The basic concept here is all about turning the time that you have, your business hours, into money. This is the exact opposite of the ‘busy work’ that some people do, work that could be delegated, or even forgotten. If you’re responding to emails from friends when you could be making money, for example, you need to change this.
The methodology is tied to your income goals. If you know that you want to earn £200,000 a year, for example, by doing some simple number work you should be able to see what your time is worth on an hourly basis. And knowing what your time is worth will help you to see when you are wasting it.
Say you want to work 50 weeks a year, and your goal is £200,000 per annum. With some simple arithmetic, you can see that this makes for £4000 per week. Divide that by the number of days in a working week, which is five, and you get £800 per day. That is how much you are worth if you want to make that £200,000 figure. To make the whole thing even clearer, divide that £800 figure by five hours, which is pretty much the most anyone can spend working without dropping in quality. This makes your hour worth £160. However, to take into account your expenses, taxes, pension contributions etc, you probably need to double this to £320 per hour.
This time is so valuable, that it needs to be spent doing valuable things. This means good thinking time, as well as researching. Visioning should be there too, as should marketing of your work and client care. This is what we call business development, and at £320 per hour it should be the highest quality work you can muster.
The key here is to know exactly what you are worth, and work at that level. Once you have worked out how to spend your time most productively, this information can be used to put together a time plan that will send your career skyrocketing, just because you are not wasting time.
Thank you to Dan Sullivan for the source materials for this article, and Ali Brown for bringing the concept to our attention.
