5 Ways to Accomplish More in Less Time (Without Hustling Harder) - EP # 249

If you’ve been telling yourself, “I just need more time,” this episode will help you.

Most business owners don’t have a time problem—they have a clarity problem, a focus problem, and a systems problem. 

In this episode of the Diamond Effect Podcast, Maggie breaks down five practical, CEO-level ways to accomplish more in less time—without working longer hours or burning yourself out.

You’ll learn why these five strategies must be done in a specific order (so you don’t “scale chaos”), and how to create more results with the time you already have by improving your weekly planning, mastering key business skills, increasing conversions, streamlining and automating repetitive tasks (including with AI), and hiring help at the right stage.

And if you want support implementing these strategies in your business with a clear plan and follow-through cadence, book a complimentary consultation with Maggie - here.

Transcript

[00:00:00] If you've been telling yourself, I just need more time than this episode is for you, because most business owners don't have a time problem. They have a clarity problem, a focus problem, and a systems problem. And today I'm sharing with you five ways to accomplish more in less time without hustling harder, without working longer hours, and without burning yourself out.

And just to let you know, these five things are in specific order. So before,

Because if you skip right to hiring or automation, which are last two, no. Before, if you skip to hiring order automation, which are the last two things, before you've mastered the fundamentals, you'll just scale chaos. So welcome to the [00:01:00] episode 249 of the Diamond Effect Podcast, where we'll talk about becoming super effective.

One of my favorite topics.

Now, please forgive my weird voice that you might be hearing. I'm feeling a bit under the weather, but well enough to record this podcast for you. So let's dive in.

Number one, you want to master your time management. Now, when people say time management, they usually mean calendars and never ending to-do list and checking things off. But for me, real time management is mastering your focus, which is. Having a lot of clarity on what is it that's the most important in your business?

What is it that moves the needle? Then prioritizing those things and then planning your activity, your weeks ahead of [00:02:00] time to ensure. That you do those things, that you move the metal, because the biggest mistake that I see business owners make is that they don't have clarity on what's important. So then it's very hard for them to prioritize their tasks, and because they don't prioritize, then they don't plan.

They just have. A long to-do list from which they pick every day. A few things to check off, but the list never gets smaller and rather longer. And they feel like they've spent a week being busy without accomplishing much, without really making a difference in their business.

Many business owners run their days when they're deciding in the moment what actions to take. But when you do that, your brain will always default either to what's screaming the loudest, which might not be the most important things to do, what feels urgent. [00:03:00] Or what feels easy because especially in the afternoon when we're tired, our brain doesn't want to do uncomfortable, difficult things, and you also fall into very often doing what someone else needs because they send you an email, they give you a phone call, and you're committed without setting any boundaries.

So you end up doing a lot of things, but not what's the most important.

That's why I always recommend to the clients to set a goal for themselves. That's why I'm so big on having three key focus areas that are aligned with those goals and identifying actions that need to happen in order for those focus areas to move forward. And then what you do is your. Plan those actions ahead of [00:04:00] time, right?

So you plan the week before it starts, so you're not figuring it out every day. You're not losing energy in deciding in the moment what to do. 'cause not only you're losing energy, but you're actually losing time instead of just executing the decisions. You made before and those decisions were strategic because they were aligned with your goals and and, Hey, I've been there before, before I started operating in a way that I teach you today.

I used to think I was super effective. I was in a corporate role, senior management, and I thought I could multitask and handle it all. And yes, I did get a lot of done. But a lot of it was at the cost of overworking, feeling overwhelmed, feeling stressed. Still having never ending to-do [00:05:00] list. But then when I implemented my high performance habits and the first one of them, and the main one being really getting super effective with my time through weekly planning, through clear priorities and focus, I.

I became a performer at a completely different level. It's like I graduated from House League to the Pro League or from Pro League to like NBA league, and that's what really allowed me to start my business on the side while having a demanding job, while doing an executive MBA online. While being a mom, supporting my kids through COVID schooling and all the challenges that came with that and still have time for self-care and still not be overwhelmed or burnout, not [00:06:00] because I had magically more hours in the day, but because I had more intention, I decided ahead of time, which made me super focused and super effective.

The second thing that will allow you to accomplish more in less time. Is getting better at the skills that move your business forward. So mastering key business skills, because the better you get at something, the faster you do it and the better the outcome you produce. And here is a simple example.

