How to Reclaim 10 Hours a Week and Scale Like a CEO

You're listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen, Episode 167. 

Welcome to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Debbie Sassen. I went from being a financial adviser, author and chronic under-earner to building my business to six figures as a financial planner and money mindset coach. And then, on to multiple six figures as a full-time money and business coach. 

I help entrepreneurs create money-making businesses and build wealth using sales and money mindset strategies in alignment with authentic Jewish values. Now, let's dive into today's show.

Hello my friends and welcome back to the podcast. I am recording this podcast episode on an epic week. Epic because I attended a very large business conference in Jerusalem this week, The Business and Mindset Conference, and I did something new that I haven't done before. And I want to tell you this at the very beginning of this podcast episode, because wherever you are in your business, I want to encourage you to do new things, try new things.

So what was new for me? I mean, I have attended conferences before, both in Israel and outside of Israel. So what made this conference unique was that I invested in a booth for the first time. I got myself a banner that I stood up next to my table and some bookmarks that people could take instead of business cards. I don't know how many people actually still use business cards, but I invested in branding assets for my business. And I really felt like I up-leveled my leadership as a CEO. I stood out more. Definitely it impacted me and how I feel about my business and my brand.

And I wanna encourage you wherever you are in your business to think about the next steps. What is the next thing that you want to do, have to do, you might be feeling that pulling inside of you, that it's time for you to elevate and grow your visibility, grow your profile, grow your leadership as a CEO?

And today in this week's podcast, we are going to speak about CEO leadership, especially as it relates to time. But before we jump in, I do want to tell you that I am running a three-day masterclass at the end of February, from burnout to making bank in your business so that you can double your income and work less. 

The signup page is not yet ready as I'm recording this podcast. So if you want to know about it, it is going to be a paid three-day masterclass. And if you want to join the early enrollment at a lower price, I encourage you to get on my e-mail list. If you're not yet there, debbiesassen.com/newsletter, because you want to be one of the first people to know when enrollment for this masterclass opens. So go to my website debbiesassen.com/newsletter and sign up to be on my e-mail. I always send out every week amazing things and of course my podcast episodes. You never want to miss an episode.

Anyway, what I want to talk about today is how you can reclaim 10 hours of your week and scale as a CEO because time is our most precious asset. We can make more money, but once time goes, it goes. We can't make more time and we don't know when the end of our time is going to be here. 

So if you are not using your time intentionally, if you are not focusing on the tasks in your business that are going to make the most impact for you, and if you are always jumping back and forth to your emails, looking at your DMs, going to scroll social media or websites or stalking your competitors, you're going to feel exhausted, frazzled. Your brain is gonna be spinning. It's just going to be not healthy for you. You're going to end up underpaid because you're not using your time effectively. And of course, you're just gonna be tired from doing so much and not being focused.

I mean, being focused in your business is exhausting, but it's good exhaustion. You know you feel good. It's like when you go to the gym and you work out and your muscles are achy, it's a good ache. You know that you have done something positive and proactive for your body. And similarly, when you focus on your tasks and the business at hand in your business, you feel good about it. You don't feel frenetic and frazzled at the end of the day.

So before we jump into really how you can manage your time better, and hint, hint, it's not really managing your time. It is managing your mind around all the time sucks and energy leaks in your day. It's not really time management. Time just is, it goes one second at a time, one minute at a time. So you have to be a leader of yourself and your time.

But before we jump into that, let's just jump into common time wasters for business owners who are already at the six-figure and multi-six-figure level. Number one is you stay stuck in doing client work. Like you're always working in your business and you sometimes overschedule clients. I remember once I was working with a client and she kept wanting to schedule CEO days in her business. 

But every time somebody called to make an appointment, she would move her CEO day and add in another client. And it was so hard for her to scale her business. She wasn't getting to sending emails. She wasn't thinking about her sales funnels because she kept taking on one-on-one clients. And that's great for income, like in the moment, but it doesn't allow you to grow your income because you're always trading time for dollars. You're always exchanging your hours in the day for money and your business needs you to be thinking more strategically, thinking more globally so that you can actually scale.

So that's number one. You're always working in your business, stuck in client work rather than growing. The second common time waster is that you as the CEO, as the business owner, you're doing non-essential tasks. Things that you're doing just because you're used to doing them or you think that you should. 

