Ep 365 - Business Owners, Beware of These 3 Time-wasters

Why Time Waste Hurts

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Well, hello friends. Really excited. I'm so glad you're here today because I'm going to talk through three massive time wasters that you may be falling victim to every day, every week. The last thing you need to do is waste time. Many of you have other careers. Maybe you have children. Maybe you homeschool. I know you're doing all sorts of things, and you do not have time to waste, my friend. And so today I'm going to help you identify these three things that I've seen in business owners that I've coached, that have been in my grouping group coaching programs, and that I have fallen victim to myself, like myself. The reason I thought of this episode today is because I realized there was time that I've been wasting last week and even this week. And I thought, you know what? I've got to share this with you. So today's episode is all

Free Resources And Gift Boutique

SPEAKER_01 0:47

about that. Real quick, some housekeeping down below. If you're just starting your business or you're growing your business, I've got some free resources and tools down below for you that you can get off my website, like my free 16-step checklist. Um, I also have my spreadsheet of tools and apps that I recommend and also links to the new She's Just Getting Started. Gift boutique. Yes, it's so cute. I'm so excited. I've got stuff in there for business owners specifically, and then also for other women that are pursuing a more fulfilling and purposeful life, whether they have a corporate job, whether they're a mom, whatever it is. So make sure you check that out because they make such great gifts too. Okay, that's it. On to the episode. Well, hello, friends. How's it going? How is everything going with your business? I hope it's amazing. I hope you are loving it. But I also hope you're not wasting time on dumb things. Excuse my language. I don't want you to be wasting time. Y'all, none of us have time to waste. We know that. We know that. Y'all are doing so many things. You're so amazing. You're busy. You may have a full-time career as well, and you're starting this on the side. Let me tell you this: there are tools these days that are amazing for our business, but there are also things that are sucking away our time. They're stealing our time that we could be doing other things, like being with our family, doing the volunteering that we want, playing pickleball, doing whatever it is, mahjong. Some of y'all are doing that, right? All the things that you want to be doing. Maybe it's even you want to have time each night to watch a little bit of Netflix. You know what I'm saying? And you don't have time because your brain is fried by all the stuff that's happening to help get your business going. Today we are talking about it, and I'm so happy you're here.

How New Tools Stole My Week

SPEAKER_01 2:37

So, what happened was last week, and even this week, you know, I was so excited about Grockbot. I talked about that in last week's episode and all this stuff. And I was like using it every day. And then this week I've kind of chilled and I was testing out perplexity and I've been doing other things. And then I've been listening to stuff about Facebook ads. I've been doing all this like learning, and I'm like, what am I doing? I've got to get these items up on the she's just getting started boutique. Like, I've got to get these things up. It's timely right now. It's important. The holidays are coming, and many of you are buying gifts for other people that you know. And I'm like, what am I doing? Like, get all this stuff up. Anyways, my point is I realized yesterday something. And that was I'm wasting a lot of time because of all these newfound tools and all these resources that we have, which are amazing. I'm so happy we live in this era. But y'all, it's taking a lot of my time. And I realized like the past two days, I didn't go play pickleball with my husband. And we usually would try to play in the evenings. And I'm like, what is happening? I am losing days and hours because I'm not controlling what I'm working on. So let's talk about the three things that I see in other business owners and myself. Okay, none of us are immune. And I'm gonna talk about them and I want you to be aware today so you can put limits on yourself. And I'm also going to share a good thing, a good tip that you can do right now, starting after you listen to this episode, to not waste time anymore on

Time Waster One YouTube Loop

SPEAKER_01 4:12

these things. Okay. So the first one is getting stuck in the YouTube loop. Okay. Y'all, I'm this person. I will have YouTube running talking to me about business, about stuff that I can share with y'all, about Facebook ads, about Shopify, about Instagram, social media, about AI, about grokbots, about what's happening with the future of AI. I get off into all sorts of things. Y'all, it's insane. I have gotten sucked into the YouTube loop. I'll be on a walk, I'll be cleaning the house, I will be on a drive. And I'm like, I've got YouTube on. I mean, what happened to the days when I used to listen to music? And it was before we had like Apple Music and Spotify. And I just had like playlists on my old school phone and would listen to playlists. I remember training for half marathon in Colorado when we lived there years ago. And I would just play the playlist, same playlist every time. And I knew exactly where I would hit in my runs at certain points in the playlist. And like ACDC would come on, or you know, 80s rock or whatever I had. I had like a mix of like hip hop and all this stuff. What happened to those days? Like now I'm listening to YouTube like a crazy person, like a complete crazy OCD person. And I've wasted a lot of hours. And yesterday it hit me and I put a boundary in place. So I'm going to tell you about that at the end. But the YouTube loop, y'all, I want you to just stop for a minute and think do I listen to YouTube or watch YouTube a lot? And if you do, that's fine if you do. My daughter, on her breaks from studying, will watch dance moms. And I think she's seen every dance mom episode of every season like 20 times. She loves dance moms. And yes, she's been a dancer. And so that's why she loves it and she gets it. And so, anyways, I want you to stop right now and be honest with yourself. Are you on YouTube a lot learning? Like learning and not actually doing. One thing I want you to realize, because this happened to me too. I was listening to someone about Facebook ads because I'm kind of testing them. I'm not really going full on with them, but I'm kind of testing things and I'm understanding. And now I'm kind of putting ads on pause for a little bit. But I realized that I was listening to one person who was talking all about ads and the strategy. And then I happened to get another video from someone else who was dogging the other person that I was watching, saying that's totally wrong information. And then I just sat there and went, What am I doing with my life? I'm listening to all these people. I could hire someone who's really good, get a referral, and do that. And I can, but I'm just like one of those people that wants to be an expert. And maybe you are too. Like you really want to know what you're talking about. So when you hire someone, you can have a good conversation about it. Uh, but I realized, am I just getting sucked into this vortex of YouTube? And like, this is wasting my time. So yesterday I put a halt to everything. I was like, stop not gonna listen anymore about ads at this moment. I have things I need to focus on in my business. Okay. Okay, so that's the first thing. YouTube loop, y'all. Please think about it right now. Are you stuck learning and listening to different people with different opinions and it's crazy? Um, you probably need to, you probably need to tone it down to about a level one. I was at about a level 10 and I need to go down to a one. Okay, so I don't even think I've listened to any YouTube videos today, have I? I was listening earlier. Sometimes I put it on white noise while I'm working, and they were just talking about some different products that I'm offering in my boutique. So that wasn't that was pretty benign. I just kind of liked it for background noise. Okay, so that's number one.