Think about when you learned how to swim when you were a beginner. Swimming 200 meters probably took you forever. You were exhausted at the end and you didn't even enjoy it. But then as you get better at swimming, you sw the same distance, much faster, less effort, better results.

And you probably [00:07:00] enjoyed yourself in the process. Business is the same.

But the challenge I've seen with many business owners is that many of them just dabble in things. So they try a bit of cold outreach or lead generation that way, and then they stop or they try content marketing. So whether it's email marketing on social media. They do a little bit and they stop. They try to do some sales and they also stop.

And because they never stay long enough in one strategy, they never evaluate, they never try to understand the foundations of that skill. So the technique of swimming, what's behind marketing? What's behind sales? How do people make decisions? They just scratch the surface level and everything stays hard and slow because they never go deep enough in any of those skill [00:08:00] sets to get good at them, to master them, so then they can go faster with better results.

So I want to really encourage you. For the next 30 days, just pick one skill to master, not ten one. So let's say if you are doing email marketing, just focus on learning how to write really good copy that converts How to write really valuable emails, but sales emails that convert and practice it 30 or 90 days, evaluate, get better at it.

So then this can work for you. And I did the same when I started my business, I didn't know anything about copywriting. The only email I wrote were corporate emails, so emails with instructions to my coworkers or some policies or. Dealing with challenges and [00:09:00] responding to those and so on. But I knew that email marketing can be a very powerful tool to nurture leads and then to convert potential clients into actual clients, right?

In the beginning, writing an email could take me hours. I would overthink it. Second guess, rewrite it. I didn't know how to start, but I just decided to stick with it and master it. Now, fast forward a few years, it takes me 10 to 15 minutes to write one email. They're way more valuable. They're way better written, and they convert better, and that's what Skill Mastery is.

Now, I took time to learn it. I wasn't just writing emails, hoping for better results. I got coaching. Programs that taught me that I understand the mechanics behind it, the philosophy behind it, and then I have different techniques that I practice. So I really [00:10:00] gotten deep into that skillset.

The third way to accomplish more and less time is to increase your conversions, because if you are getting leads, but then you are not converting them, you are still working hard. And long, but then that doesn't produce the results you want, so you are truly working harder than you need to because let's say you have 10 ideal client leads and it takes you the same amount of time to generate those 10 leads and then deal with them and nurture them

If out of 10 you only convert two to paying clients, you get one result. But then if you convert five, same amount of time, same people, same leads out of 10, then you get a completely different result, right? That's more than double your income. If, let's say those clients pay you the same amount of money for your [00:11:00] services.

So same time, different income, different growth.

But then the mistake I see business owners make is that when their conversion is low, instead of focusing on improving, that they start chasing more leads. So they start spending more time to generate. More leads, but they're not fixing their leaky bucket. So more leads might result in a little bit more conversions, but not because the conversion is tied, but because they're bringing more people into the funnel.

But that takes way more time, right? So more leads will still not solve your conversion problem.

You'll just compensate with that for your low conversion, but that usually requires more results, more time. So it's great to have more leads, but you also want to. Keep improving your conversion so you get the [00:12:00] most out of your time and money put into this process. So what I wanna encourage you is to think about one conversion point you could improve this month.

So whether it's your discovery call process or your follow up process, or how you market your offer and how clear your potential clients are on what you. Offer them and the value of that, or even how you handle objections. Just pick one of those things, track it for a few weeks and start seeing patterns.

Start seeing where. You have weak points and what could you improve? Because even small improvement compounds super fast. And I'll give you an example with one of my clients just recently. We really looked at her sales [00:13:00] process at the conversation that she has with her potential clients that are already interested in working with her and the way we.

Strategized about it and improved it allowed her to actually speed up the closing of her biggest client. Yet she was in conversation with those clients before we started coaching together and was taking months and the clients could not decide. They were interested but half and half out. And when a, we realized what was their challenge.

She addressed that in the following meeting. They quickly moved forward, became becoming her biggest clients yet, and then based on that, we improved her sales process, that now she converts more people faster. So even a small improvement can quickly compound [00:14:00] and give you a big change in the results that you create.

Okay. Number four is streamlining your processes and automating what you can. Especially now in the age of ai, what you don't want to do and what you avoid doing is doing the same thing manually over and over, just because. That's how you've done it and you're used to it and you feel like you don't have time to pause and rethink that and think about what you could, automate and streamline.

