#11: How to Buy Back Your Time so You Can Scale Your Practice Up

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Huyen - Welcome to another episode of Online Marketing For Doctors podcast, I am your host Huyen Truong and this is Steven Tait and today we are talking about how to buy back your time so you can scale your practice up.

Steve – That sounds good… but I think our listeners might be asking, what does that mean exactly?

Huyen – In other areas of life, we change as we grow: our clothing style, where we live, where we eat. Yet how we use money and time — especially for entrepreneurs —we are very resistant to change?

I’d like to take you behind the scenes of one of the most powerful productivity concepts I’ve learned as a business owner: buying back your time in both your work and personal lives.

Steve – A great example of buying back time is hiring people to do tasks so you can focus on high impact items that matter.

If you want the highest impact on your business or whatever you are doing exactly, you've got to think about where you going to invest properly to buy back your time; whether it is hiring people to do cleaning, cooking, driving, administrative, book keeping, website maintenance tasks…the list goes on.

Huyen And think about it, when you're hiring people to help you do other things you're gaining leverage and focusing on the things that will help make you more money in the future.

These are the really high level things that you can be doing whether it is spending time consulting with your patients or doing surgery or training your team so they can take over your tasks; it gives you time to dedicate to practice building tasks.

Steve - So you got to think about;

a, what are your areas of genius?

And b, where you can make the most impact?

You don’t want to do tasks that can be easily hired out. Yes, sure you can learn how to do it or maybe even easily accomplish it right now, that is absolutely fine but if you want to create the highest impact on your business and make the most of what you want to do in this world you have to think about how you can buy back your time, freeing you up to focus your energy on the high impact items affecting your business.

All of you who are listening to this have probably used some kind of ride sharing services in the past, whether it be Uber or Taxify or maybe some kind of taxi, that’s buying back your time, or when you go to a restaurant instead of cooking at home (organizing the meal, getting ingredients, cleaning afterwards) you're buying back your time.

Huyen - it's so much easier to buy back your time these days than it was like 10 or even 5 years ago; uber, postmate, airtasker, uber eats; all these new apps can really help you out buying back your time.

You can pay people to help you a simple task; you don't have to hire a full time person, that’s really inefficient and expensive.  Buying back your time makes you more efficient and these apps can also help save you money.

If I bought a car, I would have to pay for maintenance, petrol, I would have to pay for the car payments, insurance and it adds up, like Steve has a car (how much do you end up spending on it each month? Come on ) ($600) -  $700?), I bet it might be actually be cheaper for you to have a full time Uber, and if he has an Uber full time, he can work at the same time and getting more tasks done, so are you getting rid of your Mazda now? Yes or no?

Steve – umm, not sure, maybe

Huyen – Every time when Steve says maybe, it’s a no

The point I am trying to make is focusing on efficiencies; I don't even own a car, I don't even drive a car… I rather focus on work and get some tasks done when I am in a car being driven around and sure you may end up calling me a workaholic and have nothing else better to do in life, but I love what I am doing and by being more productive and efficient with my time it also makes more impact on the business.

Steve - There's an app that you can also use to help you buy back your time, it’s called Rescue Time. It shows you where you are inefficient; like you could be browsing Facebook too often and you could be doing a more high impact task, and the app is breaking them all down for you and you'll see how many hours you’re spending on this kind of stuff each day or week or even a month.

Because the key in life isn't to just keep working and working, it is about spending your time wisely.

Huyen – In addition, there is another IOS app called Moment, it shows you how much time you use your phone, how many times you pick up your phone and how much time you spend on different apps. For example, last week when I was in Japan I was looking at all the time I was spending on my phone,  you know maybe 15 to 20% of my phone time was on Google maps cause I was walking around Japan.  Which makes sense, but on the other side of things I was spending all my other time on YouTube or on Facebook as well. So what did I do?  I went ahead and deleted all these time wasting apps and I have optimised my time. So I’d definitely recommend downloading Moment and Rescue Time.

Steve – And also look at your life as well, what I like doing is a task priotization chart in an Excel spreadsheet, where you can put different chart columns of $20/hour, $30/hour, $50/hour, $100/hour and even $500/hour tasks, and in these columns map out things that you are doing right now into these categories that it would cost you to pay someone else to do them.   Now, if you wanted to free up more time to focus…say….on marketing next year, look at the cost involved in paying someone to free up your time for the allocated tasks, and weigh up to the potential increased in revenue/profits that could be realized.

Huyen - yeah I don't really have anything else from my end; time is money and focusing on what’s going to give you the biggest ROT (return on time) in life, it’s not about working a ton of hours it is about being really efficient with your time.

Steve - Oh right, that’s it for today but before we go, we’d like to hear from you..

Practice owners: I’d love to hear from you. Please share a moment when you realized you should begin buying back your time. It can be small (like realizing that you spend 3 hours a week buying food so you started getting groceries delivered) or big (like hiring someone to send all of your marketing emails after you realized you weren’t good at it). Share your thoughts in our comment section below.

Huyen - This session of Online Marketing For Doctors podcast has come to an end, be sure to subscribe for more weekly marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you always dream of and don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best weekly content possible to see you next week.

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