How to cut your work at the gym from 10 hours per day to 4 hours per day

Sounds great huh?

Well it’s not a fairy tale.  You’re probably like most fitness pros out there.  You manage your marketing, deal with customers, do the accounting and on top of that TRAIN clients, run bootcamps and manage your employees.

Guess what? This is rediculous.

Is this you after a day at the gym?

You can’t run a one man show without driving yourself nuts.  You need to find ways to remove yourself from situations and let other people handle the task at hand.  This is a frightening task for entrepreneurs because we ONLY trust ourselves to do everything right.  It’s one of the curses of being an entrepreneur.  Letting go of the reigns is not our thing.  But in order to stop working 10 hours per day, this needs to be done.

How to work less hours

Eliminate “busyness” from your life

There’s a major difference between being busy and being effective.  Checking email keeps you busy, but locking down a bootcamp for a major company is actually effective.  There’s tons of things that we all do throughout the day to stay “busy” but most of them aren’t getting us anywhere.  Do you do any of these things throughout the day when you have more productive things to do?

• Check email
• Check phone calls and messages
• Talk on instant messenger to friends and business contacts
• Post and read Twitter responses
• Check out whats going on with Facebook
• Checking traffic stats
• Checking affiliate sales and commissions

I could go on and on, but the bottomline is all of these activities are just keeping you busy when you could be doing something else.  I’m not saying dont use these things, far from it.  What I am sayin is you need to cut these things back to certain times of the day and get in and get out.

Check email at noon and then again at like 4PM.  Post on twitter before you work, then once again at the end of the day.  Have an assistant or worker print out your traffic and affiliate stats and hand them to you with the important areas highlighted.

Just quit trying to be busy when you should be spending that time being productive.

Start the day with 1-2 major tasks to do

Get out a note card or a small piece of paper before you work that day and write down 1-2 of the most important tasks of the day.  If you have 5-6  written down, then they can’t all be THAT important.

Be ruthless about this, cut it down to 1-2 major tasks.  Ask yourself this question… If this is the only thing I get done today, will I be happy? If the answer is no, then it probably isnt the most important thing on your list…

Don’t add to this list as things pop up.  Make sure you get your 1-2 tasks DONE.

What would you do if you could only work for 2 hours today?

This is one of the main questions that really changed my work ethic.  But you have to be absolutely ruthless about this and cut the fat out of your work day.

Imagine you just had a heart problem and went to the hospital.  The Doc says you’re gonna live, but you can only work for 2 hours per day or you’re going to die from stress.  2 hours thats it!  Not 3 hours or 4 hours, but just 2 hours.

With only 2 hours to work, you have to REALLY focus on the main things that are the most important and vital to your businesses survival.  Once you get this one factor down, your productivity will go through the roof.  If you work your ass off for two hours with no interruptions (no email, phone, texts, anything)  and focus solely on the one or two most important tasks for your business, you’ll be more productive than 99% of people who work 10 hours per day.  I guarantee you that.

Another note… Make sure you have something to fill the time when you cut back on your hours.  If you don’t you’ll just go back to being busy, and no one wants that.

Pick up new hobbies, hang with your wife or kids, volunteer….. do something other than “busyness”

You could be doing this!

Don’t try to do it all by yourself

If there’s one thing that Im always guilty of it’s trying to control everything.  If you want to work less hours you need to be able to remove yourself from controlling everything.

If your whole business depends on you, then you’ll never be able to get away.

For many of these tasks you’ll need to get an assistant or an intern.  If you’re dead broke, an intern will work perfectly.  Just post something on craigslist and make the job sound really hard, if people still apply for it, then they’re gonna be good workers.  Take some time when interviewing them.  Self motivated people are great, and will help you a lot more than a YES person.

So once you have an assistant or intern give them some tasks to do that are keeping you from moving your business forward.

These could include

• Answering the phone and taking messages
• Sifting through your email and starring the most important ones
• Organizing your workspace
• Reading various websites and summarizing them for you
• Setting up meetings and appointments

Getting away from your work space, means putting trust in others to do some of the work for you.  One of the main things Im working on is trying to find an intern to read and summarize all of the RSS feeds I read.  I love staying in the know, but hate reading an hour worth of posts everyday.  An intern would be great for this situation.

Conclusion

Take action on this today!  Not tomorrow, not this week, but today!   I’m going to do the same thing, cause I know there’s areas where I can improve.

If you liked this post, be sure to read The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.  I learned 90% of this from that book alone.  It’s great…

Let’s Rock!

-Justin

P.S. Giving a shout out to the best personal trainer in Columbus Ohio, Vic Magary.  Also my biz partner for Gym Junkies.