When you do manual things over and over, that's a bottleneck and not badge of honor that you can do something on your own.

So here's a quick example on how to decide what to automate or what to streamline. Write down everything that you've done more than once in the last two weeks, and then from that list. Pick one that maybe [00:15:00] repeated the most often and you'll be repeating it going forward and think about, can I somehow template this?

Are there parts of this process that I can automate? How can I streamline it? Can I use AI in any way throughout this process to speed things up?

And I've mentioned that on this podcast before, but using AI tools for in my own business over the past year and a half or more, I don't even remember, has massively increased my productivity. It helps. I use AI for so many things like drafting.

I use AI for brainstorming, analyzing, speeding out the output so I don't have to type long things when I need to type, because. I am a fast typer, but definitely not as fast as AI even drafting things, right? So then this way I can stay [00:16:00] focused on strategy, on leadership, on my intellectual property, and I can focus on those activities that really.

Create value in my business instead of doing everything manually, rebuilding from scratch because I have ai or I have certain automations and streamlined processes that take care of a lot of manual work that I don't need to be doing.

And then finally number five is of course hiring help. When you hire somebody and they work alongside with you, even if it's for a couple of hours a day, and if they're effective with your time, just like you, now you have more input and therefore more output within the same amount of time. Because with one hour, let's say you accomplish two hours of labor, for the lack of better word, but [00:17:00] this is last for a reason because hiring before you have clarity or before you mastered your own time doesn't fix it, right? Hiring doesn't fix lack of clarity. If you are not clear on what's a priority. What are you all about? Where do you wanna take your business? Then that lack of clarity, you transfer that to the person you hire, and they might be busy just like you, but your business will not move forward because they don't have established priorities that move your business forward.

Hiring doesn't also fix weak skills. If there is something you need to do and you are not skilled at it, hiring somebody,

no.

Hiring doesn't fix weak skills or at least understanding on what to require. So let's just say you are not so great at email marketing and you decided to hire out your weakness, which there is definitely benefit [00:18:00] to that. And we do wanna hire people who are better at things that we're not good at, but if you at least don't understand the fundamentals of.

Email marketing, you don't understand your brand, you don't understand your ideal client and so on. Even if you hire someone who is very good at email marketing, if they don't have the right direction, they don't understand your brand well, or they start writing to somebody else, not your ideal clients, that's not gonna produce the results you want.

So there is certain amount of knowledge and skill you need to have in order to empower the person you hired to be very effective. Hiring doesn't necessarily fix messy processes, right? So if your processes are manual and they're messy, you are just delegating. That messiness to somebody else. So you are actually paying now double for your messiness because okay, you are not doing it, but somebody else is doing [00:19:00] it and you're paying them instead of having streamlined processes and them saving time, and then using the time to move your business forward.

Think about it in a way that hiring scales would already exist. So if you have a chaos and busy with no results, hiring will create more chaos and more busyness with no results. But if you have clarity, you already have results, you've master skills, you've mastered your prioritization.

If you hire somebody and kind of pass on that philosophy onto them, they'll create more results for you. That's why I want you to think about those five things in order. Do the first four, and when you're super effective, skilled, your converting things are streamlined, then you think. You're still at capacity, then it's time to hire.

Then it's time to expand your capacity [00:20:00] through having somebody help you.

That's when you really multiply your output. So let's say if you work effectively eight hours a day, and now you have someone supporting you for. Eight hours a day very effectively. Now you have 16 effecting effective hours within one day moving your business forward,

and that's how you can grow without sacrificing your wellbeing, your life. That's how you accomplish more in less time.

So just before we finish, here's a quick recap. One, you wanna master your time management through clarity, priorities, and weekly planning. So you're mastering your focus two. Build business skills, master the key skills that move your business forward, whether that be marketing, whether that's sales. Or [00:21:00] whatever else you need in your stage of business growth.

Three, you want to make sure that your conversions are optimized, that you can, they're at the highest level possible given your lead generation. And then conversion to paying clients you want is four, is you want to streamline and automate your processes and with ais. Help, you can do a lot of it fast, easy, and low cost.

And if you want support. To implement this, build a plan around this, of course, tailored to your business, your goals and when you're at, and then creating a cadence so you can follow through and to really see a compounded sp up results. I can help you with it. Book a complimentary consultation where we can talk details.

I'll leave the link in the show [00:22:00] notes. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.