Twiddling your thumbs spinning in confusion on what to do next, feeling like a failure, feeling inadequate, thinking you should be doing more or you’re not doing enough, sitting at work with no direction. These symptoms are a product of one very simple problem that not a lot of people are talking about in the coaching world. Not a lot of coaches are discussing this. In fact, when I began teaching it to my students, at first glance it seems like the opposite of what a business coach should teach an entrepreneur, but here it is.

Today on episode 15 I’m going to teach you guys that allotting yourself too much time to work is actually making you way less productive. Let’s be honest, it’s making you feel like shit. This is Becca Pike, your host of The Hell Yes Entrepreneur, and it is time for some Hell Yes Coaching. Let’s go.

Hey, guys. I’m Becca Pike and welcome to The Hell Yes Entrepreneur podcast, the number one show for entrepreneurs looking to create their first six-figure year. If you’ve got the drive and you know how to hustle but you’re not sure where to channel your energy, we’ve got the answers. Let’s dive into today’s show.

What is up my people? How are we doing today? I’m just going to say it. I have dog fever. I have puppy fever. Listen, I’m a huge dog person. I identify as a dog person. In fact when I was 18 years old, I got a six week old half Great Dane half English mastiff. Her name was Scout. Her full name was Scouty Banana Pants Pike. She was my ride or die for 12 years. She grew to be very old for that breed. So for Great Danes and mastiffs, they don’t live as long. Usually the expectancy of life is like nine to 11 years max, and she was almost 12 when she passed away.

When I got her, it was just me living in an apartment and working and doing my thing. I was a single girl. She saw me through all the boyfriends, all the jobs, all of the breakups. She saw me meet my husband. She was with me while I was pregnant each time. She was my girl, you guys. She passed away about 13 months ago. It has taken me this long to even look at other dogs. I have always considered myself a dog lover, but after she passed away it was way harder than what I was expecting. I don’t know what I was expecting. I knew it was coming one day. It just hit me so differently than what I thought.

I couldn’t even look at other dogs up until recently. I didn’t even want to pet them when I saw them on the street or at the dog park or wherever I was. Recently, I think time heals all wounds at least to some degree. Although Scouty Banana Pants Pike is always going to have a very special place in my heart. I can’t even imagine a love deeper than that. I still am going to move on. I’m going to have another dog one day. Recently I’ve started thinking about dogs.

I love big dogs. I love English mastiffs. I love even medium to large dogs like labs, but I have a true place in my heart for Great Danes, mastiffs, and Newfoundland’s. Anything that are really big bears that can live in my house.

So anyways, stay tuned. There’s a really good chance I’m going to be getting a dog soon. If you don’t follow me on Instagram @1beccapike, then you’re going to miss out on a lot of puppy pictures. Now I’m not saying that it’s going to happen immediately, but I’m saying it’s coming. I can feel it in my little heart, my little dog heart.

All right guys. Let’s get into a quick sexy celebration. You guys know I’ve been doing these sexy celebrations, and I’m having so much fun with it. It’s bringing people out of the woodwork in my Facebook group to talk about their celebrations, which is so fun for me.

So this was written by Kerri V in our Facebook group Hell Yes: The Entrepreneur’s Circle. Kerri said, “Without Hell Yes Coaching, I would have taken an easier route of contracting with a business rather than starting my own. The trajectory of my entire life changed with the guidance of Hell Yes. There was a belief poured into me that I didn’t have in myself, particularly after being in a toxic and degrading work environment for the last two years.

“I’ve become more comfortable showing up on social media. I’ve met an entire community of likeminded incredibly inspiring likeminded kickass entrepreneurs. We are helping each other grow and succeed with our businesses and in our lives in general. With Hell Yes Coaching, I’ve invested in one on one coaching, two different rounds of Three More, and now I’m in Thirty More. #sexycelebration.” Good job Kerri. I love that. We love having you.

All right guys. Let’s get into the lesson for today. Are you ready? So here is what I want to talk about. I want to talk about time, and the way that we allot our time in business. So let’s say that you left your corporate world to become a full time entrepreneur and business owner, right? So one of the first things you were probably taught was to just keep your schedule that you had at your office gig and roll it right into the entrepreneur life.

I read one time in a blog that the best thing to do if you work a nine to five and if you’re moving into an entrepreneurship is to just keep that exact schedule when entering the entrepreneur world. The blog writer said, “Show up for yourself the way you would show up for the corporation you used to work for. Show up at 9:00 a.m. on the dot and leave at 5:00 p.m. that way you have plenty of time to get all of your work done, right?”

At first glance, this may seem logical. Except there’s a few holes in it, right? So A, you probably left your corporate job for more freedom. So why the hell would we imprison ourselves into the exact same schedule that we wanted out of so badly. Right? Part of the beauty of entrepreneurship is the time freedom. B, the corporate world is not who you want to mimic if you’re attempting to go for efficiency. Time is so wasted in the corporate and office world.

