I have spent the past four years building my company as a mompreneur, working when my children napped during the day and after they went to bed at night.
I have learned that if you don’t protect your time, no one else will.
Here are a few tricks in the past few years that will enable you to protect your time – and create more of it.
Now, we wanna hear from YOU in the comments. Are these tips useful to you? Or maybe you have some you can share in the comments. We LOVE when women can learn cool little hacks from each other – so please share your tips in the comments.
Video transcript:
I have spent the past four years building my company as a mompreneur, working when my children napped during the day and after they went to bed at night.
I have learned that if you don’t protect your time, no one else will.
Here are a few tricks in the past few years that will enable you to protect your time – and create more of it.
I find that as we uplevel and take our businesses more seriously time becomes more important. Time is finite.
1 – Be intentional with your scheduling. For example, I might have an hour-long meeting at 1 and have something else scheduled for 2. This forces me to move on to the next activity and keep a tight, productive schedule. If I have a call at 1 and nothing else planned that afternoon, I could easily stay on the phone and chat for an extra half hour or hour. (This is especially easy to do when you love the people you work with!)
2 – Use scheduling tools like time trade, calendly, or scheduleonce. Not only does this save time from the back-and-forth that happens when you’re trying to schedule, but it gives *YOU* the power to determine how long you want a meeting to be. When you invite someone to chat with you, you can invite them to meet for any increment of time that you want. So if I want a call to take 20 minutes, I’ll send them a link so that they can only schedule that amount of time with me. If I want to have someone’s attention for an hour, I’ll let them schedule with me for an hour.
Another tip: When I first started using these it felt uncomfortable to me, like I was being pretentious by sending them to a link to schedule with me. A great way to send someone the link is by saying, “You can find a time that works with your schedule at this link: “
3 – Have a script ready for exiting a situation. Meetings are going to run long, people are going to want to chat with you (and you with them), but you have to get in the habit of ending on time. Say something like, “oh I’m so sorry I have to run. I could talk to you all day but I’ve got xyz…”
Same with ending a phone call, say: “okay well I’ll let you get to that project and I’m going to get this blog post done…” I always love when my trep friends end phone calls this way, it’s like saying, “okay well I’m going to respect your time and leave you now.”
Those are my 3 tips for protecting your time. I hope they help you, and I’m hopeful that they can help someone you know. Whether it’s your friend who’s always swamped, or the one who’s always wishing she had more time, please please please tag them in this post so that we can get them these tips. We’d also love to hear from you in the comments – I know you have a time-saving or tip you use to protect your time that other women could benefit from sharing, so please share it with us.
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