Get An Assistant

How much is an extra hour of your day worth?

Today, I want to talk to you about one of the core challenges that we have as Visionaries and Integrators.

We have to figure out how to maximize the work we get done. When I say work, I mean the meaningful things that we should be working on. And done meaning that we actually get them accomplished. We’re not just moving them around.

Pick a unit of time. Let's say one hour. Whatever our level is here, we want to use that time to accomplish whatever will be most meaningful to us. There's this concept of busyness, and I'm afraid that many of you think that “busy” is the thing to be. That's not the point. We've got to get more work done. And we want to drive busyness down. It's not about you being there more. It's not about working on more stuff. It's about meaningful items actually being moved forward and completed.

To help us get there, I want to tell you a story about a good friend of mine named Tom Bouwer. Tom is a fellow EOS? Implementer and good friend. You can't hardly have a conversation with Tom without him dropping in the phrase, "Get an assistant.” If you don't have an assistant, Tom's going to try to get you to get one.

Why does Tom do that? I think there are a couple of reasons. One, getting an assistant has changed Tom's life. He knows it works. And I've got to tell you from my own personal experience, getting an assistant and learning how to really leverage and use a great assistant has made a dramatic impact on my life. I know that it works. I'm so confident of this fact that I’ll tell you - if you're a Visionary or Integrator leading a business that's a $2 million plus or 10 person plus business of any kind, and not leveraging an assistant to help you focus on high leverage stuff, you may be committing malpractice. You've got to find a way to learn how to leverage this type of resource.

I want you to get your head around: If you could have an extra hour to spend on something else, what would you spend it on? What's it worth to you? What's it worth to your company? What's it worth to your family? Would you spend that extra hour working on that big 10X project that keeps getting pushed off to the side? Would you use that hour to go to the gym and take care of your body so that you have more energy and capacity to do all the things we need you to do? Would you use it to go see one of your kid's games? How much would it be worth to them if you would do that?

When you look at the value of an extra hour of your time compared to the cost that it may take for you to recapture that hour, I bet you will be blown away by the difference. That extra hour of your time could be worth thousands of dollars. If I said you could spend $20 and go see your kid's game, when otherwise you wouldn't be able to, that’s an easy decision. That's an easy trade off. You've got companies out there like Fancy Hands, Fiverr, and Upwork, where you can engage somebody to help you do that thing that, frankly, you don't have any business spending your time doing. You need to learn how to delegate it.

Here's my challenge to you. I want you to delegate something to an assistant this week, virtual or otherwise. There's an assistant resource available to you that you haven't been using. If there's a virtual assistant that you've found or heard of out there, do it. Pick a task. Hand it off to them. Let them take care of it for you. Defeat the little voices in your head that say, "You know, it'll take you longer to show them how to do this than it would if you just did it yourself." Or, “It'll take you longer to clean up what they mess up than it would if you just do it yourself." Fight through all that noise. Delegate something to an assistant this week and see what it's like. Learn from it.

If it doesn't work out exactly perfectly the first time, that's okay. Go back with those lessons and do it again. Keep doing this until you’re comfortable that you can develop this capability to hand things off to an assistant and let them help you. Once you feel like you've got it in motion, set a goal for yourself for how you want to grow this capability. As an example, every quarter, I push myself to find an extra four hours per week that I can hand off to assistants in some form. Think about that. I'm creating an extra half day for myself each week. Every quarter, my weeks are growing by half a day in terms of how much time I have available to get meaningful work done.

Please accept the challenge. Find a way to try this out and set a goal for yourself to grow this capability. It can make all the difference for you.

Three key things to wrap this one up:

1. Get your head around how valuable your time is. How much is your time worth to you?
2. Delegate something this week. Do that experiment. Figure out how to make it work.
3. Set a goal to grow that capability.

Come see us on RocketFuelNow.com. Take the Visionary and Integrator assessments. See where you’re great. See where you could use some help. We've been having some great discussions with other Visionaries & Integrators over on LinkedIn and Facebook. Regardless of where you are in your process, I encourage you to join the conversation! Check out the Integrator Mastery Forum. This is a great opportunity for our Integrators out there. Sign-up to get our latest thinking on Visionaries and Integrators. And finally, read Rocket Fuel. If you’ve already read Rocket Fuel, and you liked it, we’d love to see a review from you on Amazon. We’d really love to hear what you think.

Until next time, Go Rocket!

Cheers,

Mark

PS – If you know of other Visionaries & Integrators who you think might benefit from this message, or any related Rocket Fuel content, please pass this along to them.

Mark C. Winters

Co-Author, Rocket Fuel

Visionary, Rocket Fuel Ventures

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