MBA2379 How to Know If You Have Too Much on Your Plate + Free Ride Friday

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show. No fluff, just the good stuff with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today's episode is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays, we give away a lifetime membership to the$100 MBA program, 100 % guaranteed to make you a better entrepreneur. Over at 100mba.net. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review, and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday, just like today, to see if you won.

0:44We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's episode, you will learn, how do you know if you have too much on your plate? Are you feeling frustrated, crabby, overwhelmed, burnt out? Are you wondering if you have too much on your plate or if you're just poor at managing your time and your tasks? Is there even such a thing of having too much work? This is a question I explored for years, and I'm going to share with you what I've learned along the way. Spoiler alert, if you are asking this question, do I have too much on my plate? You probably do. We're going to get into identifying this issue as well as the solutions to this problem.

1:23Don't worry, I've got your back. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. As a leader of your business, as the founder, as the CEO, you feel like you have a tremendous amount of responsibility on your shoulders. You feel like you need to get things done. You need to lead by example, and I get it. And that's primarily true, especially in the beginning of your journey in your business. But once your business is running, you are making money, you are making a profit. It's viable. It's what you do full time. This mindset needs to change. What got you to this point won't get you to the next point, to the next milestone.

2:00What I found is that when I have too much on my plate, it's a result of two things I'm doing wrong. One is not prioritizing what's important and saying yes to everything. And two, not delegating. And now we're going to talk a little bit more about what that means and what to do about it in a moment. But first, let's identify. Do you have too much on your plate? Or maybe you're just not working enough. Here's a very clear sign. Are you not getting through your to-do list for each day on a consistent basis? Are you carrying over things on your to-do list that you didn't get done and moving it to the next day every day?

2:36I found myself doing this and I realized, wow, I am just taking on too much. Things are not getting done in an efficient way because I'm always behind. Well, what did I do? Well, I just identified what do I actually really need to do to impact my business? What's actually going to move the needle, help the business grow? Everything else I either delete or delegate. We're going to get into that in a moment. Don't worry. But this is a brutal exercise where you have to be vigilant about the things you say yes to. Another sign that you have too much on your plate is you've left no room for creativity or any kind of thinking time to solve the bigger problems in your business, to come up with creative solutions, to come up with innovations.

3:20You just have no time to think. You're just in execution mode, no planning mode. This is a problem because your job as the leader of your business is to make solid, clear decisions. You make the decisions, others execute for the most part. In the beginning, you're doing both simultaneously, but that is not sustainable. Once your business gets off the ground, you need to start being the decision maker and letting other people do the work. This results in you being burnt out, being short with people, being really snappy. It's because you're frustrated. It's because you are really burning the candle on both ends.

3:55And it's natural to feel this way, to act this way. I have experiences day in and day out before. It's not a pleasant feeling. It's not a great business to run when you're in this state. And this is why I'm doing this episode. You got to catch this before it becomes a habit. Like you just can't get out of the cycle. Another sign you have too much on your plate is you're constantly feeling overwhelmed. Like you're never getting anything done. You're working hard, but things are just not progressing. and you don't feel like a sense of accomplishment at the end of your day, week, month. This is a major problem because it's very demotivating.

4:31It's very deflating. It makes you feel like, oh, what am I doing this all for? Overwhelming is one of the worst feelings you can experience. And it happens when there's too much on your plate. All right, let's get into solutions. The first one is a mindset thing. The first one is getting on the no train. What is the no train? Well, in the beginning of your business journey and your entrepreneurial journey, you're on the yes train. You're saying yes to everything. You're saying yes to every opportunity because you're feeling like, wow, I have opportunities. I am grateful I have opportunities. And you just say yes to everything.

5:01And rightfully so, because you need wins, right? You need sales. You need connections. You need opportunities, whether it's speaking on stage or getting on podcasts, partnerships or whatever it might be, appointments, meetings, calls, whatever. Right. And I was just like that. I was saying yes to everything because I wanted to take on every opportunity that I could afford because it was really feminine. in the beginning, right? And you just want to make sure you strike while the iron's hot. Problem is that this is an old habit that dies hard, right? It's very hard to kill this habit because what happens is as your business needs you more and more, because as it's growing, you're becoming more successful.

5:38And I'm talking about just even some small milestones, like you're making now$5 ,000 a month, making$10 ,000 a month, the business is starting to be profitable. You can pay yourself a salary, maybe a small one, you're making$20 ,000 a month. You get the point. you're starting to get some momentum. Your business is going to need you and it's going to need you so they can grow. But you're saying yes to everybody else. What happens here is your plate gets piled up with obligations you've said yes to. And most of the time you've said yes to months in the past. You just said, yes, I'll do that. And that's a few months down the line.

6:14You're like, that's future Omar's problem. No, you can't do that. So you got to be hyper-selective about what you say yes to. This is really hard. You've got to shift gears, and now the default is no to everything that is asked of you that is not pertaining to your own business. And then you've got to justify, you've got to sell it to yourself that this has to be a yes, that this is a hell yes, that this is an opportunity you can't say no, and it's worth your time. One of the best ways to do this is to give yourself an hourly rate. I learned this from Naval, from the Naval podcast. podcast, Naval Ravikant, and he gave himself an hourly rate way before he was successful, way before he became rich.

