How to Set and Keep Business Hours

Written by Dave Navarro on May 9, 2006

It’s easy to tell yourself that you want to build a business that will make you a generous full-time income for the rest of your life. But it’s a much more challenging thing to actually do it. No matter how easy some people try and make it sound, there’s a lot of serious work you have to put into making a business profitable.

As a personal coach, I often get asked the question “Why isn’t my online business making the kind of money I hoped it would?” Now, the reasons behind this are varied, but more often than not, one of the most common stumbling blocks tends to be that the person hasn’t set - and committed to - setting aside regular “business hours” to work on following through on their business activities. It’s a classic time management issue.

If you’re not making the kind of money you want with your business, then you have to ask yourself if you’ve set and kept specific business hours to take care of what needs to be done. If this isn’t a problem for you, then there’s no need to read further. Maybe you’ll want to check out other articles in this series.

But if this does describe the time management obstacle you’re facing in your business, we need to get to changing this right away, or the results could be pretty devestating for your bottom line (especially if it’s at an early stage of your venture).

To do this, let’s take a step back for a moment and look at why people resist the idea of setting aside specific hours to build their online business - and how to turn the situation around to your advantage and give you leverage over the situation. Basically it comes down to a common perspective people have about “business hours”:
I don’t need to set business hours.

The whole point of an online business is so I can make money on my own time. Setting business hours would be too restricitive.

Hmm … yes, and no. It is great that an online business is one that you can run from a flexible scheule, and a good-sized portion of the tasks can be handled on your own time … but be honest, are you really getting them all done? If you are, fantastic (and again, this article isn’t necessarily for you). But if you’re honest, there are probably a lot of things you need to do to build your business that aren’t getting done because of a number of factors.

It’s been my experience over the last two decades of studying how people work that what doesn’t get scheduled more often than not doesn’t get done. There are a million things competing for your attention every day, and if you don’t get serious about scheduling the activities that are important to your business, then they are very likely to be pushed aside in favor of some new urgency that plops out in front of you during the day. And then your business activities just become additional items on your “to-do” list that get pushed aside to another day … again.

When you set aside specific hours that you have committed to dedicate to your key business activities, you’re setting yourself on the path of massive follow through. But it takes some discipline to get things going. If you’re constantly playing a game of “I’ll work on it when I can get to it,” then you’re seriously hampering your ability to make strong, rapid growth for your business.

And setting business hours doesn’t have to be restrictive at all, even if you have a schedule that fluctuates wildly. You can ease into it by building what I call a “hybrid” schedule, or a schedule where one part is “set in stone” and the other side is more flexible.

Here’s an example for someone who says they have no time / very little time to get their business going. This is good for someone just starting out:

Step One: Look at the next seven days and try to find 3 to 5 hours that you can lock down as “100% committed” to working on your key business activities.

They don’t all have to be on the same day - you can split them as you like. The important part is to find somehwere that you can lock down that time. Maybe you can go to bed an hour later every day. Maybe you can set aside a copule of hours on Saturday and Sunday.

Realistically, you can find 3 to 5 hours you can fully commit to working your business that you can reasonably say won’t be interrupted by something else. It just takes the discipline to do it. Once you commit to that time, though, tell yourself that you will not let anything keep you from following through from “showing up” for those hours.

This will let you ease into the discipline of locking down time to run your business and guarantee you the space to get profitable activities taken care of.

Step Two: Come up with a flexible schedule to work in another 3 to 5 hours this week.

At this point, it’s good to set a goal of working in just a few extra hours during the week to give you some extra momentum. I say just a few because we’re easing into this discipline, so I don’t want to over-burden you and reduce the chance that you’ll follow through on building this new habit.

These extra hours will be part of your “flexible schedule” - time that you’ll fit into your day as your week’s schedule allows. This will be time you push yourself to follow through on, but on a day to day basis rather than putting it in your “set in stone” schedule.

The advantage of flexible scheduling is that it gives you the ability to roll with the uncertainty of the week, as your schedule may shift around from day to day. You may realize that you have an extra block of time freed up on a particular day that you can take avantage of.

Just make sure as the week goes by you get those hours of work knocked out, so you’re not faced with a load of work right at the end.

Step Three: Maintain or Increase The Workload

A key to your business sucess is going to be keeping the pace. You don’t want to let a week go by without hitting a minimum number of scheduled hours, or you’ll start to lose momentum (and for some people, they’ll never get around to recovering). So as you wrap up the week, you’ll be faced with one of two choices:

1. If you’ve had any problems sticking to your set-in-stone or your flexible schedules, you need to figure out how to fix the issues that became your obstacles. Make this your priority, and commit to meeting that work schedule for the next week.
2. If you were able to keep your schedule, now’s the time to increase the time you commit to business hours. Don’t go crazy - you may just want to push for a 30 or 60 minute increase - but do take some action to push yourself. You always want to be growing at this initial phase. Later on you’ll want to focus more on becoming more efficient than adding more hours, but for now, raise the bar a little bit.

For those struggling to get into a rhythm of solid and consistent business progress, this is a good template for moving forward and getting the ball rolling. And if you’re still reading so far, chances are these three tactics are something that you’ll want to start putting into action immediately.

So go ahead and schedule those business hours - and start following through on a lot more of the activities that will start making you more money. Do it now. You’ll thank yourself for it.