Who here has had an office job? You show up, you get all your work done before 11 a.m., and then you stare into the abyss, and you contemplate suicide until 5:30 p.m. Am I right or am I right? We must erase the belief that we should be compensated for the amount of hours we work, and we must concrete the idea that we are paid based on the amount of value that we give to people.

Did you know that the nine to five workday was actually introduced by the Ford Motor Company Henry Ford back in the 1920s. It became standardized in the Fair Labors Act in 1938 as a way of trying to curb exploitation of factory workers, okay? So not many people know the history behind why we act like it’s logical to pay people based on the amount of time they spend in the office as opposed to the actual amount of work that they produce.

The concept of billable hours came in the 1950s in order to boost the salaries of lawyers who’s pay grade was failing to match those of doctors. So in 1958, an ABA article argued that because attorneys were paid a fixed fee for their services, they weren’t getting enough money in exchange for all the time they were spending with their clients. The concept of billable hours arose as a way of enabling lawyers to make money from every minute that they spent working.

By the 1970s, the approach had become the norm across all industries, right. It’s what we still see today. It’s 2021 and no one has questioned if these hours are the most efficient for modern 21^st century workers. It’s one of the good things I feel like that came out of the pandemic is so many workers were flooded into their homes to work from their house where they were capable of not necessarily following that exact nine to five workday.

People started learning and skillfully crafting the day that they want. Yes, they were getting their work done, but they were stopping to take walks. They were stopping to get out and get fresh air. They were getting away from their computer, and they were socializing with people midday. This is amazing. This is something worth celebrating.

It’s not the most modern way, it’s not the most efficient way for us to be clocking work hours. In fact, we still hold onto it because it’s expected, and it’s normalized. It’s been proven though that humans are the most productive, motivated, and creative in small chunks of time and when those small chunks of time are surrounded by enjoyable tasks outside of work.

So for instance, instead of locking yourself in a room for eight hours, going on a hike and then working on your computer for like two hours. Then reading a book, playing with your kids, and then coming back and working for a couple hours. This is how the human brain works best.

Also let’s just highlight how giving yourself too much time to work can fill you with a false belief that you’re not doing enough. So it makes you feel like garbage. If you allot yourself nine hours a day but you only have two hours’ worth of work, you’re going to spend seven hours wondering what to do. And in turn feeling like maybe you’re not doing enough without ever questioning why you chose to work for nine hours that day with only two hours’ worth of work, right?

I have clients that come to me, and they say, “Becca, I go to my office at 9 a.m. After I do some main tasks, I spend the next several hours feeling directionless. I putter around. I scroll on social media, and I try to write some posts here and there that add value to my clients. Ultimately I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing with my time.”

Now I think a lot of business coaches may say, “Okay, let’s dive deeper into time management. Maybe we can create a content calendar or a task calendar so that you know exactly what you should be doing at each hour of the day.” Some coaches might even say, “Hey it’s time to start increasing the amount of clients you see. It sounds like you have too much time on your hands.” I don’t agree with all of this.

You know what I would say? I would say why the fuck are you sitting around your office for so long? Are you aware that you just made up this eight hour a day schedule? It’s completely made you. You pulled it right out of your booty. It isn’t needed. It’s wasted time.

Guess what happens to you when you allot too much time for yourself to work and then you don’t have anything to fill it with. You start having thoughts about yourself, about your industry. Thoughts that aren’t true, that aren’t real. You start thinking things like, “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m not cut out for this. I’m unorganized. A professional would be doing better at this.” Thoughts create how we feel. So we start feeling inadequate or not enough. We start feeling like we could be doing more, and we start feeling like shit because of it.

What happens when you feel this way? You start producing less quality work. You start questioning your motives, your industry, your experience. Your business suffers.

Let’s do a super quick example. So I’m going to paint a picture for you. Could you imagine a situation in which you are given a test that’s supposed to take three hours. You don’t know why it’s supposed to take three hours. It just is. That’s what society has told you. That’s what the test takers believe. That’s how long it’s taking other people. Let’s call it the three hour test.

So you study your ass off for a year before this test. Today is the day you’re going to take it. You wake up. You eat a hearty breakfast. You feel good. You feel confident. You feel calm. You drive to your test taking facility. You go into the exam room, and you’re given this test. It is laid in front of you. You start working on the test. You feel really good. Then instead of three hours you actually complete it, and you look up and you realize it’s only been 25 minutes.

So you look around the room and everyone else is still working. So you start wondering why you’re done so fast. You check back through your answers. Like maybe you missed some questions and you left something blank or like a whole page is blank, right? But you go back, and you didn’t miss anything. Everything’s there. You completed the whole test. So then you go back, and you start looking at page numbers, making sure you’re not missing entire sections of the notebook right, but it’s all there. Everything is adding up. It looks like you completed the entire test in 25 minutes.