So for example, you're the one who's doing the billing, invoicing, and bookkeeping for your business. And it could be back in the day when you started your business, you had to do that and you might even enjoy doing it. Although from what I've heard, most people really don't enjoy doing the billing and bookkeeping and thank G-d, there are actually people who really love doing that. I really praise them every day so that I can do what I do, like record podcasts and coach my clients.

But if you're doing tasks like that, or it could be even you're sending onboarding gifts to your clients, or you're sending them flowers or chocolates on their birthdays. Whatever it is, if you are doing those tasks because you're used to doing them, then your brain, your most important asset in your business isn't being utilized to be thinking as a visionary and thinking how you can scale your business and double your income and quadruple your income, how you can grow your impact in the world and how you can make more money and build wealth.

You also might be lacking priorities and lacking a structure in your business. So you jump from task to task. You might be in the middle of writing an e-mail, then all of a sudden you remember something and boom, now you're scrolling on websites or emails or something like that. You don't have a structure to your day. 

What am I going to do today? How am I time blocking my time? What am I focusing on first? What do I want to get done? And checking things off the list. And oftentimes, when we get to hard tasks in our business, where we actually have to engage our brain and think, the first thing we wanna do is we wanna relieve a little bit of that pressure, that hard work, and so we go to something easy, like checking our emails.

So if you're not prioritizing your time, if you're not staying focused when you need to do hard things, when you're doing the tasks in your business that you shouldn't be doing anymore, and you're always in the business rather than on the business, those are common ways that you are letting time get sucked away from you, and certainly your energy gets sucked away from you, and it stops you from growing your business and scaling your business, working with more people and making more money in your business.

So let's see what the signs are that you are actually wasting time, right? Letting time slip through your fingers so that you can notice it. We're not gonna judge you, shame you. There's none of that self beat down if you know you're wasting time. And most of us do know that we're wasting time. I mean, none of us are robots. We all let time slip away from us. So this is a call out for me, for you, for all of us. But these are the signs that you need to look out for. You need to notice what's happening so that you can actually change it.

Number one is you are in reactive mode. If you have notifications on your computer or on your phone, every time an e-mail comes in, any time a message, whether it's a Facebook message or a WhatsApp message or a Voxer message, if you are always having messages come into you and maybe you've got those pings, what happens is you end up in reactive mode. 

Every time you hear something or see something, your body kind of jumps. Your brain notices it and then you drop what you're doing and you jump to the thing. And even if you don't jump to the emails, even if you don't jump to DMs on your phone, what happens is, is you've had a little like ping where there's an emotional response, a dopamine hit in your body. And even if you tell yourself, no, no, no, I'm not gonna respond right now, you have actually lost concentration, even if it's for a nanosecond, right? Even if it's just for a couple of seconds. And what happens is, is you have to take your focus and bring it back to what you were doing. And those little micro doses of seconds that are slipping away, it results in you being less productive in your business.

So if you're getting to the end of the day and your to-do list, which if you really looked at it, you say, hmm, that should have taken me half a day, then you know that you are letting time slip away. And again, we want to notice it so that we can change it.

If you're feeling exhausted at the end of the day, right? That often happens. If you're like hopscotching between activities, it is exhausting for your brain to go from working with your clients, doing client-facing work, to doing emails, to setting up programs for the next thing you're going to launch in your business. There are too many jump arounds in your business and if you're always going from one thing to the next, rather than staying focused on one type of project for long periods of time, you're going to feel exhausted, but not in a positive way.

When you get stuff done, you feel great. You feel on a high because you know you have accomplished so much. But when you haven't accomplished, you know that feeling as well. You're feeling exhausted and you're feeling unproductive, and you probably want to beat yourself up at the end of the day.

You also notice that if you keep saying, I don't have time, I don't have time, I don't I don't have enough time, I'm not getting things done. Like just notice your self-talk or even what you're saying to other people. If you're telling people that you don't have time or if you're ignoring your family, maybe one of your girlfriends wants to go out with you for lunch and you're like, no, I can't, I don't have time, I'm so busy, that refrain, I'm so busy, there's so much to do, right? Your personal life, your business life, everything's going on and you're not making time, you're not finding time in your day to have enjoyable activities, to spend time with your family, to go and exercise.

