Picture this: You're closing up the bar after another hectic day, already dreading tomorrow's to-do list. What if I told you that with a few clever tweaks to your routine, you could greet the dawn with confidence instead of chaos? Today, we peel back the curtain on the art of advance planning to help prioritize your daily tasks.
Now, let's talk pressing priorities. Ever wondered how to distinguish between the 'must-dos' and the 'can-waits'? I'll break down the task prioritization system that can revolutionize your workflow, ensuring you're always on top of the urgent and important, while adeptly delegating the rest. And here's a golden nugget: the tasks that someone else can handle at least 70% as well as you can be your ticket to reclaiming valuable time. It's all about optimizing your focus for the aspects of your business that truly need your magic touch.
Finally, we can all agree that even the most well-oiled machines need a break sometimes. That's why I stress the vital role of downtime. Your bar thrives when you do, and that means taking a step back is not just recommended—it's essential. I share experiences and insights on how regular breaks from work can actually sharpen decision-making and boost productivity. So, if you've been wearing your overwork badge with misplaced pride, this episode is your wake-up call. Pour yourself a cold one, take a seat, and let's transform how you navigate the bustling nightlife landscape with grace and efficiency.
##### Welcome to the Bar Business Podcast, the ultimate resource for bar owners looking to elevate their businesses to the next level. Our podcast is packed with valuable insights, expert advice, and inspiring stories from successful bar owners and industry professionals. Tune in to learn everything from how to craft the perfect cocktail menu to how to manage your staff effectively. Our mission is to help you thrive in the competitive bar industry and achieve your business goals.
Special thank you to our benchmarking data partner Starfish. Starfish works with your bookkeeping software by using AI to help you make smart data-driven decisions and maximize your profits while giving you benchmarking data to understand how you compare to the industry at large.
Picture this: You're closing up the bar after another hectic day, already dreading tomorrow's to-do list. What if I told you that with a few clever tweaks to your routine, you could greet the dawn with confidence instead of chaos? Today, we peel back the curtain on the art of advance planning to help prioritize your daily tasks.
Now, let's talk pressing priorities. Ever wondered how to distinguish between the 'must-dos' and the 'can-waits'? I'll break down the task prioritization system that can revolutionize your workflow, ensuring you're always on top of the urgent and important, while adeptly delegating the rest. And here's a golden nugget: the tasks that someone else can handle at least 70% as well as you can be your ticket to reclaiming valuable time. It's all about optimizing your focus for the aspects of your business that truly need your magic touch.
Finally, we can all agree that even the most well-oiled machines need a break sometimes. That's why I stress the vital role of downtime. Your bar thrives when you do, and that means taking a step back is not just recommended—it's essential. I share experiences and insights on how regular breaks from work can actually sharpen decision-making and boost productivity. So, if you've been wearing your overwork badge with misplaced pride, this episode is your wake-up call. Pour yourself a cold one, take a seat, and let's transform how you navigate the bustling nightlife landscape with grace and efficiency.
##### Welcome to the Bar Business Podcast, the ultimate resource for bar owners looking to elevate their businesses to the next level. Our podcast is packed with valuable insights, expert advice, and inspiring stories from successful bar owners and industry professionals. Tune in to learn everything from how to craft the perfect cocktail menu to how to manage your staff effectively. Our mission is to help you thrive in the competitive bar industry and achieve your business goals.
Special thank you to our benchmarking data partner Starfish. Starfish works with your bookkeeping software by using AI to help you make smart data-driven decisions and maximize your profits while giving you benchmarking data to understand how you compare to the industry at large.
You're listening to the Bar Business Podcast where every week, your host, chris Schneider, brings you information, strategies and news on the bar industry, giving you the competitive edge you need to start working on your bar rather than in your bar.
Chris Schneider:
Hello and welcome to this week's edition of the Bar Business Podcast, your ultimate resource for bar owners. I'm your host, chris Schneider, and in today's episode we're going to talk all about ways to maximize your time. In the last few weeks, we've really been talking a lot about finances, bookkeeping, that sort of thing, and so I wanted to mix it up a little bit here and spend some time talking about time management and, specifically, we're going to delve into five different ways that you can maximize your time, and time management I think is something that those of us that have owned bars or do own bars always have some issues with. There's so many things going on and if you're like me, I have honestly bad ADHD that sort of things going on left and right. The constant hustle and bustle of the bar industry is a very appealing thing, but when we're constantly getting pulled left and right, what we aren't doing is managing our time well, and frequently I'll hear bar owners say things like I'm too busy, I don't have enough time and I hate to tell all of you that, because I used to say these things too, that's just straight bullshit Because I'm too busy and I don't have enough time. What that really means, what we're really getting to there is that you don't have the right strategies in place to get more done in less time, and that's the bottom line when it comes to time management. You always have the time to get things done, you just aren't properly focused, and that can be a harsh reality to understand, and that's something none of us probably will ever be perfect at. I can tell you right now, with everything that I do, I get pulled in the wrong direction a lot, and there are things that don't get done because, I quote, don't have the time. But really what happened was I managed my time poorly.
