11 ways to have a 4 hour work week and make more money!

Hey there. Today I want to talk about how to get more shit done in less time so that you can go and do the things that you love to do and live life on your terms. The big secret to this is to outsource smartly. It will change your life.

Unless you really really love doing something (For me I love getting on my ride-on lawn mower and doing the lawns) or are the only person in the world that can do it, then consider outsourcing it. It is costing you money, not saving you money to mow the lawns, to clean the house, to book your own travel etc.

Think about it. Your time is precious. When you are your own boss there is nothing more precious than time. Plus, you also want to save some for the family, socialising, exercising etc. So, let’s say your time is worth $50 an hour or $100 per hour or even $1,000 per hour. You can pay someone $30 per hour to clean your house while you are working. Let’s do the math’s – You are worth say $100 per hour, you are paying someone $30 per hour to clean your house. You just made $70 profit for that hour and your home is now clean. Versus cleaning it all yourself which will take you 3 hours – You just cost yourself $300 worth of productivity, you didn’t save yourself $90. Get my point?

Here are 11 ways for Entrepreneurs to free up time, make more money and enjoy life.

1. Get your partner on board with your vision and mission. If your partner is not only supportive but also can help in your business then that’s like having a staff member that you don’t have to pay. My wife is not involved in my business but she is on board with it. One of the biggest time wasters of all time for me is booking travel. Flights, transport, accommodation etc takes so much time to get it right. We have to get the right flights at the right price at the right time, the right accommodation at the right price in the right location etc. It can cost you hours per month doing this. Luckily for me my wife use to be in the travel industry and books all of my travel needs, saving me literally hours and hours of unproductive time per month. What can your partner do to help you out? If your partner is on board they can also help with keeping the kids out of your office, they understand when you have to travel etc. If they are not on board you are going to have real problems being an Entrepreneur with the travel, the hustle, the long hours etc. Sit them down and get them on board. This leads me to point number 2.
2. Get yourself a travel agent. If this is not your spouse then get a professional travel agent. The extra money you spend these days having a travel agent book everything for you is so minimal. But also remember our equation at the start. Your time is valuable and booking travel takes way too much of your time up, outsource it to a travel agent, partner or virtual assistant. Which brings me to point number 3.
3. Get a virtual assistant. There is a great website called virtualelves.com that can remotely do just about anything you want for a fraction of the cost of a staff member. Another website I like to use a lot is upwork.com – You can post any job you like on there and people will bid for your job at crazy low prices, but will generally do high quality work. I found my website designer on Upwork and she builds me a very high-grade website in just a few days for $500 instead of the $5,000 I would be paying my local website company up the road. Other things you can outsource to you VA are – Your partners and parent’s birthday’s so that they automatically get a bunch of flowers from you every year (can save your butt and make you look amazing:), any logos, business card designs and flyers. These all take far too long to do yourself, especially when someone else can do it better and cheaper. Also, any research is a great thing to outsource to your new VA as this is also another huge time consuming exercise – Get them to do the research, scroll through Google for hours and just send you the relative links. This is a huge time saver. My last VA was from the Philippines and was $8 per hour. She was fantastic and saved me a lot of time every day.
4. Another thing to outsource is a point all by itself – Your slide show. PowerPoint presentations kind of have to be done by you because the content is you and the person delivering the presentation is going to be you. BUT you don’t need to be sitting there looking for images, making things spin around, creating the best theme, making the layout all perfect etc. This is the part you outsource. Get a quick skeleton of content done and then send it on to make it pretty and do all the tricks that make you look great. I look for high level PowerPoint skills when hiring a VA.
5. Anything technical. Linking forms to your auto-responders, creating websites, editing videos, creating your marketing funnel, Facebook ads etc should all be outsourced to someone that can do it faster, cheaper and better than you. Your job is to create the content as you are the expert.
6. Social media. I like to make sure I am always the only one updating my personal brand pages on social media, but I can’t keep up with all my niche pages on FB. Things like fitness pages, weight loss pages, female Entrepreneur pages, Gen Y Pages etc. All have their own niche and provide great content and leads. These are not my personal brand so a VA can easily create motivational content, inspiring posts, images with quotes, copy and paste a fitness tip etc. As long as they are being updated regularly with relative content then they are working for me in the background.
7. Book Keeping. Yes – Doing your spreadsheets, 1/4 taxes, payroll etc is quite time consuming and once you show someone the ropes this is a great job to outsource to a book keeper each month to keep you organised and on top of all your book work while you free up your time to party.
8. Get an Au pair. This changed our life. I love hanging with my kids more than anything in the world. But I also have to make a living, I have to work every now and then 🙂 Making my important phone calls is quite difficult with the kids on one hip yelling down the phone. So, at some point we do need our own space to get our work done right? Me and my wife Nicole, did have a pretty good balance going with one child, looking after Cruz while the other went and did some exercise or work or whatever and then we would swap, but with my travel it became increasingly hard on Nicole to be home 24/7 by herself as our second boy (Beau) came along. Plus, sometimes we wanted to do things together and so weighing up all “Nanny’s”, Baby Sitters, Day Care, versus a live in Au pair was an eye opener. For $1,000 per month you can have yourself an Au pair to help with the kids for 30 hours per week. This is soooooo much cheaper and better than any day care option or baby sitter. Our first 2 Au pair’s have been absolutely amazing people and really great with the boys. We can now have a date night every now and then, something we haven’t done for the last 3 years. We can sit down and get business done together and all in all just free up a much more productive work environment at home. With a 9 bedroom house, it was an easy decision to hire an Au pair and we will continue this until the boys go to school. If you have the room in your house, weigh this option up because it is the most economical way to help with the kids. It has worked well for us and friends that we know.
9. Use Technology as your friend. One great example I use is recorded webinars. We can now create a webinar or a series of webinars, record it and then have it running 24/7 online for our audience to view. Webinars are time consuming, you have to physically be there to present it. But what if you did all the work up front, presented them, recorded them and then instead of having to be there at 7:30pm every Monday and Friday, you were at the beach while the webinar content was running as if it was live. There is some great technology out there now to help you save time and work from anywhere in the world. What else can you use to save time via technology? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
10. GET OFF Facebook/Instagram/Snap Chat. Yes, that’s right, I know you spend way too many minutes scrolling through the newsfeed. Stop it. Give yourself some dedicated time (limited time) 2-3 times per day to jump on, do your posts, see what’s happening, connect and build relationships and get off. We have all done it, hit the office – What shall I do first? Next minute you just lost 15 minutes scrolling the newsfeed doing ZERO productivity. Get off Facebook and hit the phone calls, that’s where the magic happens.
11. Consider a business partner. If you can find a business partner that is as hungry as you and as reliable as you, that brings different skills or value to the table this can be a great way to get more done and do less. Maybe they are the technical guru, saving you time and money doing this or hiring people. Maybe they live in a different location bringing different leads, networks and proximity to valuable assets with them. Of course, there is a MAJOR downside if your business partner turns out to be a lazy, incapable douchebag. So think this one through and choose wisely if you are going to go ahead with this.

