 Are you spending enough time growing your business? Maybe you're spending too much time doing certain things and maybe not enough to bring other things. After having coached hundreds of self-employed people and done Q and A's with hundreds of others, I've noticed that this is a recurring issue. A lot of you, I'm guessing, are not spending enough time taking the right actions. I might be spending too much time doing other things that are not as useful. So one thing is you might be spending too much time consuming content about business or time management or marketing or et cetera, et cetera. You're watching videos, you are taking courses, you are reading books, you are reading articles, you are participating in discussions. And those are all good if you keep that time very constrained and you are taking bits of it and applying it right away. So in this video, I'm going to share with you what I think are the right amounts of time to spend in the most strategic actions to help you develop a viable self-employment, a financially sustainable and thriving business. All right, so let's get going. All right, so the first thing, I'm going to be framing this entire video based on the eight practices of authentic business. And if you haven't yet read about those, you can Google eight practices of authentic business and probably find my article doing that. So I'm going to frame it around the eight. So the first one, because these are, by the way, these eight are the actions I recommend for you and if you are a self-employed person wanting to develop a more successful business, okay? So the first practice is joyful productivity. So whenever I think about time management and making sure we're using our precious life energy in the most purposeful and impactful ways, meaningful ways, the first thing I always do is to schedule self-care. So if you look at my calendar, you will see that I always work only in hour and a half to two hour periods before I have a large break. So for example, I will work from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. and then I will take a break from 10 a.m. to 11 30 a.m. During that break, I might be walking my dog, having breakfast, taking a nap, actually all three of those things from the 10 to 11 30 a.m. break. So, and then I'll work from 11 30 a.m. to 1 p.m. that might be a 90 minute work period and then I'll do a lunch and a nap. I take a lot of naps throughout the day. Four in fact, actually about 20, 25 minutes each. So have you already scheduled your self-care into your calendar? Now, some of you might be saying calendar, I don't follow a calendar. I'm self-employed, I'm my own boss. I get to do things whenever I want to do them. Okay, I understand, but how is that working out for you? Are you getting, is your business growing in the way that you like it to grow? Are you overwhelmed? Do you have enough balance? Because ultimately, after over a decade of successful self-employment, I've come to see again and again and again that as long as I follow my calendar, as long as I have a thoughtfully scheduled calendar and I just follow it strict about showing up, lenient about the results, over time, I just get better over time and my business gets better over time also. So there's no mystery to it if you follow your calendar and keep improving on it week by week, month by month, year by year. If you don't follow a calendar, if you just go based on whatever you feel like doing today, chances are some important things are gonna be left undone and some things might be spent too much time on it because it's easy to get sucked into videos like this or online courses or reading things or having discussions online on Facebook or wherever else. It's going with the flow is not about following your human lower impulses and being hypnotized by online media because if you just do whatever you feel like it guess what's gonna happen? Online media, other people's requests will hypnotize you and you'll be spending all day fulfilling other people's requests and consuming other people's content, right? So you've got to schedule self-break. That's number one because self-care breaks because at least that gives you a reset. The other thing I do is during my work periods remember I said 90 to 120 minutes during those work periods every 15 to 30 minutes I do an energy reboot. If you want to, it only takes me 30 seconds, 20 to 30 seconds to do my energy reboot. You can Google energy reboot and read my article and watch my video about that. Okay, so first thing to do is to schedule your self-care making sure that's in there, okay? And the second thing to do for joyful productivity is to schedule your inbox clearing at the end of each of my work days most days of the week, I do it at least two or three times a week where I have completely zero emails in my inbox. Some of you have like 16,000, right? I have zero emails and even with such a, you know, thankfully, gratefully successful business, you know, small business, self-employed person, I'm successful, I have lots of clients, I have lots of requests on my time but I still get to zero emails most days and zero things on my to-do list most days. And yet I take these giant breaks throughout the day, several giant breaks throughout the day. How am I able to do it? Well, number one, I don't have kids. So that's really important. If you have kids, you have to be even more, you have to be even more careful, right? Even more careful about scheduling your self-care and scheduling the time that you clear out your inboxes. Clearing out inboxes, by the way, doesn't mean you read every newsletter that you get. I don't even open most of the newsletters I'm subscribed to. I select all and I archive it. If George, why are you subscribed? You just select all and archive because at least I want to take a glimpse at what some of my niche mates are doing and some of the subject lines give me a sense of kind of what the rhythm of their launches and it gives me a sense. And once in a while I'll open something to kind of see what someone's doing but I don't