruptions by not having a cell phone. Yes, that’s right, he doesn’t have a cell phone. He did try having one once, but got so frustrated with it after 2 weeks that he threw it out his car window and never had one again. He also doesn’t have email. Yes, pretty crazy! He does his work through fax, FedEx packages, phone call appointments, and in-person consultations. It took me awhile to wrap my head around this that he wasn’t actually kidding.
He even has these strict communication rules with his clients, where they need to setup appointments ahead of time. His phone appointments are 20 minutes long, so that he can squeeze in 3 meetings into an hour. And once a month, he has these phone call days, to take care of all these calls. If there’s an emergency, the clients contact his assistant who will triage it appropriately. He requires his clients come to where he’s located, so he can save time by reducing air travel time and fatigue.
While I found some of his methods very strict, I do see the value in having those firm boundaries so that he can have as much uninterrupted time to do deep focused work. He describes the benefit to his clients in this way: when they’re meeting (on the phone or in-person), they have his FULL ATTENTION. Whereas if he was available 24/7 by phone, then they would only receive his partial attention because he could be in the midst of doing something else.
I have to admit, Dan Kennedy has seriously thought about the costs of everything – the cost of travel, interruption, context switching, etc.. By being intentional about how his time is used, he is able to have more time to relax at the racetrack in the evenings or spend time with family.
Similar to what I had learned in the last book I wrote about on The Power of Full Engagement, being extremely efficient with your time DOES NOT mean working all the time.
Dan Kennedy has budgeted time for the projects and clients that are important to him and budgeted time to enjoy life as well. That sounds like a good deal to me.
Here are some of the quotes I wrote down:
“If anything, the passing of time has stiffened my resolve about safeguarding it, wisely investing it, enjoying it, and bringing upon any who would steal it, waste, or abuse it.”
“Is what I am doing, this minute, moving me measurably closer to my goals?”
“Just as the person who cannot tell you where his money goes is forever destined to be poor, the person who cannot tell you where his time goes is forever destined to be unproductive- and, often, poor.”
“One of the most significant things that you can control to a great extent, is association- your choices of whom you permit into your world, whom you give time or invest time with, and whom you look to for ideas, information, and education.”
“To get anywhere with an idea, you must concentrate ALL your thoughts on ONE task at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until they are brought into focus.” -Alexander Graham Bell
“There is only one success- to be able to spend your life in your own way.” – Christopher Morley
One suggestion he made is to have clocks in every room of your house. Then you won’t lose track of hours passing by. You’ll always be conscious of what time it is, so you can know if you’re on track or need to move onto the next thing. I usually use the clock on my phone, so my action item is to buy more clocks for my place!!
I’ve also decided to use timers more often for my work. If I take an afternoon break or a lunch break, sometimes I’ll set a timer so that I don’t get too carried away. In addition, I’ve gone back to using Toggl and even downloaded the app on my phone too for when I’m not doing laptop work. (See earlier blogpost where I talk about Toggl.)
If you’re feeling frantic / pressed for time, here’s the book if you want to adopt some new time management techniques: No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs
For more thoughts on productivity and priorities, check out some of the episodes on my podcast What Kat Found Out, also available on all major podcast players.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. And of course, I would recommend this book regardless.
One of my goals for 2019 was to work on my public speaking skills by doing monthly speaking events. But finding speaking events is not necessarily straightforward, so to reduce dependencies, I decided to take it upon myself to host a webinar (an online talk) each month for the whole year, with a different topic each month.
The thing with having a webinar, unlike hosting an in-person event, is that there’s no pressure for a certain number of people to come. Whoever wants to come can come! And if they don’t, that’s okay too. Takes some of the pressure off, so I could focus on my speaking part.
I just hosted my first webinar last weekend and the topic was: Making Your Dreams Com True in 2019! I was very happy with how it went. There was 10 of us and we had guided reflection time so we could write / plan out our goals and also talk about them too. It was really great connecting with like-minded folks and being able to share openly about struggles and also tips for chasing our dreams. I can’t wait for the next one!!
I had to do some research to figure out what technology to use for the webinar. I wanted a low or no-cost option because this is really an experiment, so I had to rule out the platforms that had monthly fees.
So after all that, I decided to go with a Zoom call. It’s not exactly like a webinar format with a host and participants, but it’s more like a group conference call. It actually worked out quite well for our group size. People could turn on their video and microphone and chime in.
A Zoom call does have limitations though. The free version limits your group calls to 40 minutes. We did end up signing off the call, and then signing back in at the 40 minute mark lol. A tiny hassle. And there is a limit to 100 people per call too.
For your purposes, it’ll depend on what your needs are, what audience size you have, and what type of engagement you want with them. If you’re starting off, I would test out the waters with some free options first.
Technology doesn’t always work when we want it to, and I know other people have had technical difficulties with their webinars (on much larger scale with more complicated technology, but still). So having a backup plan is always good. I had a backup plan of using YouTube live in case the Zoom call didn’t work. But luckily I didn’t need it!
All went smoothly with the Zoom call and I’m looking forward to the next one in February!! Hope you can join me for that one! You can also join my mailing list so you don’t miss out. I’ll be announcing the next topic soon!
I’ve tried all sorts of routines and things to stay on top of my tasks. These are the tips that worked best for me.
I use the countdown timer in Google search on my computer. You can use a physical timer or one on your phone if you prefer. I set it to 30 minutes and then start working on a task – like writing this blogpost!
