You can’t get more time. But you can make yourself use it better. Business coach Daniel Fitzpatrick from Next Level Tradie explains how.

If you’re like most tradies, you’re so busy you can barely catch your breath right now. Make hay while the sun shines. I couldn’t agree more.

But there’s one small catch: Avoiding burnout is paramount. For you, your family, your team and for the success of your company.

Sucking it up “to just get through the next big job”? Not the best plan. Why? Because there’s always another “next big job” around the corner.

To stay on your game, handle the curveballs of this “new normal”, maintain strong margins and profits (…and still have family time…) you’re going to need tried-and-true strategies that work in the real world.

You’ll need to get a better handle on managing your time. Here are 3 of my favourite insights:

1. Only 20% of tasks move the needle

Heard of the 80/20 law? Here’s how it works:

• 80% of referrals come from 20% of your contacts
• 80% of your profit comes from 20% of the jobs you do
• 80% of the problems come from 20% of your clients
• 80% of staff issues come from 20% of your team

Same with your time: 80% of results come from 20% of the efforts.

In eight hours at work, you’ll find that less than two hours of your time is spent on tasks that make a real difference. Take a look at your week. What are the things that move the needle?

Profit-generating tasks might be: Speaking with key clients, negotiating deals, organising your team, staff training and keeping standards high, setting targets with your team, working on profitability, hiring, streamlining systems so things happen without you being involved every step of the way and so on.

It’s very easy to get caught up in the wrong things. Fires and squeaky wheels distract you from what you should be doing, and this can leave you shattered week after week.

Instead of reacting to the demands of the day, step back for a moment. Don’t let other people’s priorities dominate your day.

Identify the 20% of tasks on your plate that drive results that move you closer to your goals.

To do this, I recommend grabbing a piece of paper and on the left, listing all your daily and weekly activities and on the right, write down your recent wins. Then draw a line to connect your wins to tasks directly responsible for making them happen. Then you’ll know exactly where to focus your efforts.

Start each day by jotting down your top three tasks, do the most important or hardest one first and minimise interruptions during this time. Remember: You can’t do it all anyway so you’re going to have to choose.

2. Using money to save time makes you happier

As a skilled professional, you probably think it’s crazy when a homeowner wants to DIY. It’s stressful, it takes longer and the quality isn’t nearly as good. But here’s something interesting, most of us DIY stuff inside our own businesses all the time.

I’ll tell you what though. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

Let’s be honest: The bulk of your time is probably spent on stuff you could pay someone else $30/hour (or less) to do.

But using your money to free up your time makes you happier according to a study by the University of British Columbia. People who invested in time-saving services (such as house cleaning, grocery/meal delivery, lawn mowing, errands and childcare) reported higher levels of satisfaction with life. This was true regardless of income level, even when participants had very little disposable cash.

Let’s apply this to business. Take another look at your to-do list. Ask yourself if the task need to be done? For real? Does it need to be done by me? Who else could do this? Could you outsource, employ an admin person, foreman and an extra pair of hands on the tools?

Do you need to be: Answering the phone 24/7 (dealing with the tire-kickers)? Wrestling paperwork? Doing all the bookkeeping? Fiddling around sorting out IT issues? Or wasting 40 minutes fixing the printer?

Don’t get me wrong, delegating is not just about handing work over – but also checking in to ensure it’s done to the same high standards you expect.

Letting go is easier than you think. But having the confidence to let go – staying in control – happens by putting in place standards and systems so you can trust your team will get it done right.

Don’t forget to consider what you can automate. Bad systems cost you time and make your life harder. You might invest in apps so you can get paid on the spot, log timesheets, use GPS or project management software for job tracking, and to keep clients updated/get the same information out to everyone in real-time.

3. Work expands to fill the time available for its completion

Ever swore you couldn’t possibly fit one more task into your busy day – then something urgent cropped up, and somehow you still got everything done?  Weird, right? When push came to shove, you did have time.

The secret is, for the most part, things get done when they need to get done. It’s Parkinson’s law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

In other words: Time is elastic. That’s why we often get more done when we have less time to do it, we fit the task to the timeframe.

Another clue I’ve heard along the way is about understanding the difference between “doing” and “done”. When you shift your focus from what you are going to be “doing” in a given time period and switch it to what needs to get “done”, your productivity skyrockets.

In a real-world application, a great exercise is setting targets for your workers as to when you expect a job to be completed by. Look at how many hours are allocated on fixed-price jobs before you start eating away at profits and break it down at each stage to stay on track during the job.

Sure, sometimes things take longer and delays are unavoidable but I can almost guarantee if you adjust expectations and set targets, you’ll shave significant time off each job.

A drainlayer I worked with would book inspections on jobs before they were complete. When they didn’t, jobs would take two-and-a-half days instead of the usual two. Staff productivity increased when there was a hard deadline of an inspector coming.

Let’s wrap things up

A word of caution: Ideas are useless without execution. Yet to get results you don’t have to implement every idea that comes along, just the ones that make the most difference.

You can have your nights and weekends back and a highly successful business. My clients have achieved this and so can you.

Like the idea of getting some support and accountability to be the best version of yourself as a business owner? Book a free call with me. It’s a zero-pressure chat to see if private one-on-one mentoring might be right for you.

Visit this link to book a time: nextleveltradie.co.nz/nextstep