read most newsletters. I don't know about you. Maybe you're subscribed to my newsletter and you don't even have to read my newsletter, right? If you don't want to. So don't read most newsletter, don't respond to most emails. Just archive everything, have everything to zero. Of course I do respond to the ones from my clients particularly or from students who fill out feedback or whatever, so sometimes I'll respond. So anyway, so far what we've done, we've scheduled self-care and we've scheduled time to work to clear your inboxes. I recommend at least one hour a day to clear your inbox and your to-do list, at least to postpone everything if you need to or to archive everything so you have to look at it anymore. Nothing is really that important other than taxes, right? And other than legal requirements and other than your clients responding to them, nothing else is really important. So just know that. Just one hour, I actually, personally I spend about 90 minutes Monday through Friday. Some days I actually spend two hours but I have more emails probably than you do because my business is way more developed than most of you who are watching this. So if you're not yet having a very well-developed business, it's full-time business, supporting you full-time, you probably can spend less time on your emails and your to-dos. Okay, so thus far we've done scheduled self-care, we've done scheduled time five hours a week or one hour a day clearing your emails and your to-do list. Okay, that's number one. Number two is healthy money habits. If you don't develop healthy money habits, it's very hard to reach financial independence and financial sense of calm. That's what I wish for you. I wish for you a tremendous sense of peace about your money situation. I know all of us think about that a lot but do you have a tremendous amount of peace about your money situation, about the current and the future situation? If not, then you've got to work on your money habits and basically what I recommend to you is 15 minutes a week, 15 minutes a week, that's it, 15 minutes a week to categorize your bookkeeping, your money inflow and outflow. You should probably automate that first of all. I use mint.com, someone you love using YNAB which is youneedabudget.com, youneedabudget.com. I think they YNAB, YNAB.com, I think might work now but youneedabudget.com is an app that many of my clients love using. I use mint.com which is free. It's not as fancy as YNAB though. 15 minutes a week, that's all you need. That's all I spend categorizing things and once a month I spend another 15 minutes doing my monthly transfer. If you want to learn all about healthy money habits I just finished teaching a course that I'm really proud of called Conscious Money Flow. I really, really recommend this to everybody who's self-employed because without healthy money habits that's really one of the first habits to develop to have a successful self-employment. Okay, so that's 15 minutes a week. Next up, third thing we have is consistent content creation. You probably have heard me talk about this before but I think about marketing as a creativity practice. I'll say that again. Marketing is not primarily about getting clients and getting more money. That of course happens when you do authentic and good marketing that naturally happens but on a day-to-day basis I hope you will think about marketing as a creativity practice. It's a practice of creativity, of writing, maybe making videos if you wanna do that, maybe recording podcasts if you wanna do that but it is essentially a practice of exploring what your passion is and what might be helpful for your audience. Exploring ideas, exploring examples, sharing insights, sharing tips, it's a creativity practice just like exercise or good nutrition are practices for a healthy body. Content creation consistently is a practice for a healthy business, a healthy and growing audience. So I recommend one hour a week. Hopefully more but even one hour a week to write and publish an article is a good minimum and I know you can write quickly. You just need a timer. Whenever I teach my content writing class, I give people a seven minute timer to write an article. Yes, you heard that right. I write there in the class and if you are interested you can take my content planning classes, it's on my website. But I give people several exercises, seven to eight minutes and just about everybody, even the people who think they don't have anything to write, they're able to write or at least write part of an article in seven to eight minutes. They simply needed a timer and so do you. You think you can't write or oh, I don't have ideas, I'm not inspired, I simply schedule time to write and I know that in that one hour I got to write and publish an article. That's it. Actually what I do is I take half hour to write and then I take the other half hour to edit and publish what I wrote last week. But it's essentially one hour to write and publish an article. It's enough time because I know you can do it in eight minutes. I can barely do it in eight minutes. I'm actually quite surprised that many of you in my classes can do it in eight minutes. I can barely do it. I'm a much slower writer than most of you, to be honest with you. I really believe that I am a slower writer than you probably. Takes me an hour to write and publish an article with a timer. If you had a timer, you could probably do it in 25 minutes and then you have another 25 minutes extra to spare for editing and rest. So it's one hour a week. You can definitely write and publish an article. Go for it. Use a timer. Use a timer. Use focus me if you need to. Okay. Next up is the fourth action is paid distribution. What do I mean? If you're publishing articles or making videos, but you're not using ad dollars, you're not paying Facebook ads or Instagram ads to get your information out there, it's gonna reach very few people. It's really unrealistic to think you can grow to have a sustainable self-employment without using paid ads. Let me say that again. This is really, really