6:56And that hourly rate was$5 ,000. So basically he said, if this thing is not going to make me$5 ,000, then it's not worth my hour. Now you got to come up with your own hourly rate. Maybe it's a thousand, but it should be uncomfortable. It should be almost hard for you to say out loud so that when somebody asks you, hey, can we jump on a call to discuss a possible partnership? Hey, can we jump on a call to do XYZ. I'd love to discuss this opportunity with you. My default response to any of this is I send it to my EA and I can't do a call. Can we do this over email? Your time is precious. You got to get on the no train and start saying no to things that don't actually impact you and your business directly.

7:35This mindset alone will free you. You're going to say to yourself, wow, okay, I'm feeling better. I'm putting myself first. I'm putting my mental health first and I'm putting my business first. My business, my team, my customers need me the most. Everybody else comes second. So that's the first thing, the mindset, getting on the note train. The next thing is deleting and delegating. Anything that's on your plate in your to-do list, your regular to-do list, things that you do all the time, you either delete, get rid of, don't do this anymore, or you delegate it to somebody else. This includes meetings.

8:06Take a look at all the meetings you're doing. Do you have to do this meeting? Can you do this over your project management tool or over email? Or can you do this instead of once a week, twice a week? Can you get somebody else on the meeting, somebody else on the team, and they can document the notes or transcribe it and you can read it later? So you can be in the loop. Get rid of it first. If you can't get rid of it, if you have to do it, then delegate it, get somebody else to do it. And we're talking about all tasks, even your inbox, even replying to people. And here's the key. it's easy to delegate the things you don't want to do, but delegate even the things you like doing.

8:45Okay. That's the hard part is actually taking things off your plate. They actually enjoy because it's actually not a good use of your time. Most of the time you need to make decisions. You need to actually move the needle in your business. That's the sacrifice you got to make in your business sometimes to grow. For example, I love creating beautiful slides for my presentations, but that's not a good use of my time. It's going to take me hours to create. So I get someone in my team to do it for me when I'm speaking on stage. I give them my outline. I say, hey, I need a really beautiful looking design with this topic and these points.

9:15Help me out. They go ahead and they work on it for hours. They come back and they give it to me. I look at it, make a few revisions. The time I need to spend on it is like five, 10 minutes versus five, 10 hours. I used to love doing that stuff, but not a best use of my time. My capital is my time. So learn to delegate as much as possible. The pinnacle of this is where you don't actually do anything in your business other than make a few key decisions. So we may not be there yet, but if that's the pinnacle, if that's where we want to get to, let's reverse engineer it. What are a few steps before that?

9:54A few times this past year, we've had visitors come and visit us, family, friends, and that's a good moment in time where you can stress test how much you have on your plate. When you have too much on your plate, you have no bandwidth for anything extra. So when guests come over, you're feeling stressed because you want to entertain, you want to help them, you want to take them out to dinner, you want to make sure they're comfortable. This is a good stress test to see if you have too much on your plate because when you have guests over, you want to entertain, you want to make sure they're comfortable, you want to make sure they're happy, you want to take them out.

10:23And when you've got too much going on, it's like, I don't have time to do the basics, You don't have the time to be a friend, be a family member. That's a red flag. No, there's too much on your plate. You don't have any wiggle room in your schedule for anything that should be normal. You should be able to entertain some guests for a few days and not affect your work to the extent where you feel overwhelmed. Listen, I get it. Business is hard. It's busy. You have a lot to do. But the great thing about business is that you create your own utopia. I learned this from Derek Sivers in his book, Anything You Want.

10:56The beauty of creating your own business is that you get to create your own rules, your own circumstances, how much you do work, how much you delegate. You get to design that. And you should take full advantage of that and start making some progress now. You don't have to go extreme right now. What you can do now is if you're feeling overwhelmed, look at all the things you're doing every day, every week, and do that exercise of either deleting or delegating. and take off 25 to 30 to 40 to 50 % off that list by either deleting or delegating, you're going to automatically start feeling a whole lot better.

11:29You're going to exhale a sigh of relief. You deserve to give yourself that gift so that you can think clearly because one of the worst things you could do for your business is to have a cloudy head and make poor decisions with that cloudy head. You can think clearly. You can make better decisions. You can feel better about your business. You can represent your business in a better state. The benefits are endless. Thanks so much for listening to The$100 MBA Show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app, whether it's Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Overcast or whatever it might be.

12:01Hit subscribe, hit follow so they get your next episode automatically. Our next episode, as soon as it's published, will be right on your app. Today's episode's not over, though. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is ENFJ. That's the handle on Apple Podcasts. They say, Dan Kennedy's sales letter delivers. The Dan Kennedy Sales Letter Podcast. Three stars. This podcast was a short and concise review of Dan Kennedy's timeless principles of writing effective sales pages that stood the test of time. Hey, ENJF, you are a winner. Thanks for the review. Your mission is to email me at omar at 100mba.net so I can make sure to hook you up with the$100 MBA program, your free ride.

12:44If you want to win a free ride to the$100 MBA over at 100mba.net, just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. We call Free Ride Friday. Just listen in on Friday, just like right now to see if you won. It's that easy. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Business is actually more EQ than IQ. Emotional intelligence. Being able to manage your emotional state. That includes your overwhelm, your frustration, your anger. As soon as you start feeling these things, you got to stop yourself in the tracks. and ask yourself, why am I feeling like this? What am I doing that's contributing to this feeling?

13:18How can I change it? What can I do right now? Because whether we want to admit it or not, how we feel impacts how we perform. You don't feel good, you're not going to do good. As simple as that. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

13:44Thank you.