Welcome to Visionary’s Pursuit, a podcast where we explore what it takes to turn your bold and inspiring ideas into reality. I'm Carolina Zuleta. I'm a life and business coach and your host for this podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here.
Hello everyone. Welcome back. This is episode 79 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. Today I have a juicy topic, a conversation I have very often with my clients, I think it's one of the biggest challenges we have as business founders, and it's about time management. How do we organize the hours we have in our day to fit our personal life time with our family, taking care of our health as well as all the demands we have in our business, especially when we're very ambitious and we have big dreams for our business.
We wanna grow fast, we wanna serve our clients and many times we end up feeling burnt out, overwhelmed, exhausted. And I think one of the worst consequences is having our team experience the same. So this is gonna be actually a two part episode in which I wanna share with all of you my best ideas, my best tools.
This is a learn, think, but also apply type of podcast. You can think about it as your free coaching session here in the podcast. So the first thing I wanna say is that managing time is not simply a math problem. Yes, it is a math problem in the sense that we have 24 hours a day and we need to figure out how do we distribute those hours to do the things we wanna do.
And about that part, I'm gonna talk more in the second episode, but managing our time is also an emotional problem or an emotional challenge. And what I mean when I say emotional is that we have an inherent problem. Our brain is divided in two main parts.
You can think about it that way. I mean, it's way more complicated, but let's think about it as in two parts. Our prefrontal cortex that is behind our forehead.
And our amygdala, which you can think about it as in the middle of your brain. The prefrontal cortex is where we can do our higher level thinking, where we can plan, where we prioritize, where we know we're at our goals are what matters to us, and our amygdala is where we feel our emotions, where we feel resistance, when we feel boredom, when we feel fear. And time management is a conflict between those two parts of our brain. Because if we were only to use our prefrontal cortex, we would be like a computer. We do the things.
At the time we said we're going to do them, but as human beings, we have also our emotional part, which is when you need to sit down and do some work and you feel scared of doing it, you tell yourself you don't know. So you feel confused. Or when you say you were gonna do this thing and other people are asking you to. Do something for them. And then you feel that emotional conflict of, should I do what I said I was gonna do, or, you know what? Let me fix this for this person because I want them to like me, or because I wanna feel accomplished. That emotional challenge that we all face is also what I'm going to explain in the following episode in part two of the time Management series. Today I wanna talk about the bigger picture, or the bigger challenge we have when we're managing our time and this challenge, I call it our clarity and intentionality challenge.
Because my goal is not just to teach you how to do more things and to do them faster and to fill up your life with more and more and more, but to actually use your time intentionally in a way that is honoring the life that you wanna live.
So let's start with a clarity. We need to have clarity about some different things in order to manage our time in the best way, the first is our goals. So we need to understand where are we going, what we wanna accomplish in order to be able to decide what I do today when I talk about goals. In this sense, I think there's many different types of goals we need to have.
We need to have a longer term vision. Where do we want this business to be in three years? Then we need to have a year goal. What are we gonna accomplish in 2026? Many business founders also find it helpful to divide that yearly goal into four quarters. Then we can even divide it into our monthly goals.
And then we need goals for a week, and then specific things we're going to do every day. And all of this should add up. What we're doing today shouldn't be disconnected from our quarterly goal or from our yearly goal. There should be a relationship that makes sense that if I'm gonna be spending my time in this project or talking to these clients or doing this outreach is because that is taking me to the goal I want to accomplish.
We talk a lot about prioritization in business, but we cannot prioritize when we're not clear on our goals if we think about it in a different way, if there's not a clear goal, then everything is gonna feel important and everything is gonna feel urgent. So ask yourself, do I know where I wanna be in three years from now? Do I know what I'm wanting to accomplish this year? Do I know what my goals are for this month, for this week? And are they all aligned? So that's the first part. In order for us to prioritize and manage our time well, we need to know where we're going, where we're heading to.
The second area we need to explore is our values.
When I did my first coaching certification, one of the key things I learned is that a fulfilled life is a life in which we're honoring our values. When we are not honoring our values, we stop feeling the joy for our life. We can feel lost, we can feel stuck, but the problem is that many of us don't make time to understand what our values are.
And when I talk about values, I'm not talking about morals or ethics. I'm talking about what you as a human being and as a business owner, value the most. There are no values that are better than others. your values are personal to you, and what matters is that you understand them. I have some of my clients whose values are about productivity, making money fast, being successful, being able to invest that money and create a significant net worth for the future. And that's a perfectly valid value. But I have other clients who are also business founders who value being present with their families, who for for some their health is very, very important.