That makes me feel like I have a short term deadline to get the task done, instead of feeling like I have all afternoon or an infinite amount of time. Otherwise the task will drag on and fill up the entire space that I allow for it.
If I start to feel antsy and want to do something like get up to get a snack or take a break, I’ll tell myself that I can do it after the 30 minutes are up. Hence it reduces distraction because the timer is running. Seeing the timer jolts me back to focus at the task at hand.
If the task takes longer than 30 minutes, then I can reset the timer, but then I’m conscious that now it’s taking me an hour. And so on, if I need more time. This is helpful rather than letting hours slip by unconsciously. If I reset it a couple times, then I realize I should hurry up because it’s taking longer than it should. Or maybe the task is too big and needs to be split up into parts that can be done in smaller time increments.
At the end of the workday, do you ever think, “Wow, where did the whole day go? I got nothing done!” Well, I’m sure you got something done, but maybe not the right priority item.
In any case, tracking what you did and for how long can bring you awareness of where your time is actually going. I use the Toggl website, which is a free tool. You can start/stop/pause the timer when you change activities. I’m not the best at remembering to always start the timer, but you can go back and add entries if needed.
I wish I could be better at tracking everything because Toggl has this cool aggregate report where they show you a breakdown of what you spent your time on for the week. As you can see, I got lazier with tracking as the week went on. It’s hard to remember to track things when I’m driving around and not sitting at my computer. In the column on the right, it also shows what you spent the most time on.
Anyhow, Toggl has a bunch more features like tracking multiple projects, tracking for a whole team, track billable hours worked for a client, etc… There’s so many features, I haven’t dug into them much yet. I use the basic free plan. I don’t know if Toggl has a countdown timer, so I use it in conjunction with Google’s countdown timer.
In the SELF journal I use, there are 30 minute time slots to schedule each day from 6am – 9pm. The 30 minute slots are really important than just a big old blank space for the whole day. I find the 30 minute time slots force me to be very specific and account for what I will do throughout the day, instead of hand waving approximately how I’ll spend my time.
Hence I started planning my days the night before, trying to block out time for eating, gym, cooking, meetings, content creation, even accounting for driving time to get to places.
I definitely don’t follow the plan exactly, but sometimes I try to pencil in how long actual tasks took so that I can learn how much time to allocate for them next time.
One thing I learned is that my morning rarely goes as planned in the journal. -_- And that sleeping past my alarm makes me go off schedule as well. Ah well, tomorrow’s another chance to stick to the schedule!
Trial/error with these different techniques is the only way to figure out if they work for us or not. It often requires repeated attempts at the same technique to get it to work.
I’m still grappling with how to manage my time. Time is our greatest and most precious resource. So I hope that by all this planning, tracking, observing, and reflecting, I can get a more realistic view of how I spend my time and be more intentional about how I use it.
Alright, well checking the clock, I’m 10 minutes overtime already, so it’s time to wrap this baby up and go take a break! 😛
What techniques do you use for managing your time? Would love to hear what works for you!
There’s no need to use Photoshop or other complicated tools.
It’s also FREE!
Canva has tons of templates and layouts that look fantastic and professional.
You just drag/drop your own photos, enter in your own text, and suddenly you have a magical and beautiful social media graphic – without any graphic design experience!
Major props to those who have graphic design experience, I don’t know how you make such beautiful things. The rest of us have to resort to finding tools like this to help us get by!
When you open Canva, you can create a new design.
Depending on what your use case is, you can pick if you’re creating an Instagram post, a Facebook ad, a LinkedIn cover photo, blog header image, infographic, flyer, or a multitude of other options.
It’ll lay out a canvas for you at the appropriate dimensions – so helpful because the variation of image dimensions for each social media platform drives me nuts.
I clicked on “Instagram post” so here’s a blank square canvas for me to work with. I can choose from various Canva layouts. There’s a lot of great options for free, while some options cost money.
Once you select a layout, it gets added to your canvas. Then you can start editing the text, photos, and drag/drop to move elements around – change the color / font / etc…
You can upload your own images and drag them onto the canvas. Below is a history of images I’ve uploaded for my past graphics.
You can also search for photos or illustrations that Canva provides. Some are free and some are paid.
Once you finish your design, you can download it in the format you want and use it wherever you need.
Canva also keeps a collection of all your past designs. That’s handy when I want to use a similar format / font from something I created before. Make a copy of a design and then edit from there.
This is a recent graphic I created for a YouTube video thumbnail.
Side note: I like how preparing my own graphic for the thumbnail makes the video look a lot better (top two video thumbnails), as compared to a random still frame taken from the YouTube video (rest of thumbnails). 
To promote the video on my Instagram page, I couldn’t use the above thumbnail because some of the text would get cut off. Hence I copied all the elements over and created a new square Instagram graphic. Download the image and then post it!
By now, you’re probably getting the idea that there’s many use cases for these graphics. If you’re building your own brand, it’s important to have strong visuals. I’m still working on making a cohesive visual brand for myself, but Canva is allowing me to experiment with different styles in an easy way.
For more examples of what I’ve created with Canva, check out my Instagram @kat.kuan.
There’s also a paid premium version, which I haven’t tried yet. If you work on a team, then multiple users can collaborate together. You can setup a brand color scheme, logos, fonts, etc.. so that these preset defaults are easily accessible when you’re creating your graphics.
Overall, I highly recommend this tool for beginners. It makes you feel powerful *arm flex* and capable of doing graphic design!
Now go make your social media accounts pretty with Canva!