So you look around the room again. You start asking why am I done so soon? You start making it mean something about you because you were told it should take three hours. You start making it mean something less than flattering that you completed it two and a half hours before you were “supposed” to. You might even spin into panic and start trying to fill the time with bullshit. You may even start requestioning your answers.

Here’s the deal. Maybe you aced the test, but that doesn’t matter because you’re going to spend the next hour spinning out on whether or not you’re doing it right. You start telling yourself, “This is a three hour test. How could I possibly be finished?”

What if it’s true that you actually aced it and you’re the smartest person in the room, right? Yet you’re tearing yourself down because the timeline just doesn’t butt up to what is recommended. You start feeling unempowered, guilty, inadequate. Just this morning you were feeling amazing, prepared, and calm. The only thing that happens between this morning and now is an expectation of how much time it would take you. Expectations should be killers of dreams. When you expect things to be a certain way and then they aren’t, you may assume that things are going wrong. Right?

Listen to me. Just because it’s recommended to work nine to five in the corporate world or whatever. Maybe for you it’s like nine to four, eight to four, eight to five. It doesn’t mean that that’s the most efficient or that you should work these hours. If you’re kicking ass in your business and you’re done with all of your work and your marketing and your networking and your emails and your growth by 11 a.m. then go home and play with your dog.

Here’s what I want you to hear so loudly and clearly also. The amount of time that it takes for you to accomplish your tasks in a day is up to you. Time isn’t something that happens to you. You’re in charge of what gets done in your own time. If you want to write a newsletter to your audience, you can choose for it to take 20 minutes or two hours. It’s a decision. If you allow yourself 20 minutes, by god you better turn your notifications off, hunker down, and start pouring thoughts on paper. If writing this newsletter has taken you two hours every single time you’ve ever written it, that’s just because you’ve allowed it to.

For some people it is so foreign to them to realize that there is a difference between thinking a task takes a certain amount of time versus a task takes the exact amount of time that we allow it. If you wanted to create a 100K per year business by only working one hour a day, you could. It would be hard, but you could do it. It would require planning, but you could. It’s not about having more time in a day. It’s about being more efficient with the time you have.

One of the biggest killers in the world is believing that you wish you had more time. We hear it all the time. I wish there was more hours in the day, right? That is the most unempowering thought ever. The most subtle but the most powerful question isn’t how much time will this take but how much time am I going to allow this to take? The belief on how many hours we’re supposed to work is draining the confidence out of entrepreneurs everywhere. They think that they’re done with their test too early when they’re actually killing it every day.

I have clients all the time that spend their mornings kicking ass and then feel guilty that they took the rest of the day off to pick their kids up from school and walk around the mall with them. Because corporate America has brainwashed them into thinking they didn’t spend enough time on their work that day.

Here’s what I want you to consider doing. Sit down, write down every task that needs to be completed at the start of every week. So on Mondays you sit down, you write out everything that needs to be done that week. Then next to it allot it a certain amount of time that you’ll spend on it. Then plug it into your calendar at the times of the days that your brain works best for you. For me it’s like 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Outside of those hours I’m like braindead, I don’t know.

Then, are you ready for this? Are you ready for this next step? Don’t just add random bullshit that doesn’t align with your exact goal just because you think you’re supposed to work more.

All right guys. I want you to never think that I’m sitting on a high horse lecturing you. The only reason that I understand there’s problems so well that I bring up in each episode is because I’ve been through them. Every episode you hear is just a problem I’ve attempted to overcome in the past. A lot of them I have overcome. That’s the only reason that I can confidently sit here and talk to you about it. Then I’ve taught other people who have been through the same things repeatedly.

So I just want you to know that all of this is normal. It is human. Everything that you hear in every episode. If you ever feel like speaking right to you, it’s because you’re a human. I’m just here to remind you to push back on societal norms, especially societal norms that don’t make much sense. Some are dumb.

Women don’t have to stay at home and tend to the house. Men don’t have to be the breadwinners or every family. Our kids don’t have to go to college to be successful and well rounded. What? Is that crazy? Our lawns don’t have to be perfectly green. You don’t have to imprison yourself from nine to five in your office just because Henry Ford made that shit up in 1920.

All right guys. That’s it for me today. I encourage you, as always, to reach out to us. Just shoot us an email. Or click on our website. We have a ton of opportunities for you, and we have an awesome community of people that want to welcome you in. If you’re looking for one-on-one coaching, we got you.

If you’re looking to take a class on how to gain more clients right now, Three More is enrolling at this moment. If you’re looking to become a coach and you don’t know how to get your coaching business off the ground, Zero to Coach is now enrolling. We are the only coaching certification program that is 100% one on one. That’s a big deal. So whatever it is that you’re looking for when it comes to business growth, we’ve got you covered here at Hell Yes Coaching. Consults are free. All right guys have a great day. See you here next week on The Hell Yes Entrepreneur. Bye.

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