And depending on what you value in this moment of your life. In order to live a fulfilled life, you're gonna have to make certain choices, right? The people who are all about the focus, I'm gonna dive deep and three years, five years, I'm just gonna give it all to this business so I can sell it and then make a significant amount of money. They're gonna be spending their time in a very different way than the business founders who are parents who wanna be present for their kids, who don't wanna be working every weekend and every night so they can enjoy the time when their kids are small and young.
Or for my clients who their health is very important because I have clients who run marathons who care so much about what they eat about meditating. Then also their time management is gonna look different. So you need to understand your personal values. So you can choose to honor them and live a fulfilled life.
And also you need to understand what your business values are. there are businesses that are about volume, about a lot of output, really fast trying to get clients. They're not so concerned about churn, or churn is not their priority. While there are other businesses that maybe they have 10 clients, 15 clients, and what they care about is building solid relationships, about delivering incredible products or services to maintain those relationships in the long term.
And again, the values you have within your business are gonna determine how you manage your time. you also need to think about the values of the culture of your business. you know, I worked with companies that it's all about work hard, get paid. We're all here to make money in, and we get an exit.
And there's other companies that I've worked with whose culture is more about taking care of their employees work, work-life balance. One of the values is the families of their employees as well. And that's gonna create a different culture. And I wanna be very clear on this. I do not think that one is better than the other one.
What matters is that you understand what is your value and what is your business value, and organize your time and what you do every day around that so you can honor your values and therefore live a very fulfilling life. I don't think many of us start a business to be miserable. Although in our culture, I hear a lot , oh, once you become an entrepreneur, you thought you were gonna have time for yourself, and you don't. You're actually working a lot more. And yes, I see that happen often, but not because they have to, but because they're not making time to answer these important questions.
What are my goals? What are my values? And based on what my goals and my values are, how am I gonna get there? What becomes most important in my day to day that it's gonna take me there?
and listen, I think we all need to be very clear and honest with ourselves that we're gonna have to make trade-offs. This idea that we can do it all. Puts us in a space where we end up not being intentional.
We end up saying yes to everything. And when we're saying yes to everything, we are also saying no to things that matter to us, and that we'll only feel the pain of those later on, like our health, like our relationships, like our mental health as well.
so I think let's be mature like grownups in this and understand. That we need to make trade-offs, that we cannot put everything on the table that we're going to have to choose, some are gonna be very easy and obvious, but some are gonna make us think about what we really value the most and what matters the most in that moment.
Okay. Another concept that I think is very useful when we're getting clear about how we wanna manage our time is called the zone of genius. I have this conversation often with my clients because they're all brilliant and they can do many things, and they can do many things well, and that's why they are now the founders or the CEOs of their business, but because they can do it really well. It doesn't mean that they should be doing it.
So the zone of genius, you can think about it as that part of yourself that is unique, that nobody else in your team can do it. That is where you add the most significant value to your business, it's where you have the most impact.
And I want you to take a moment and ask yourself, do you know what your zone of genius is? Are you so great with bringing on clients that that's where you should be spending the most time because you have the relationships or you have the way to sell the vision to others? Or is your zone of genius in thinking about the future, about how you're going to disrupt.
Your industry or about how you're gonna position yourself. I don't know in this moment that AI is growing everywhere and you wanna have a clear position. So yes, you can do many things within your business, but there are some things that only you can do, and those are the things where you add the most value and are the most important work you can do for your business.
So again, if you wanna be managing your time intentionally. Make some time to understand your goals, to understand your values, and to understand what is your zone of genius, and also take a look at the trade-offs you're going to make and choose them with intentionality instead of simply continuing to move forward and allowing those choices to be made for you.
There is a book called Essentialism, written by Greg McKeown, and what that book teaches you is the discipline of focusing only on what truly matters and eliminating everything else. And I love this book because when we are running a business, everything seems important and everything seems urgent.
But when you ask yourself what is essential and when you know that what is essential are the maybe one, two, maybe three things that are what the business requires in order to continue growing and living, then it's easy to understand how everything is secondary. the question the book invites us to ask ourselves is, is it a clear yes?