important. If you're trying to grow a self-employment without using paid ads, I don't understand. I really don't understand how you're doing it. And I've learned marketing for 15, 20 years. Of course, oh, George, I've heard about posting in Facebook groups and responding, no, that's not a sustainable strategy. You'll probably get exhausted doing that, number one. Number two, you start feeling salesy or people start seeing you as, anyway, there's so many so-called organic growth methods that are good as amplifiers, are good as supplements, but really the main method of getting a bigger audience is by spending money using advertising. How can you have a business and not spend money on advertising? That doesn't make sense. It really doesn't. Tell me, please comment below if you're now some of you are lucky and you have a big enough network, lots of people support you and you're able to just get enough business through your network. Just count yourself blessed, but one day your network will run out and you'll say, George, I've got everybody in my network who already refers to me, but I still need more clients because my clients are completing and I need more. Build a roof before it rains. So you think you can grow your business without paid advertising? You are basically trying to live in a house without a roof and then praying it doesn't rain because once it rains, you're ruined. Not ruined, but it's a mess, okay? So essentially paid ads is like building a roof, making sure that you're gonna have shelter in the future. So I recommend 30 minutes a week to do $30 a month, 33-zero. You can afford that. I'm pretty sure you can afford that. I'm willing to bet that you can afford $30 a month, not a week per month. If you have a business, if you expect to have a business, you can afford $30 a month to do something like Facebook or Instagram ads or any other paid ads that gets your message in front of the right people. Facebook and Instagram ads happen to be the easiest way to get your message in front of the right people. If you're interested, obviously I have a whole class on this so I won't go on there, so this is about 30 minutes a week. Next up, number five, the other main way. So paid ads is really the main way that I recommend everybody do. The other main way that is not as easy to do is simple collabs. Even though it says simple collabs, what I mean is to get together with colleagues and promote each other. Now why that's hard to do is that you're probably shy about reaching out to other people. So it says, hey, will you promote me? Some of you aren't shy. Maybe you should be a little bit more shy. No, some people approach me and like, yeah, we don't even have the same sized audience. It's not appropriate for you to approach me, right? You got to approach people who have a similar sized audience. So if any of you are watching and you regularly get a hundred likes on Instagram for your posts, we can maybe do a collab or you regularly get 20 likes on your Facebook posts without using ads yet, we can collab or you regularly get about a hundred views on YouTube, we can collab. But it's like you look for people who have similar level of engagement as you, some of your friends and colleagues have that similar level of engagement, collab with them, meaning interview them and they interview you for the audience. It's the simplest way of doing it. They interview you to talk about your message and you interview them to talk about their message and you share that. So the simplest way, it takes about four hours per month to do one collab. You might even take shorter, but anyway, there's an article you can read below this video or above this video, wherever the article is, to read a little bit more about that. Okay, number six is audience research. I only have eight actions, so I'm almost done. Number six is audience research. Why is this important? Because the easiest way to sell successfully is to sell what people want. Some of you are having such a hard time getting people to hire you for your service. It's because you haven't yet framed your service in the issues that they really care about. Because your friends and your colleagues and your audience, they would love to hire you. We would love to hire you. You just have to sell us something that we care about. Really, I mean, we love supporting you. We like to like your things. We like to comment on your things, but we're not gonna buy from you, even though we love you, we won't buy from you unless you're selling something that we care about, that we actually think we want to buy. You see what I mean? Just because we like you, doesn't mean we're gonna spend money with you. You still have to sell us something we want. But how do you know, how do you sell something we want? You have to talk to us. If you're not talking to us about what we're gonna buy, what we are buying, what are we buying that's related to what you could sell? Well, let us tell you. Let us tell you what we're buying that's related to what you want to sell. And then you go, oh my gosh, I didn't think of offering that kind of thing. I could certainly offer that. Or, oh yeah, that's right. I could probably frame this life coaching thing to this way, then you're more likely to hire me because you don't just care about life coaching. Some of you actually do. But it's like, you know what I mean? So you gotta frame it, you gotta do audience research. Gotta get into our heads, get into our hearts to understand what we're really struggling with that you can sell us on. Then we're like, oh, happy to buy from you because we know you. So audience research, that's number six. And that's about two hours per, let's see here, two hours per month, two hours per month. Yeah, two hours per month. So about half hour per week averaged out. Okay, so then the seventh thing is the rhythm of gentle launches. Sorry about that, bumping my laptop here. It's bumping up and down. The rhythm of gentle launches, the idea is this, even if you have friends and colleagues who care about you or you have an audience by this