And this is really important because we are not robots. We are not automatons that can keep working 24 hours a day. We need time to go outside, breathe fresh air, do some exercise, be a human being. Humans are wired for connection. You need to spend time with your family and with your friends.

So if you notice that you keep saying, I don't have time, that is a wake-up call that there's time traps, there's time sucks in your day, and it's time to fix it. And the last thing is, is if you are doing those tasks that you really could outsource to an assistant, maybe someone you could hire for $20 an hour, $30 an hour, who really loves doing those small detail-oriented tasks in your business, you really should be outsourcing things so that you, your brain is worth $500 an hour, $1,000 an hour, $5,000 an hour, the higher level thinking, visionary, creating skills that you do as the CEO, that is where you should be focusing your time and let things go. You don't need to do everything in your business again.

So let's just talk about how are you gonna notice besides the noticing at the end of the day, I'm so tired, I didn't get anything done, I feel exhausted, but let's actually create a plan now, a structure for how you can reclaim your time. 

And the best way that I know of doing it is doing a time audit or keeping a time diary. And the way you do it is you decide, you have to be proactive about this, and it's gonna be one of those tasks, like if you ever wanted to diet and you write down everything that you eat, so you notice if you're eating those pretzels that your kid left on the table, or if you're eating their leftover pizza, right? You track everything that you eat and you actually notice how much you're eating, even though you thought that you were just eating tuna fish and salad and it's really not happening.

The same thing is what you do with time, is that you decide that every day for seven days, you're going to log what you're doing in 15 or 30 minute blocks of time. And when I say everything, I mean everything. And you have to be brutally honest with yourself, because if you're not gonna be honest with yourself, you're just fooling yourself, this isn't gonna work anyway.

But notice, like just be totally neutral about it and notice if you keep flitting between writing an e-mail and checking your emails. Notice if you flip between writing an article, writing a blog, figuring out an outline for a podcast episode, creating a program for your clients and checking social media. Notice if you're getting Slack messages. 

Sometimes I've noticed that I've been on calls with clients and I hear those little Slack notifications. My Slack notifications are off and I oftentimes just close the app down. So if it's a time that I wanna be focused in my work, I just close Slack down. So I don't even notice when my clients are posting messages in our Slack channel, I will get back to it later, I'll get back to it tomorrow.

But it is so important if you notice that you're just having this reactive response to notifications from your emails, from your WhatsApps, from your Slack, from DMs. Notice that. Again, there's no judgment here, but when you see what is happening and you write down everything that's happening in your day, in 15 or 30-minute blocks of time every day for seven days, that gives you so much awareness. And that awareness, noticing what's happening, that, my friends, is the key to transformation.

So the first thing you want to do is just look for patterns. Do you notice that you wrote down that you were going to write an e-mail? And it gets hard. You're trying to think, how do I start this? What are the right words to say? How do I end it? Are there transition statements? What bullet points? 

Now, by the way, you can use our good friends, ChatGPT, Claude, other automations to help you write your emails, but I'm going to warn you, do not sound like a robot. If you're using these, we're gonna talk about automation. Automation AI, we're gonna talk about it in this episode, but make sure that you review it because we can smell it a mile away if it sounds like a robot. Don't let your emails and social posts, et cetera, sound like robots. It's gonna be an instant repel for your clients, that we want to deal with people. We want to connect with people, not robots.

Anyway, back to what we were talking about. You need to have that awareness of what's going on. Is it when you're doing hard work? Is it after you've worked for two or three hours and you're just feeling exhausted? And what you really need to do is get up, walk around, go have a drink, go outside. You might want to schedule in time in your day where you call a friend, family, so you can spend 10 minutes disconnected from your business and letting your mind rest for a little bit.

You need to get that awareness of what's happening so that you can change what is happening. And the way you manage your time better or the way you manage your mind around time better is to do it in little increments. You're not gonna go from wasting 10 hours a day to all of a sudden focusing for 10 hours a day, right? 

This is gonna happen in little increments. You're going to build habits slowly, but notice if it happens more at the end of the day. Are you very focused? We usually have a lot of willpower in the morning after we've had a good night's sleep, but do you lose it after lunchtime? Do you lose it after two or three in the afternoon? When do you have less self-leadership and figure out a plan for those exact times?