And if it's not a clear, yes, I have to do this, then it's a no. So there's not that gray area. It's very either is it essential or it's not essential. So as you are practicing being clear, you can start asking yourself what is essential in my business? And you can identify the few things that create the most impact.
maybe what is essential for your business is closing another client. Maybe what is essential for your business is making the time to make those two or three hires so you can continue growing. Not everything in your business is essential. If you think about a human being for us, essential is water and air, right? And clothes, and food, everything else. Is not essential. We can live, you know, in the tent for a little bit, right? But if we don't drink water, we'll die. If we don't breathe air, we'll die. So you wanna think about essential as really the things that have the most significant impact on your business.
in Essentialism, the goal is not necessarily productivity. It's about precision, about understanding clearly, where is it that you need to focus your time to deliver the biggest impact. and I wanna also name it, it's challenging because when we are business founders, what we're doing is we're basically driving the car as we're building it.
So sometimes everything feels like it needs your attention right now, but that's when with time and practice, and again, this word that I love, intentionality, you are going to start deciphering what is essential in your business and what are all the things that are yes, things that you need to do maybe are important, but that are not essential. And if you focus more time on what's essential, you're gonna have better results than if you allow your calendar to fill up with all the other things that are calling for your attention, which I know could be hundreds, thousands, every day, every minute.
so again, to summarize what I've shared so far, step number one is clarity and it's clarity about goals, values, zone of genius. What is essential, and you need to make time to answer these questions, doesn't mean that you need an entire month sometimes with one coaching session we can get clear on all of this.
And then what we need to focus on is that you are living those priorities. But that's where I'm gonna go deeper in the next episode. So take a minute and answer these questions. Do you know what your goals are? Do you know what your values are? Your personal and your business values? Do you know what your zone of genius is?
Can you name really quickly as you're listening to me, what are your top three essentials? And if the answer is yeah, I think so, no, but I'm not sure, then that's a sign that you need to spend some time getting clarity on these questions. Once you have clarity on those, then we need to start really prioritizing and there's that prioritization in terms of the goals in the year, what are you going to accomplish?
But I'm gonna talk a little bit about the prioritization every day. One of the things I tell my clients is, listen, in order to manage your time better, you need to invest time in organizing yourself. And that can feel hard because the feeling is you're running, you're running, you're running to your goals. And what I'm telling you is, Hey, stop running.
Walk with me this different path, but then you're gonna get on a bike and you're gonna be able to go way faster. But that feeling of stopping and walking instead of running. It feels very uncomfortable, but it is required. My recommendation is that every day you get a little posted or write it somewhere that you can see it, and you write down what are your essentials for that day, and those should be no more than three.
In fact, many times it's just one. It's closing this client.
Is hiring this key role, or is fixing this bottleneck, this process that is creating a lot of pain for all of us. What you wanna identify there is what are the few actions that will drive most of your results? You can apply the rule of the 2080. What are the 20% of the actions that are gonna deliver you the 80% of the results?
Then step three is about eliminating and delegating aggressively.
So if you now have clarity as to where you need to be investing your time, you need to decide what you need to stop doing completely. Or what are things someone else can do?
There is a quote that has been attributed to Warren Buffet that says The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. So part of you becoming a master in time management is learning to say no and learning to say no to most everything right now.
You probably say no to some things, but the better you get at time management, you're going to start noticing that you're saying no to more things. One, because you have clear goals, you have clear values, you know your zone of genius. Are you gonna say no to everything that it's not fitting those goals, those values are your zone of genius.
And step four, I'm gonna go deeper into these steps in our following episode, but step four is protecting the time for what matters the most. Are you actually putting in your calendar the time you need to spend in your zone of genius? What I believe is, is a way of prioritizing, not necessarily everyone has to prioritize this way, but it's a good rule as a founder is to first add to your calendar anything that is revenue driving, meeting with clients, closing clients, anything that has to do with bringing revenue to your business. Second is strategic work, and this one is where I see a lot of founders fail what I mean when I say strategic work is the work in which you are planning for the future.
For example is, you know, part of the strategic work is setting those goals, but also, you know, a lot of my clients' industries are being disrupted by ai. So strategic work is thinking how you're going to incorporate ai or how are you gonna position the use of AI for your clients?
How are you gonna answer your client's questions about how AI maybe can replace what you're doing or how is it gonna be used? That time that we're thinking about the bigger questions, that time when we're thinking about the growth of our business, when we're spending time in our prefrontal cortex thinking about the future, maybe that could also mean, creating the new org chart or deciding on the profiles of the people you're going to hire. That strategic work should be second in your priority list. Third is anything that has to do with your team. Training them, guiding them, teaching them, supporting them, and then everything else.
