Business Owners Need to Do These Two Calendar Audits RIGHT NOW

All right, what’s up, all you beautiful people? Today, I want to share with you two frameworks for thinking about how you can organize your calendar, your schedule. As an entrepreneur, this comes to mind because last week I was working with one of my students, and we’ve been working on a focus and energy audit of his calendar, looking at where his time and energy is going every single day so that we can zero in on one of those activities that really move the needle, that only he can do the highest values activities for his time, and then trading. Organize his calendar in a way, organize his team in a way to take those lower value activities off of his calendar. So there’s two frameworks here that I want to share with you to think through as you are auditing your own calendar. The first one is the idea of $10,000 an hour tasks. So you might have heard this before, right. There’s these different activities that you do throughout your day that if you were to assign a dollar value to. There’s some activities that you do that are worth $0.

They don’t make you any money. There are some activities that make you $10 an hour. There’s some that make you $100 an hour. There’s some that make you a. Some that are truly valuable will make you $10,000 an hour. And so the power of this framework that people like to use is to think through what are the different activities you do in your day or within your business that truly move the needle, and how much money do they generate? And so that’s what my student did. He went through his calendar, he audited it, and then he said, okay, these activities, they make me $0. These ones make me $10.
These ones make me 1000. These ones make me 10,000. Okay. And you organize this calendar and then color coded it so you could, at a glance, see how much time are you spending every day on tasks that make you $10,000? How many are you spending on tasks that only make you 1000? Right. Now, don’t get into the weeds too much of whether or not the activity actually makes you those dollar amounts. The value here to think through is in the hierarchy, what are the most valuable things? Whether that’s $10,000 or $1,000, that’s irrelevant. Or even 100,000. Right.
It doesn’t matter what the actual dollar number is. We’re trying to figure out and triangulate what is the most valuable stuff that you’re doing with your time. Well, the problem with this framework is this is powerful and I would recommend you go through this exercise, but the issue that my student ran into is he’s like, okay, I don’t know what to do with this now. Like, I have these activities. He put all these different activities into the $10,000 bucket. And I’m like, these things aren’t really $10,000 an hour activities. And the reason, the way that we know whether an activity is worth $1,000 or 2000 or $100 is to ask ourselves this question, how much would I have to pay somebody else to do this activity? That is the true value of the task. It’s not actually, how much does that task make you? When we’re doing the calendar audit, you want to ask yourself, how much would I have to pay somebody to do this? For instance, my emails.
I can pay somebody $20 an hour to do my emails, for my financial reviews. I probably need to pay somebody a couple hundred dollars an hour to do that activity. For networking, for having conversations with investors. I probably need to pay somebody a bit more. Right? And you, you go through all the different activities that are currently on your calendar, and that is the dollar amount that you put there is to not ask yourself, how much money is this making you? You ask yourself, how much would it cost you to pay somebody else to do that activity? And there are some activities in your business that there’s no amount of money that you could pay somebody to do it because it is so important and so valuable, or it would be so economically infeasible. Like if you wanted to bring in the absolute top CEO in the world to run your company, then, yeah, there’s some activities on your, on your to do list right now that you could outsource. Those are the $10,000. You have to pay $10,000 an hour for Elon Musk to come in and do that activity for you.
And it would be worth it. Right. But you can’t afford that and you can’t get him to come do it. So the, the power of this exercise is you go through your calendar, you look at all the different tasks and activities, and you put a dollar amount on how much it would be to have somebody else do it for you. And then you start with the lowest value activities and you outsource those first. That’s usually the administrative stuff, like your emails, your calendar, your scheduling, that stuff. Next is probably going to be operations or delivering on the product. You can usually hire somebody to come in and deliver on the product for slightly more than the admin and slightly less than the other activities which are going to be your marketing and your sales.
You’re going to outsource the sales next, and then your marketing finally, because your most important job is the CEO is typically the marketing bucket. Now, those are just some buckets to think through, but this exercise is very valuable to be able to quickly, at a glance, start looking at your calendar and realize, like, oh, I’m doing a lot of tasks that I could outsource for $25 an hour. The laundry, the cooking, the cleaning, all that stuff. Right. You don’t need to be spending any of your time on those things. And so outsource those first, free up that time so you can spend more of the time higher up on that ladder, say, on the marketing or on the sales side. The things that actually move the needles in your business and make you more money. Things that you can’t quite afford to outsource yet.
And once you can afford to outsource those things and absolutely fly through that ladder, bring on the team, train them onboard theme. Bring in great talent and trust them to run towards the goal. That is how you build the machine that ultimately builds the machine. So that’s the first framework of thinking through the $10,000 an hour task. The other one is through the lens of energy. What gives you energy and what takes away your energy. I want you to go through your calendar and color code. Everything green or red.
Green if it gives you energy, red if it takes your energy. There is no neutral, there is no gray. Nature I abhor is a vacuum. Everything is sliding into continual decay, into a state of entropy unless we insert energy into the system, right? So it’s either is it adding energy or is it taking away energy? And then color code the calendar green and red. And then at the end of the week. Look at that. Your goal for the next week is to try and eliminate the red activities, not all of them simultaneously. Just like pick off one or two here and there.

And over the next six months, your goal is to slowly reduce the number of red activities on your calendar. Get to the point where the only things that you are doing are bringing you energy. It’s a full green calendar. If you can get to that place, as an entrepreneur, I promise it’s a beautiful, beautiful place. It will mean that you have built the machine that has built the machine. It is thriving without you. You are in your zone of genius, and it is a beautiful, glorious thing. So if you want help figuring all this out and implementing it into your business, go to beyond theapex.com dot.

If you’re a six or seven figure entrepreneur, we can help you scale to eight figures and beyond. Go to beyondtheapex.com dot. Otherwise, that’s going to do it for me, guys. I’ll catch you in the next episode. As always, stay focused, stay vigilant, stay frosty, and stay tuned. Peace.