Time Waster Two Instagram Overthinking

SPEAKER_01 7:53

Number two, y'all ready? This one you could have guessed. Overthinking Instagram and social media posting. Like the complete obsession with overthinking. Listen to me right now. If you have been like me in any way where you do not feel good at social media, like I am not good at it. I I do have a viral video, but it wasn't even totally my niche. And it was something I did off the cuff, which is ironic. And um I I just realized how much time I waste overthinking Instagram when just a second ago I went on Claude, and I told y'all last week Grockbot was giving me ideas, but I went on Claude and it gave me a strategy as well. So I'm comparing that to Grokbot, but it gave me like directions and was like, okay, do this Monday through Friday. It was just super quick. Like I didn't need to pay for some extra app because that's the other thing that I've been doing. I've been looking like, oh, do I need one of these apps that you pay per month and they create all the videos for you? It sounds so glamorous and amazing, like that it's gonna save me time. But actually, like I I was playing around. I'm like, what am I doing? Like I can get this on Claude right now. I already have a pro or whatever membership. And I because I do videos and, you know, like I'm sorry, not videos, like photos. I have it do images and things like that, right? And so I don't need to keep overthinking this. And I just talked to Claude and Claude was like, here, here's how you do it without being like a salesperson, and here's what's getting the best traction in the industry right now for boutiques like yours. And I'm like, Yes, thank you. Done. I've made my two posts and one is scheduled and one is done. Okay, y'all, it was that easy. And I've been like trying to figure out what to do and y'all, we have tools that can tell you in two seconds, but you have got to prompt it correctly. You've got to tell it, I don't want to be salesy, I want Instagram to actually show it. How do I not do this? What's the strategy? When do I post a link, like a shop link? When do I not? When do I tell people to buy? When do I not? I mean, because we are selling something, right? So, how do we do this where we're real humans behind a business and we are not overselling, right? And that's where I want to be. And so, and you want to keep just keep yourself top of mind, keep your business top of mind, your products and services, whatever you offer, because you may offer services and all that. So that's that. Instagram overthinking is sucking your time. And I want you to think right now, am I spending a lot of time like looking at the captions, creating images? Are things actually taking me longer because I'm using AI to edit stuff when I could like literally snap a picture with my phone, ask AI what's a good caption that's not salesy, that's great to engage, and they can give you the caption and you can post it in literally five minutes. This is what I'm realizing, y'all. We have all these tools. As I said, I was researching other apps. I've already, I'm already paying for all these tools that I have that are AI that I'm going through and kind of testing. And I don't need any more tools. Okay. So make sure that you are not overthinking Instagram and TikTok and Facebook, that you are being yourself. That's the advice I can give you is be yourself. And then there is a time to quote, sell so people know to buy. They know that you have something, a service that you offer, a product, a store, whatever it is, right? So we're gonna stop the Instagram overthinking. So let's review. We're not gonna get stuck, number one, in the YouTube vortex, that whole loop that we can get sucked into. Number two, we're not gonna get stuck in the Instagram overthinking vortex, because that's a whole nother one. It's like a black hole that we can go down and we can be second guessing everything. We need to just stop and be ourselves. Number three, this one's gonna be ironic that this is number three, but it is because it's important because this is the time that we live in and we're on the cusp of everything.