Chris Schneider:
So we're going to go through five ways or five strategies to help you manage your time, and the first one we're going to talk about is plan your next day the day before, which is huge, and I know it sounds minuscule, but it's a big thing. The second thing we're going to get into is a concept I took from Brian Tracy the ABCDE system of organizing your day. The third time management strategy we're going to talk about is when you should do your most important tasks, how to organize your day in that way to make sure that the hard stuff actually gets done and that you can't procrastinate around it. The fourth strategy we're going to talk about is actually turning your time management into a game and gamifying it, because I don't know about you guys, but games in particular, I think, for those of us with ADHD make things a lot easier and a lot better when it comes to time management. And then, finally, the fifth strategy we're going to talk about is actually giving yourself time to recharge. Sometimes, the best way to save your time is to actually not work some of the time, as odd as that sounds. So we'll dive into these five strategies and hopefully this helps you manage your day better, because, like I said, I don't know a single bar owner, for that matter, I don't know any business owners that are not guilty of poor time management from time to time, but most of the time when we don't have time to do something, we're too busy to do something. It's not a function of the fact that we're actually that busy or that we actually don't have the time. It's a function of not using proper time management and putting in place the right strategies to make sure that you have successful time management for yourself in running your business.
Chris Schneider:
So, as I mentioned, the first strategy we're going to dive into today is to plan your next day the day before, and that seems counterintuitive A lot of us. We get into work and one of the first things we do is we jot down what we need to do for that day and then we kind of make a checklist and we go through it. The thing is that oftentimes you leave work at night, and especially if you're working a closed bar shift, you know, leave work at night. That could be 2, 3, 4 o'clock, 5 o'clock in the morning, and so you leave work, you're tired, you go to sleep, you wake up, you go back into work. I think for most bar owners, it's fair to say that at least two or three nights a week we're leaving work, going to sleep, waking up and going back into work, and there's no real time in there to do anything besides work, sleep, work. And so what happens is when we go into work that next day and then we figure out what we're doing. Well, maybe we have or have not had enough sleep, maybe there has been other things on your mind, there's family issues, there's things that you interacted with at home, you got the mail and you got a letter from the IRS.
Chris Schneider:
Whatever is going on, and that extra noise that gets injected between when you leave work and when you get back to work actually hurts your short-term memory of what you were doing at work. You remember less of what you did. You remember less of the things in your head that you said, hey, I want to do this tomorrow. So if, at the end of the day, you write your task list for the next day, your brain is still in that work mode. You haven't gone from work to home and now back to work and lost some of that work thought process, and that way you're less likely to forget important tasks that need to be worked on the next day. Now, the other thing that this does for you is it gives your mind time to process and consider your tasks for the next day.
Chris Schneider:
So something I've talked about many times and then I'm a firm believer in is that one of the most important things you can do every day is think, because when you give your brain time to sit and think and ruminate through things, you are processing those, you're coming up with strategies for those. Even if you're not writing it down, even if you're just talking to yourself in your car ride to and from work, you are thinking through that body of work and you're strategizing and you're collecting your thoughts when you write down what you're going to do the next day, the day before, you have all that time going home while you're asleep, because your brain still works when you're asleep. When you wake up in the morning, you have all that time that your brain is slowly thinking through those things. Now, sometimes this is consciously, sometimes this is subconsciously, but almost all the time you're going to produce better work and have a better result because you've had time to think through this work again, whether you're aware of it or not. So a huge, hugely important strategy Write down your task list for the next day, the day before.
Chris Schneider:
And that takes us to the second time management strategy. We have the ABCDE system, and this I stole from Brian Tracy, who, if you have not read Brian Tracy's books and you're looking for time management and motivation and a whole host of other things, mix them with some really good knowledge. His books are fantastic and I highly recommend listening to him, but one of the things that he talks about in many of his books is how to rate your tasks for the day, how to define what's important to you, and he does that by assigning each task an A, a, b, a C, a D or an E. So if we've written our task list for the next day the night before, then one of our first tasks when we get in is to rate those items on our list and essentially, a, b, c, d and E all stand for different things in the system. So A is going to be urgent and important. B is important but not urgent. C is something that's nice if it happens, but is neither urgent nor that's nice if it happens, but is neither urgent nor important. So if it doesn't happen today, nothing really changes. Maybe it needs to happen the next month. So it's not urgent and important today, but it will become urgent and important in the future. D is a task that you can delegate and E is a task of little or no value that you can eliminate. It's something you don't actually need to do.
Chris Schneider:
So let's go through these one by one and I want to help you guys, give you guys some examples of how you may rate tasks. So, like I said, a is going to be urgent and important. These are the most important things you have to do that day. They're the things that, if they don't get done, there are bad results. That's what's making them urgent. Urgent means we have to do them today. Important means that they make a big impact on us.
Chris Schneider:
So what's an example of a task that could be both urgent and important? Well, maybe communication with your suppliers. If you have to make a schedule and you don't, for next week and the schedule isn't out yet and everyone expects a day, that's urgent and important. Maybe you have to do inventory, because it's the end of the week or the end of the month and inventory must happen today. That would be urgent and important. Maybe you've completed your fiscal week and you have to get your bookkeeping done because you're doing your bookkeeping yourself. That would be urgent and important.