But what I see often happen, I think that many founders are good with the revenue creation part, but I see them inverting these last three, putting everything else they need to do when they're inside the work, when they're, you know, looking at what their employees did or getting into the details where they don't need to be, or they're allowing their teams to fill up their calendars with meetings, and then maybe strategic work will go maybe one day at night, maybe during the weekend, maybe they postpone it for months. And that's really a trap. That's when you're gonna get in this cycle of putting out fires instead of creating something for the future.
All right, those are the first four steps that have to do with clarity and intentionality that I'm telling you is the first challenge we have when we're gonna organize our time.
What I wanna do in the second part of this episode is, I wanna explain or, or share with you what the theme of this entire podcast is, and it is that your beliefs, your thoughts end, up showing up in your results.
And that is also true for how you manage your time. Your calendar is a reflection of your beliefs.
How I like to think when someone invites me into their business to understand their culture, to understand their goals, I always imagine that I'm walking inside the brain of the founder.
Because the culture of your business is gonna be a reflection of your own beliefs of the way you manage yourself. So when I see a founder who's working around the clock, I immediately know that their teams are gonna be working around the clock. When I meet a founder who is overwhelmed and stressed and is not prioritizing, I know I'm gonna find the same thing in your team
so I think it is very important as a founder to investigate what is it that you believe in and how those beliefs are showing up in your results. I'm gonna share with you some of the most common beliefs I hear my founders having. And how they're impacting their work so you can notice if you have those same beliefs and we can start challenging them and shifting them and thinking in different ways so you can create a culture and a way that you're managing your time that's way more productive, better, more aligned with the life you want to live.
First the belief of if I'm not involved. It won't be done right, and it comes not exactly like that. It can show up in a sneaky ways. Like, oh, I have to check everything before it's sent to the client. There's always have to be a step that it's my revision of things. And how this belief starts showing up in your behaviors is that you are in every detail. You're actually not delegating, you're redoing the work for your employees. You're becoming the bottleneck.
And the result, right? Like the result of those behaviors is that you end up. Working long hours, weekends, feeling exhausted, feeling that there's always this important thing you need to do, but that you're not getting to do it.
Another unintended consequence from this is that your team starts depending on you, so it's a team that cannot decide for themselves because you've been checking their work. Then they start feeling like they need your approval before they do anything. Or they're not building their own confidence to make their own decisions, but they're always trying to figure out how to please you, how to make you happy with their work, versus them being happy with their own work.
And there's a constant overload. This is when we get to burnout and exhaustion and it could even start deteriorating our health. And it's from this very simple thought that it's along the lines of, if I'm not involved, it won't be done. Right. Another common belief I hear is I have to say yes to every opportunity that comes my way because that opportunity may not come later on or, because if I say no to a client, then I'm gonna miss all the other opportunities that client could bring to me in the future.
And yes, there might be some true to this, right? Remember when I talked about trade-offs? Yes, you might lose a client. You might lose all the future opportunities that client could bring to you.
But if you are taking every client, every project, every meeting that comes your way, and you are not filtering based on the types of clients you wanna have or based on how profitable those clients are, or if it's the type of work you wanna do, or if it's the type of relationships you wanna have, what you're gonna do is you're gonna be overbooked with misaligned clients, not having any space for strategy, not having enough time to focus on the real clients that you love and that you wanna cultivate.
And then under delivering to many of them because you have to. Too many clients, too many demands, and then you might end up losing really valuable clients, the ones that you want to keep. for the rest of your life. And this also shows up, this belief, as a fear of losing the relationship. So you know when a client is asking you for more work and you don't have the ability to set boundaries or to push back or to say no to last minute asks. Again, your calendar gets hijacked by those clients, by their demands, and not by the values of your business, not by what you decided was the most important.
So those two are related. It's this scarcity thought about I need to say yes to everything, because if not, then I'm gonna lose these opportunities, or I'm gonna lose these relationships and then I won't be able to get them in the future.
Another very common belief, and I think it's a very big belief in our entire society, is more work equals more success. So if you think that in order to be successful, you need to work more hours, you are going to fill up your calendar with things to do. You're not gonna allow yourself time to rest or to play or have fun or to contemplate, to do nothing.