I love taking time out of the middle of my day between two and four o'clock, and I'll just go to my recliner and I'll recline, close my eyes, listen to a guided visualization. Sometimes I'll be sitting on my recliner and I will be answering questions that my clients have in our Slack channel, but mostly I will use that time just to disconnect. At the moment in Israel, it's cold, it's wet, it's rainy. It is not conducive for me getting outside and doing a walk, but when the weather is warmer, nicer and drier, I will also get outside and take a walk, move my body. Our bodies are designed to move.

So you wanna know what's happening and then you wanna look for patterns. When you notice where your time is going and where it's slipping away from you, but specifically you want to know what activities are directly impacting your revenue. 

And are those revenue generating activities that you as the CEO should be doing? Are they support activities that you can be outsourcing, you can be giving them to a virtual assistant or personal assistant or somebody else on your team? And which activities are you doing that are not income generating? 

For example, your billing, your invoicing and bookkeeping, it does bring in money that you have already created by working with your clients, or maybe it's sending contracts. What is the work that you should be doing as the CEO of your business? And what other kinds of work are there that it would make so much sense for you to hand them over to one of your support team members? And then, of course, you want to know when you're doing busy work or there are distractions which are avoidable that you can figure out a system or a strategy to not be distractible in the future.

I want to give you a 4D, as in Debbie, framework for how you can manage your day, the tasks in your business better on a day-to-day basis. So the first thing is once you have done your time audit and you know what's happening in your business, the first D is delete. 

What can you completely remove from your schedule? One thing that I have gone savage on this year is I am unsubscribing from emails. I've gotten on so many e-mail lists and we end up on e-mail lists that we didn't even plan for, but I am deleting myself because every time you look at your e-mail and you notice something, just hitting, speaking of delete, that delete key, it takes a little bit of time. So I have really gone savage on my inbox. I want to keep it super clean so that I am not wasting time on my inbox.

So is it that, is it scheduling content and maybe somebody on your team can be scheduling some of your content. One of my virtual assistants schedules a lot of content for me on Instagram. I'll do some of it myself on LinkedIn or on Facebook. But if you have a team member who can work with you on scheduling content, that will free up some of your time for doing the higher-level activities.

So notice where your time is going and what can be outsourced to somebody else. Okay, and that brings us to step number two of my 4D framework is delegate and automate. So again, you can delegate tasks to someone on your team so you don't have to do them. 

And also now, especially with AI, we can shorten how much time we're spending in our business because AI is so helpful for us to, as I said, for writing emails, for figuring out outlines for podcasts, for figuring out outlines for workshops, even probably writing an entire workshop, although I haven't used AI for that. Even when I get outlines, a lot of times I need to adjust it, I need to modify it, I need to make it sound more human, as I said, but leverage automation. It's like you're delegating part of your work to a robot. 

Do that as much as you can. Use the power of AI and automation to save yourself so much time. There's so many things that you're doing in your business that you don't need to be doing manually. And even if you have somebody on your team, your team members don't need to be doing those things manually. You can really claw back so much time, seriously 10 hours a week, by delegating and automating and deleting what you don't ever need to do.

D number three is to delay. We don't need to do everything. We don't need to do everything now. What I find from some of my clients is they're already thinking in the beginning of the year before they have finished everything that they have on their schedule for the first 90 or 100 days, I like to work in 100-day segments, they're already thinking about what they're gonna do in May. 

I'm like, no, come back to now, come back to the present. Our brain will take us to the future because it's so much easier to think about and fantasize about the future rather than working on the hard tasks that are in our business now that require mental energy. So if you notice that you're kind of coming up against a brick wall in the tasks that are on your to-do list today and your brain is like going down this rabbit hole of something that you're thinking about for the future, that is a warning sign that whatever you're working on needs to be delayed for three months from now, six months from now, a year from now. You don't need to do everything right now.

And then the fourth D in my 4D framework is do it. Do it now. When I look over my emails in the morning, I often look at emails and my instantaneous gut response is, I'll do it later, I'll do it later, I'll do it later. I'm getting so much better. This is one of the standards that I have up-leveled in my business this year is that if I see it, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna take care of it because if I have to come back to it, do you know what happens? I've now sucked away time twice. 

