T.I.M.E. Management Framework

I was listening to a Alex Ramosi interview the other day, and he said something that really resonated with me. I want to share it with you guys. In the context of how we can manage our time, our schedule, our calendar, even better, he said this was in the context of hiring. He’s like, how do you know that you have an a player like a rock star when it comes to hiring? And his litmus test is the quality and the quantity of metrics for which they measure their job. So his stance is, the more ways you have to measure, the more ways you have to win. And I think this is a really great mindset, whether it’s in your physical health, your financial health, your relationships, whatever it is, the more ways you have to measure whether or not you’re winning, the more likely you are to win, because you have more ways. Right? So if you’re measuring how many times you get into the gym, that’s one way to win. If you’re measuring how many calories you’re consuming in a day, that’s another way to win.

If it’s. If you’re measuring how many reps you’re doing while in the gym, that’s another way to win. So each one of these can be another way to win. And you want to step those wins to become very large wins. So here’s what that means then, when it comes to our calendar and our schedule maintenance, is that you need to have more ways to manage and to look at your day to day calendar and ask yourself, am I winning? You guys know I’m a big fan of the concept of winning the day, right? Defining what does it mean to win the day with your three tasks that are the most important. That if you did nothing else, you accomplished just those three things, you would be a stunning success for the day. Right? But I want to share with you what I call time management. And time is actually an acronym in this case, that gives you four ways to manage your calendar, more ways to look at your schedule, to give you more lenses, more perspectives, because often, you know, reality is simply a function of our perspective.
You look at the number on the ground in front of you, it might say six. But if I’m standing on the opposite side of that number, looking down at it, it says nine. So perspective is relative, very important. So the more ways we have to look at our calendar and to ask ourselves, is this the most optimized, most maximized? Is this the best use of my time? The better. So, time management stands for time block, impact, money, energy. So number one first time block. This is the fundamental I think of good calendar management is you must time block your day. If you don’t own your schedule, your schedule owns you.
And the way that you own your schedule is to sit down and tell your schedule, tell your time where you expect it to go. Most people who are not winning in life, it’s because they don’t own their calendar. They leave it open because they don’t want to feel the waste of constraints. They don’t want to feel like a prisoner to the schedule. I totally get that as an ADHD guy. Like this was the biggest battle that I had to wage with myself, which was recognizing it is within the constraints that I can maximize my freedom. Outside of constraints. Without constraints, there is just chaos.
There’s no freedom in the chaos. It’s just a. A maelstrom of chaotic energy. No bueno. So time blocking is the number one activity that you need to start implementing right now. There’s a lot of different ways that you can time block your calendar, but I’m not going to go into the nuts and bolts of that right now. Just have a methodology for sitting down every day and blocking out what are you going to do and when are you going to do it. It’s not enough just to have a to do list.
Your calendar becomes the to do list. It tells you what you need to do next and when you need to do it. So first, part of time management, time blocking. Second, we want to measure our schedule and the activities that we’re doing based on impact. How impactful are the activities that we are doing on a day to day basis? So what I want you to do is look at your calendar from the last week and I want you to go through and on a scale of one to ten, I want you to rank every activity that you did based on impact. How valuable was that activity? How important was it in moving you towards your biggest goals? And that’s important because context is important here. We want to know what are the big goals that we’re moving towards. And then it’s based off of that big goal that we have for our year, for our life that we measure the impact of the activities.
Because some activities can have massive impact. They can be massively important, but they might be not moving us towards that primary goal. So that’s important. The goal becomes the chalked field against which we measure the impact of the activity. So go through and rank every activity that you did last week on a scale of one to ten, and I want you to then look at that week or that day and ask yourself, what could I have done to maximize the impact? Each day should have a maximum impact score depending on how many activities that you did right. You want to figure out what is your average impact of activity. Start looking at that and asking yourself, what things am I doing that are low impact, that are not a good use of my time that I need to maybe remove? What are the things that are high impact that I need to make more time for? Just going through this activity will reveal to you that a lot of our time and day is spent. Only a fraction of that, a minority of our time and day is spent on the really impactful, important activities.
Impact is number two. Third is money. Third is I want you to go through your calendar, looking at all the different activities and ask yourself, what are the money making activities that you’re, that you did last week? The things that had a direct impact on your money making potential. Rank it with three dollar signs. So $1 sign, low value, two dollar signs, medium value. Three dollar signs is like really high value. Like, you crushed it. That’s a really important task that’s going to make you a lot of money.
So I did another podcast and a blog article on this called the Money Making Tree. These are the three step concept for how do you plant money making seeds to make a money making tree? And then how do you harvest that? You need to know as an entrepreneur, as the founder, what are your activities, your key money making activities. You define those very, very clearly and then look at your calendar and ask yourself, how many of these activities are my key money making activities? You will be surprised how few of these things that you do on a day to day basis are actually driving a direct ROI. If you want to make more money in your business, I assume that you do, which is why you’re building a business. You need to allocate a disproportionate amount of time towards the high money making activities. So that’s the third. That’s the third thing that we’re going to look at, right? So we time block, we impact, and then we look at money. Okay.
Fourth is energy. We’re going to look at our calendar through the lens of energy management. Where are you at your highest energy? Where at your lowest energy? What are the activities that are giving you energy? What are the activities that are taking your energy? And this is a very simple process. What I do is I have a minus, minus, a minus, a zero, a plus, and a plus plus process. So I go through each activity and I say, oh, this was a minus. Minus. This is something that’s soul sucking. I hate this activity.
It actually is such a drain on my energy levels. I absolutely hate it. Minus. Minus, right? Minus is like, I hate doing it, but it’s. Yeah, it is what it is. Zero is. I feel nothing towards it. It’s totally neutral.
Don’t mind doing it, it’s easy, but also don’t love it. Plus is like, oh, I actually get a little bit of energy out of this. I get a little bit of a kick. And then plus. Plus is like, this is where I feel in my zone of genius. You’re going to go through all the activities that you did last week or on a day to day, day to day basis and you’re going to rank it minus, minus, minus zero, plus or plus plus. Then you can start to look at your calendar. You see very clearly another way to do this.
And not just with the pluses and the minuses, but they color code it. So you go red, like dark red for the negatives, the bright green for the positives, and then shades of green and red in between. And what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to create a visual landscape of your schedule so you can see, oh, I’m spending a disproportionate amount of my time in the red. Not only am I spending a disproportionate amount of time in the red, but I’m spending it in between these chunks of time where I’m in high energy state. Wouldn’t it be better to rework your calendar so all your high energy stuff is right in a row? Your low energy stuff is kind of consolidated and put into like one single time block. So you can just kind of pump out all the negative stuff. But the thing is, as an entrepreneur, you’re going to have to spend time doing the things you don’t like to do. But those are the first activities that as we get to build the resources for hiring and building out our team, those are the first things that we’re going to start delegating and offloading.

Those are the four ways that is time management, the acronym for time block, impact, money and energy. Four different ways. Lenses to look at your calendar and take control so that your time is something that serves you and it’s not just being stolen from you. So take this, run with it and let me know how it works for you. I’ll see you guys in the next episode. But until then, stay happy, folks. My friends.