They are a few of the things you can outsource in your business. To recap – Power-points presentations, travel bookings, book work, social media, technical creation, Flyers and any creative design and research are some of the things that can take up a lot of an Entrepreneurs day, week and month. As an Entrepreneur, you have to realise that your time is worth hundreds of dollars per hour, so outsource these jobs for $10, $30, $50 per hour. You will be a long way ahead as long as you use your time wisely and are kicking goals.

Go and use your time to sit with people one on one and get the deal done. Hit the phone, network, present in front of big groups, create content, mastermind, hang with peers higher up than you, learn more and make a bucket load of money. But most importantly you are now getting so much more done in less time while you are doing all of your productive dealings each day. You also now have more time to hang at the beach, play with your kids, romance your partner and just flat out enjoy life. Who likes spending hours putting together a slide show? Come on, you are better than that. If you catch yourself doing these things remember to tell yourself that you are above this work, you are a huge global Entrepreneur (even if you are not, that is where you are heading right?) that is very important and you need to be doing productive things, changing lives, helping people, solving problems. This is how you will forge ahead quickly.

Other things you can outsource:

• Cleaning your house
• Gardening
• Pool cleaning
• Shopping (your VA can order your weekly meat, fruit and veg delivered to your door, saving you hours of driving and shopping. Just tell them what you like, what you want ordered each week and from where and presto, it aint rocket science).

Some other tips for being productive:

Jump in the pool or have a cold shower as soon as you get up. Follow that up with exercise and watch yourself turn into a productive machine. Procrastination will not stand a chance.

Quiet work space. This is absolute paramount. You need to be somewhere that will not get interruptions. You need to be somewhere that if your kids have a hissy fit, you can not hear it. Consider turning the shed into an office, consider sound proofing that spare bedroom and turning it into an office, consider cool cafes close by with free Wi-Fi or hire a shared working space, which can be done for minimal cost. Either way you need to find what works for you and make sure you have this quiet place to get things done.

Be organised. I love putting everything in my phone calendar with an alarm reminder. I am also a big fan of my wall calendar as I can sit back in my office look up and plan my upcoming week and month all in front of me. A “To do” list is also a must.

Be passionate. If you like your job or business you are in trouble. You need to absolutely love it. You need to be super passionate, because only then will any work never seem like work and you will bounce out of bed to get it all done. If you are not super passionate about what you do, then go find something else to do. Life is short.

Have a mentor/accountability partner/coach. Having someone keep you accountable is a sure way to make sure you get things done. If you are competitive which I bet you are, then this will work super well for you as you will want to outdo each other and that just makes it even more fun and productive.

Hopefully you have got something from this post and can put it into action in your life and business to help you fast track to living life on your terms faster.

Please comment on anything you learnt or will implement from this post. I would also love to hear from you in regard to how you free up time and are super productive. Add me on Facebook and I look forward to connecting.

Aaron Byerlee

DeckChairMillionaire.com