Are you Master of your Destiny?

Unless you Master your time, you can never truly be master of your destiny.

What is an hour of your time worth?

I don’t mean to get all philosophical on you, but have you ever really thought about your time – it’s your life. If you really think about it, time is all you have. Moreover, there’s no such thing as free time. You can’t save free time and use it later. You have leisure time but it’s not free time.

You are either using your time purposefully or wasting it. Leisure time is time that you use for rest and creation. You have chosen to spend your time this way. It is not by default.

What does this mean for your business or your life? Unless you commit to continually increase the value of your time, you will not be making the kind of money in your business you want or working the amount of hours you want.

There is no free time. You pay for all your time with your life. If you don’t use it, you lose it and its affects your income level, your health and your relationships. . In short, if you don't value your time, no one else will.

It always intrigues me that people generally have no idea what their time is worth and how to increase its value. So, the question is, “what is your time worth?” Do you know what your time is worth? Do you know how to value your time to achieve your income goals?

Unless you know the value of your time, your capacity to make effective decisions on what you should do or shouldn't do and whether you should delegate would be fatally flawed.

Now another thing to know, is it this exercise will also challenge your perception around the value of time. But if you're honest and I hope you will be, you get tremendous clarity about why you may or may not be making the kind of progress you want. You and I both know it's easy to fall onto the trap of 'everyday life'.

So if you're someone who's coasting along this exercise will ensure that the next twelve months you'll stay on track. It's going to bring intention into everything that you do. And if you're the type of person who's been living a compulsive life, where you've been very focused on achieving in just one or two areas of your life at the expense of the others, then this exercise will help you channel your ambition and ensure that you win at work and succeed at life.

For now, I want to give you the more of the building blocks and it start with this one simple exercise. It's going to open your eyes to what's really going on with your time. The good, the bad and yes, the ugly. No more going into default mode and hoping in success just comes to you. Today, we're getting intentional. We're taking the first step towards designing life the way we want it. Are you ready? Let's get started.

We've all heard that time is money. The problem is that we don't actually act like that's true, but what if we did. That's exactly what my '"What is your time worth" exercise does for you. Here's the reality, right now you have some big decisions about what you're going to do with your time. Maybe there are some enticing opportunities on the horizon that you shouldn't take. Or maybe you have a project or a business you need to exit to make room for something even better.

But the only way you'll know is if you can determine the real value of your available time.

The best way to do that is to work from how much revenue you're currently earning. Next, notice the 4 big blocks; Time off, Time on, Administration, Service Delivery and Revenue Generation. We only have 365 days in a year; 366 if it’s a leap year, how we divide these days is critical for understanding how much they're worth. Take the total amount of revenue we're projecting and divide it by the days we have available to earn it. Right away we want to subtract the number of days we're taking off. This is your actual time available.

You may want to pause the idea while you are doing the following exercise.

Current Value of Time: Total Income / Total Number of Days = Dollar Value per day (8 hour day formula)

This will actually tell you what you are actually making.

Next, best way to do that is to work from how much revenue you're going to be earning.

Current Value of Time: Total Projected Income / Total Number of Days = Dollar Value per day (8 hour day formula)

If you are an entrepreneur, business owner, CEO this exercise is for you. Practice working on profit building for an hour. At first it won’t be easy. Eventually you will be able to go the distance on an hour on profit building activities. That is what productive time is all about. Productive time is time directly generated to income. So what percentage of the time are you productive?

The above exercise actually shows you your dollar value. However what will really get to you is how much of your actual day is productive?

Right now I'm taking off 99 days each year, so I subtract those days from the 365 and those are the days I have left for work. For me that's 265 days, for you it will be whatever's left over after you factored your time off. I take what's left over and break this up in three different ways .So I actually sat down and tracked for three days how I spent my working time . Everything I did and kept track of it. I looked at time I spent on:

1) Administration

2) Service Delivery

3) Revenue Generation

Administration refers more on the maintenance stuffs, running meetings, answering email, returning calls, and so on. Time I'm working on the business. You're going to look at it this way, you have things to do to maintain your business, and you have things to do to grow your business. And here's a pro tip, the more you can group these activities into their own days, the more focus and efficiency you'll pick up.

Service delivery is when I am actually doing medical related activities or I am teaching a program and there is no selling involved.

Revenue Generation for me is stuff like, creating video courses, blogging, writing books, conducting seminars, selling to clients. For you it could be the different businesses in your portfolio, the different customers your accounts will serve, it could be creating a product, making sales calls, and whatever turns the crank in your business.

Once you've figured out how many days you have to generate revenue, this are your Revenue Generation days; the worksheet will divide your total revenue target and see how much those days are really worth. Every day you're working, just to maintain the business and not create revenue, you're potentially wasting time. I encourage you to think about doing this exercise over the next few days. I was shocked to realize that I was spending only 15% of the time on revenue generation activities.

So I decided to change how I spent this time. I started passing on more of the Administration and Service Delivery to others and focused more on Revenue Generation. And right on top, you'll notice the first critical piece of information, how much money are you projecting to make in this coming year? We want to put dollar sign on our days so we can see how much our time is worth. I think you'll be surprise.

Doing this exercise gets very sobering, very fast. But it's also empowering, when I first did this exercise I found I was spending time on activities that were not generating revenue. It took me awhile to make the decision, but I eventually decided reconfigure how I ran some of my businesses.

What are your results telling you? Whatever the answer, doesn't it feel good knowing where you should spend your time? Clarity is a wonderful thing. Even if it’s tough news at first. The first time I went through this exercise, I was shocked. I couldn't believe the deficit I was experiencing but it explained a lot. Immediately I could see why work was creeping into my weekends and into my nights. And from that, it was easy to see how about was compromising the time I had for the important things in life.

Productive time is time directly generated to income. So what percentage of the time are you productive? One study of Fortune 500 CEOs estimated they had 28 productive minutes a day. Another one estimated it at 38 productive minutes a day. Can you do any better? Shocking isn't it that they only spend 28 or 38 minutes on profit building activities a day? But think about what a CEO does. However most of us are not working at that level so we can afford to be a lot more productive.

Compulsive Life Designed Life

There are many things I do well There is only one thing I am brilliant at

I will go after every opportunity I will only focus on my core competence

There are many things I can do to There is only priority I need to focus on increase the to impact the bottom line right now bottom line

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On this podcast I’m going to help you design a life that works. So you are able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The more clear you can be about how to organise your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you’ll step into your true potential, stay on track and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen?

Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift. Design it. Do what matters and join me each week as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams. I am Dr Sun. Join me next week on Your Life by Design.