Get Your Life Back with the Time Freedom System

The fact that we are all given the same amount of hours in a week is the coolest thing I can imagine when it comes to being an entrepreneur. It levels the playing field in terms of your ability to do what you need to do in business. Business is one of about 6 life areas you have to focus on, and I think a lot of people building a real estate team get the whole thing wrong. They don’t create standards around what they’re willing to do with their time - they don’t commit to only touching the things in their business that are off the charts in terms of high dollar productive activities. 

For some of you, this is going to motivate you to take your next step with us at Real Estate B-School. Most of you will continue to make excuses that time and money freedom isn’t possible when it comes to real estate, and that’s OK. I get it. Many of you are lost when it comes to the concept of time freedom. But to me, it’s the entire game of business. 

So the question I have for you…

“Are you making consistent progress towards meaningful goals in the areas of life and business that really matter?”

Think about that for a second. Are you kicking ass in business, but falling short as a husband/wife, as a parent, in your physical body, or perhaps in your faith walk? Are there areas that you’re falling off because you’re giving too much time to your business?

The reason why this is called The Time Freedom System, is if you really are able to focus on the things that matter, and you’re where you’re supposed to be, you can achieve a  massive amount of time freedom with your real estate business. If we do a little math, we see that there are 168 hours in a week. Subtracting sleep, we have roughly 100 waking hours each week. And that’s not a lot of time if we want to show up at a high level in multiple areas of our life.

Time is finite, and these are extraordinary times in terms of the information we have coming at us all the time. On top of that, the responsibilities of being a good husband or wife, father or mother, a friend, being involved in a church, and god forbid you have a hobby. We find so many ways to fill our time with activities that don’t matter. Here’s the thing I have found …  there is freedom in structure. 

I schedule every aspect of my life out, from dinner with my family to make sure I fit in a date night with my wife every week. I’ve time blocked my morning routine. I’ve time blocked devotions in the mornings. Every important activity I do in my business is in my calendar. 

There’s a really simple exercise I went through called The Business Freedom IndexTM. Take your pre-tax income last year, and divide it by the time you spent working last year. Say you took home $300,000 last year, and you worked 60 hours per week, taking 2 weeks of vacation. So 60 times 50 is 3,000 hours you worked in the year. Your income divided by the hours worked leaves you at a Business Freedom Index of $100. 

The cool thing is this: $250, $500, even $1,000 per hour is possible when you set your business up the right way.  Compare what you are making now with what you want to be making. Just knowing these numbers will change everything.. What does that gap look like for you?

It took me 5 years to get to $250/hour, then another 5 years to get to $500/hour, and this year I might be able to break into $1,000/hour territory. I am not saying any of that to brag or boast, I just want you to believe that it is possible for you to do it as well.

Another tool I use is the Eisenhower Matrix. This is a way of prioritizing the onslaught of tasks that keep coming at you every day. Your inbox doesn’t care that you have a predetermined ‘ideal day’ running on some time system. The quote from Eisenhower himself is this:  “What is urgent is seldom important and what is important is seldom urgent.” 

If you actually want to achieve at a really high level in the areas of life that really matter, we need to take a hard look at the time that you spend doing things that aren’t important or urgent, like watching movies or filling up with social media. 

It’s okay to have downtime. I LOVE movies so that is where I decompress. But I’ve completely eliminated recreational social media, using it only for business and only for a few minutes every week. You just need to make sure you are intentional about it and don’t overindulge. 

Time is our scarcest resource. It levels the playing field for business owners. I love the guiding principle of my C12 group. “Priorities are what you do, everything else is just talk.” What are your priorities?