point because you're doing all these actions, your audience, your network doesn't remember what you do. Honestly, we don't remember. Even if you and I are friends, I still don't remember what you do often enough for me to refer you. If you expect that once a year you reach out to me, how's it going, I'll remember you once a year. But if I see you on social media launching things occasionally, when I say launch, what do I mean by launch? I simply mean two emails to your subscriber list, that's it. That's all I mean by a gentle launch, nothing fancy. No five video series, no funnel, no webinars, whatever you could do those if you want to. But by a gentle launch, I simply mean to send two emails to your email subscriber list. You know, one email saying, hey, I want to let you know that this is the service I provide. I really enjoyed providing it. And then one more email two weeks later. So every two weeks you send an email, if it's appropriate, if you're not in that rhythm yet, just send one email a month. So a gentle launch can be one email plus two social media posts that month. That could be a gentle launch. So I want you to have a gentle launch every month. One email about your service and two social media posts. Can you do that? Comment below, you know, not because I need comments, but I want to know if that feels doable for you if you have any questions about this. So please do that. So that's about a half hour a week, one hour every two weeks, essentially, to write that email about your service and then schedule those two social media posts. So if you do that, then we will remember your service often enough to be able to refer clients to you. Otherwise, we don't remember you. Even though we might be best friends, I still don't remember what you do because I'm so busy. I think about my own stuff. I'm not thinking about you. Sorry, best friends. You know, really, you know, your best friends, even your best friends and even your biggest fans, don't remember what you do until they're seeing it. Then they remember it for maybe six hours or if you're lucky, they remember for 48 hours. That's why at least twice a month, you know, on social media, you kind of touch back. Yeah, remember, this is what I do in case you mutely know someone who needs help. So rhythm and gentle launches, which is about half hour a week. And finally, number eight is mastery of your craft. What this is is to, you're probably already doing it. You probably already love taking courses, right? Otherwise, you wouldn't be my audience. You love taking courses already. You love reading books to improve yourself, to improve your modality, your method, whatever you do with clients. But what I'm gonna ask you to do is to spend every three months or once a quarter. That's not very much. Once a quarter for three hours through the following. Spend up one hour to write and send out a request to your clients for feedback about your service, about your product or whatever it is that you do. So send out a feedback request once every three months. That might even be too often for some of you. So once every six months or once a year. But if you get feedback and then two hours, two more hours to read and process the feedback and see what kind of changes you wanna make. Because if you're not consistently getting feedback from your clients so you can improve yourself, improve your craft, it's hard to improve if you're just always thinking about, you're not getting the actual from the clients and what they really love and what youth they think you might improve a little bit on to make it even better. So I hope this is helpful. And if you add it all together, it's 850 hours a week of work now. Actually, if you add it all together, it's about 10 hours a week. That's it, 10 hours a week of purposeful, impactful work. Now, if you're just starting out and you're still needing to learn a bunch of these things, it might take you 20 hours a week. I'm doubling that, 20 hours a week. A lot of you already spend 20, 30 hours a week just on Facebook alone, right? Just on consuming YouTube videos or consuming other courses, right? So yeah, I didn't add in any course consumption time. You might say, well, George, I'm taking your classes. Aren't you gonna add that time in? Okay, fine. You might spend another three to five hours a week consuming, which is why I told you. 10 hours a week is efficient. And up to 20 hours a week is if you're learning all these things and trying to figure out how to do them, you might be part of the 20 hours a week is taking some classes, going to some Q&A calls, and asking some questions in the forum and getting some responses, that kind of thing. So anyway, 10 to 20 hours a week, does that feel doable to build your business? The other thing I wanna be transparent about is I didn't add in any time to spend with clients. So the 10 hours a week is really for your business development, kind of like to clear the decks. 10 hours a week includes getting rid of all your emails, getting rid of all your to-do list items, right? So 10 hours to 20 hours a week is just your administration, your business development, your marketing, everything aside from client sessions, aside from course preparation, we teach online courses. So essentially, if you add in 10 hours of client time, then now you're spending 20 to 30 hours a week, right? That's full time. If you have 10 hours of client time per week, you're probably a full-time business. So that's 20 to 30 hours per week. It's really, really nice to be able to work 20 to 30 hours and have a full-time income. Most people work 40 plus hours a week to have a full-time income. So you're really lucky you can spend 20 to 30 hours a week. I hope this is helpful and I look forward to any questions you have or comments you have below. All right, I'm George Cao. For those of you who don't know who I am, I love talking about building an authentic business, business that's really purposeful, that is aligned with your values and that is based on joyful productivity. We'll see you in the next video. Take care.