And instead of subtracting, instead of what Warren Buffet says about saying no to things, you're gonna be saying yes to more and more things. And then you get up in the cycles of burnout, of being so exhausted that you are now go having diminishing results. You're not being able to really deliver at your best.
And I think that this one can also be similar to the feeling of, if I'm very busy, that means my business is being successful. So you are avoiding white space. You are confusing doing things with making progress. Those are two very different things.
Here's when many of my clients tell me, Caro, you know what? I cannot turn my brain off. I'm always on. I Personally, can understand this because I think it happens to me also and have to be very mindful of it, because I know that feeling of our brains never turning off, not being able to relax, always operating from our cortisol and, and what's next, what's next? And, and that is really hard for our health and that's not sustainable in the long term.
So we have to really. Tests that believe that either doing more means more success or if that I'm doing a lot means that I'm being successful and challenge it. And we challenge it by understanding what success means to us. Again, we're going back to those goals, going back to those values.
The next one is, if I slow down, everything falls apart. And, and you know what, I can also relate to this because. There is this fear that if we actually take some time to think or we say no to certain clients, or we slow down our timings to deliver things to our current clients, we're gonna, again, miss opportunities.
Things are gonna stop working, but the problem is that when we believe that, then we're in constant urgency where there's no time to think we are reacting to everything. So we become really good at putting off fires. But therefore, we're always having fires, and then chaos becomes the norm.
I go into so many businesses that I see it from the beginning that chaos is the norm. Being in this urgency mode is how they operate. But often that will get in the way of long-term growth.
And the last one, is when we attach our value to our productivity, where we attach our value to the outcomes, but not necessarily the long-term outcomes, but having this output every day.
And this can lead to things such as. You know this need to prove ourself to our clients or to the board by overdelivering, by taking on too much, by not setting boundaries, by not pushing back. And similar to the other ones, what we create is exhaustion. We allow clients to scope creep to ask for more than they're paying for,
many times what happens is we end up resenting. We end up resenting our clients. We end up resenting our work. I have a client who I've been working with now for a little bit, and when she first came to me, she had a very successful business that she did not like. And it wasn't because she didn't like the core of the work she does, but it was because she hadn't been setting boundaries and she was now resenting her clients, resenting her employees, resenting the business itself.
And she thought the fault was in others until she started realizing that it was her allowing them to take on her time because she needed to prove herself that it was creating this dynamic. There's a lot more and if you're one of my clients or you want coaching with me, we can go deeper into this because I think once you understand how you think, once you understand what are your beliefs and how they're creating the results in terms of how you manage your time, how you.
Decide on what to do every day, and you, you make that click, then you can start creating different beliefs that are more sustainable, that are driving you to the goals that you wanna achieve to the life you wanna live. But we're gonna have to go through this process of challenging these beliefs that sometimes we got them since we were very little, or because the culture and everyone around us believes them.
So we think we have to believe the same. And I think the beautiful thing about coaching is that. We understand that because even if the entire world believes something, we don't have to believe the same. And we get to create our business and our life on our own terms.
Okay, so like I said, I want to do these two episodes. This first one I went. Deeper into clarity and intentionality, because also when I read a lot of books about time management, I feel like we don't talk about this part enough about really taking responsibility for our entire view and how we use our time by taking responsibility for the trade offs we need to make.
So here's your homework. If you wanna be doing this work with me. Like I said, I wanted this call to feel like coaching for you and it's one, understand what your goals are, what your values are, what your zone of genius is, what is essential for your business, and what are the beliefs that are currently creating the results in time management.
In your day to day. And as always, if you are listening to this and it's resonating with you and you're thinking to yourself. Oh my gosh. I really need to go deeper into time management.
I want a coach to help me operate and manage my time, like the CEOI wanna be the CEO I'm becoming. I invite you to book time with me and we can talk about how I can serve you, how I can help you accomplish your goals.
The link to my calendar is in the description of the episode, and I would be more than happy to spend an entire hour with you talking about time management and how I can serve you. All right? So stay tuned. Remember next episode, we're gonna continue this conversation. We're gonna be talking about the math challenge and the emotional challenge that come with managing your time. All right, see you next time. Bye.
If you're currently pursuing a big, bold idea and would love some support, let's talk. In my coaching program, I'll teach you how to manage yourself, your own thoughts and emotions. as well as your team and your money so you can turn your beautiful idea into a reality. Go now to carozuleta.com slash consult that is c a r o z u l e t a dot com slash consult and complete the form to book a complimentary call with me.
See you there!