Time Waster Three AI Rabbit Holes

SPEAKER_01 11:55

It's the AI rabbit hole. It's the AI rabbit hole. As I've mentioned, and you can probably tell, I've been all over AI. If you listen to last week, uh last week's episode, I've been all over it. And I've been testing things and I like certain apps for different things. And I think that some of the things that it can do for us are amazing, but they're actually taking longer than if I just did it really quick. I noticed that because I had it do stuff like uh last week, I had it upload this edited episode to my podcast and put it in BuzzSprout, which is the uh app that I use that that um why can't I talk today? That, you know, releases my episode out into the atmosphere into Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It's kind of it's my host. It's my host. That's the word I was looking for. It hosts my podcast, right? And it did that and uploaded it, but it had the title wrong. It didn't have some of the stuff. And I've got to go back and tweak it and manage it and micromanage it in the beginning so that it does it right from now on. But the problem is um, I'm still learning what it's doing right and do it doing wrong. So I could just do my episode myself, and I think it will be faster at this point until I sit down, maybe on a weekend or something like that, and really program it perfectly with the set of rules. And I was doing that, but things started taking longer. And I'm like, what just happened? I've got to get this episode out. Last week, I was like, it was the day before it was going live. And I was like, I have to get this done. So it did it, but I was having to babysit it and it was taking me a little longer. So some things aren't there yet, some things are, they're close, but you would have to have some hours to actually give it super clear directions, test it, and then revise what it just did, and then tweak it again and then get it perfect. Okay. So just think about that right now. If you're doing things with AI that you're automating or that you're searching for, you can get caught in rabbit holes and also have it taking you down other directions that you didn't even sit down to do that day. You can. Like you're looking up something for your business, and then it's telling you to go off in this direction, which may or name may not be the right direction, and all this stuff. And I'm just realizing that AI is actually taking a lot of my time. I mean, I'm trying to be honest with myself. It's taking a lot of my time. And here's what happened yesterday. I realized like, I need to get these other products up on my site. What am I doing? I need to finish. And within no time, I was finished with the stuff that actually mattered because I did already have a good workflow myself. And I realized that all of this, me, me trying to add AI in right now is stalling me at a time when I'm when I actually need to be doing things. It's not like it's the dead time of the year, or maybe February for retail or or whatever it is, right? Um, this is the busy time. I have to get everything up. So you have to think about your business. This is probably a very busy time, no matter what business you have. And so I think you can do the little tweaks that make your business run more efficiently and use AI quickly. Instagram, this, Shopify, this, whatever, use Kajabi, whatever tools that you use, right? Um, helping with naming your episode title. Like I was creating the title already for this episode, and it said, yeah, that's great. I was like, okay, done. I don't need to keep tweaking this, right? And I just think sometimes we can keep talking to it because it feels like our confidant, you know. I noticed that. Like my daughter walks around talking to it like it's a real person. I'm not even kidding, y'all. She's in high school, she's an amazing student, top of her class, but she was literally talking to it all the time. I found myself yesterday in the car talking to it. I'm like, listen, and I was like talking to it like a friend. And I'm like, what has happened? Like, this is my confidant now. Um, but it's a rabbit hole. And I, you know, as much as this is going to save us time and change the world, you have to prioritize what has to get done in your business right now.

Do The Must Do List First

SPEAKER_01 16:11

What has to get done? If I was sitting next to you right now, what would you tell me has to get done? You'd say, I need to start marketing more so people know I need more traffic to my site, or I need to get more, you know, contact forms submitted from people online. I need to, you know, get more people on my podcast, or I need to record videos, or I need to get my website up, whatever it is. Line item that out really quick. Like get out a piece of paper and go, what are the things that I must get done? Then I think what you can do is when you get that done, then you can give yourself free time, just like you would if you were gonna sit down and watch a show or free time to just hang out. My free time is going to be spent learning AI, making my business more efficient, doing that secondary, then having that cannibalize the most important things that you need to get done now. Because yesterday, when I did the most important things, y'all, they got done in no time. They got done in literally no time. And I thought, I've been spending this whole day going down rabbit holes. I was listening to YouTube, I was thinking about Instagram, I was going down the AI rabbit hole. I did all these things all last week and this week, and I was like, I'm done getting the most important things done first. So this is my advice to you today. As amazing as all these tools are, okay, all these tools, YouTube, Instagram, AI, everything, everything. We have to focus on what's important right now because this is a busy time. This is not a time for you to be like kicked back and being like, I am learning everything. No, there's marketing you need to be doing. You need to drive people to your business somehow. And I mean whether that's online driving customers, getting um inquiries, contact forms submitted, quotes, whatever it is for your business. Okay. So please think about that today because I don't want you to waste time. I want you to be able to complete all the things that mean so much to you in your business. You've worked too hard to get here. You've worked too hard to waste time, and you have many other important things in your life. Many other important things. Your family, your home, your volunteering, your personal activities, your social activities, all the things. Okay? Y'all are amazing. Y'all are awesome. Have a wonderful day, and until next time, remember, let's not get stuck in the vortex of all these tools. Let's get the important things done, and then for fun, we can be optimizing and learning and, you know, becoming the best version of ourselves. Have a good day. Bye.

Closing And Where To Get Help

SPEAKER_00 18:53

Now, this episode may be over, but our relationship does not have to end here. Head on over to Kimberlybrock.com, and yes, you can get more valuable information for your journey. And you know what? You don't need to go through this alone. I would love to help. Thank you so much and have a great day. Bye.