It's kind of like you get up in the morning and you make your bed. If you say, I'll get back to it, and every time you go in and out of your bedroom, oh yeah, I'm gonna make my bed, I'm gonna make my bed. It just takes up space in your brain. Get up in the morning, make your bed. Open your emails, delete the emails or answer the emails. Don't come back to it because it just is taking up valuable space in your brain and that is a time and an energy suck.

And what I would say is as you're looking over your activities on your to-do list or you're doing your time audit and you're noticing everything, really ask yourself, can this be eliminated? Can this be automated? Can this be delegated? 

When you ask yourself a question, rather than just noticing what's going on, it forces your brain to create answers. And so you can ask yourself, noticing what you're doing, oh, do I need to do this work? Can I delegate it? Can I automate it? Who should be doing this work? So that's the 4D process for finding out what's going on in your business and in your time and figuring out how to claw back your time.

So the last thing I want to talk about now is your mindset around time. As I said, it is not really time. Time cannot be managed. It just ticks away one second at a time. It is really your mindset, and you need to shift the way that you think about time. You have to believe that it's possible for you to change the way that you are managing your days and managing your weeks.

If you, you might wanna think about, hey, if I wanted to work in my business only four days a week, and I'm not talking about 14-hour days, four days a week, but if you wanted to work an eight-hour day, four days a week, and look at your list that way. What could I delete? What could I delegate? What do I want to delay? What do I want to do now? It's a great framework because you really can reduce the amount of work that you're doing in your business and make more money when you ask yourself those powerful questions, right? You're gonna be faster, you're going to be more structured, you're going to delegate, you're gonna build a team, you're gonna trust your team. It's a very powerful process for doubling your income and working half the time.

So what are the takeaways that I want you to take away from this episode? Number one, commit to a week of tracking your time. Do that time diary. Notice where your time is going. It is not a fun task. I'm totally with you on that. It's not fun. It's kind of boring. It's kind of like annoying to do it, but the information that you will glean from your time diary is gold. It will really help you make higher-level decisions.

The second step is you want to start planning your week as a CEO from the beginning of the week. Don't let your time just like morph all over the place. Notice, have a plan for what you need to get done this week. Have goals, set your goals, put them into your calendar, time block so that you're not flitting between different activities. 

You're not trying to remember what you said you would get to this week. On a Sunday, give yourself an hour or two of CEO time to really think about the week and plan ahead of time. Don't just like dive into the week. Plan it, commit to it, and do what you said you would do.

Limit your availability to both your clients, your family during work time. I like to say it, unless it's like blood or fire, I'm just unavailable, right? Make sure that you have your boundaries around your time structured so that you're not always jumping from working on your business to being in your business. 

Make sure that you have time to think and you're not being reactive to all of the notifications and tell your clients, I'm not gonna be available all the time or it might take me an hour or two or four to reply to you. And learn to say no. Those are the things that we delete. Those are the things that we delegate. We don't keep taking everything on ourself.

And when you commit to you as the CEO managing your time better, you really get back 10 hours of your week every single week. You can learn to take days off, enjoy it. Today, I scheduled lunch with a friend of mine that we haven't seen each other, and I don't know how long, but we're planning to have lunch together in a couple of weeks. 

And that makes such a difference in the way you feel as a person. You're not an automaton who just bounces from work to family to work to family. You really are a person who has goals, who has dreams, who has desires, and wants to spend time out of her business with her friends.

So that, my friends, is how you're going to level up as a CEO. It's your self-leadership, it's your time leadership, and you're going to get back 10 hours in your week when you follow these instructions.

Now, I want to remind you that at the end of February, the 24th, 25th, and 26th of February, I'm running a three-day masterclass from burnout to masterful CEO, right? From burnout to making bank as a CEO in your business, and I want you to come. So the sign-up page is not ready as I'm recording this podcast, but go to my website, debbiesassen.com/newsletter, get on my newsletter so that you are the first to know when enrollment opens.

Thank you very much, and I will see you next week on The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. Bye for now.

Thanks for listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. If you want to stop underselling and underearning and close more sales, you need to clear the limiting money beliefs that are sabotaging your business growth. 

Head on over to DebbieSassen.com/mindset and download my free Money Mindset Workbook. Uncover and dissolve money blocks, like hundreds of other entrepreneurs who are now building six-, multi-six-, and seven-figure businesses and creating true financial freedom.