Chris Schneider:
But an urgent and important task is something that you must do today and that, if you don't do, there are severe ramifications for it. So those are going to be everything labeled A, then our B tasks important but not urgent. So an important but not urgent task could be you need to develop a new training system. It's very important that you train all your people properly, but, assuming that you're not currently hiring and you're not currently onboarding anybody into your bar, it's not necessarily urgent. Obviously, if you hire somebody today, tomorrow, that's going to be both important and urgent and move from a B to an A category item. But B are things that are important, that you must do, that are absolutely structurally required for your business to be successful, but that you do not have to do today. And that takes us to our C test. So C, like I said, is nice if it happens, but neither important or urgent.
Chris Schneider:
And there can be a few different reasons why something is neither important or urgent, different reasons why something is neither important or urgent. Maybe you need to inquire about a new product that you're thinking about getting in In the future. You're going to make a menu down the road and you're just interested in this new food product or this new alcohol and you want to talk to your rep and learn more about it. When I say not important, it doesn't mean that these aren't things that impact your business potentially, but if you don't do them, there's no immediate issue, right? So when we're talking about something that's important, like inventory, if you don't do inventory, you don't know your costs, you don't know what to order. It screws up your business and if it's your inventory day, it's definitely urgent. Well, we're talking about things that aren't important in that way but still make an impact on your business. And as far as urgency, it doesn't matter if it happens today, tomorrow or next week. So, like I said, investigating some new liquors that your liquor rep has brought to you, some different offerings maybe that you're going to bring in the future, it's important for your business, but it's not deathly important that it happens. You can keep selling what you sell. It's not particularly urgent, because if you do it today, if you do it tomorrow, if you do it next week, it's not going to make a difference.
Chris Schneider:
Now that takes us to our D tasks, and this is where bar owners, frankly and I'm just as guilty as this as everyone else this is where the most difficulty is. D is a task that you can delegate, and so when I say a task that you can delegate, I can already hear you guys yelling at the podcast and saying everything I do, only I can do and no one else is going to do it as well as I am. Well, you're probably right about the fact that no one else is going to do it as well as you are, but you're also probably wrong about the fact that no one else can do it. And when it comes to delegation, the way I always like to look at this, no one else can do it. And when it comes to delegation, the way I always like to look at this and this is straight from Brian Tracy as well, as he was laying out this system in his books you should delegate things that someone else can do 70% as well as you can.
Chris Schneider:
So you're not looking for perfection, you're not looking for it to be identical to how you would do it. You're looking for it to work. I mean, if you think about it, you're looking for it to work. I mean, if you think about it, school grades right, a, b, c, d, c meant average. It meant well, it's all right, it's passable. You understand the information, but you're not doing it eloquently. Maybe there's some minor mistakes in what you're saying. That's what a 70% is, and so if somebody can get a C at the work that you're doing, you should let them do it.
Chris Schneider:
And I hear more of you now yelling at the podcast saying, well, but if I do that, then I'm going to have to redo it. Well, maybe you are Quite. Frankly, you might, but the thing is that if someone gets you 70% of the way there. It shouldn't take you much time to get it 100% of the way to where you want it. When you delegate things, it doesn't mean necessarily that you just have to go with that final product. Now I will tell you right now most things that you think you can't delegate. You can, most things that you say well, if it's done 70% as well as I do it, it's not going to be good enough. It probably is good enough. It probably is.
Chris Schneider:
One of the things that happens as a business owner for all of us is we get very particular about what we do. We try to make everything perfect. We have our own ideas of what perfect is and I hate to tell you this, but most of the time your guests aren't going to notice if something's a little bit off and perfect. Now, if it's a food or a cocktail or something like that, yeah, you need to be consistent, you need to be damn near perfect every time. But if your chalkboard is 70% as nice as it would otherwise be, or if you had some marketing materials made for your table tents, for your internal marketing and it's not quite the way you would do it, but it gets the information across your guests probably won't notice, and so there are all sorts of things as bar owners that we can delegate, that we don't, because we don't think our team can do it the way we would, which they won't, and to us that's unacceptable. But seriously, if somebody can do something 70% as well as you, you should let them do it. And if you have to make some edits and some changes and some corrections to whatever it is after the fact, that's okay.
Chris Schneider:
Now, another place where 70% really doesn't work is inventory. Let's be honest here. If you're talking about delegating inventory, it needs to be perfect, because you're basing those counts on a lot, so you have to be smart about what hits the 70% threshold. But nine times out of 10, 70% is good enough. And the other piece here to remember is the whole idea that your employees will ever work as hard as you, that they'll ever care as much as you, that you'll hear people in business and whether it's bars or other businesses, you'll hear this a lot where they say you know, I hired all these people and they just don't have the same passion I do. They just don't have the same drive I do. Of course they don't. A they're being paid by the hour and their employees. B they have no skin in the game. If you close, they can go down the street and get another job you lost your house or whatever. And C they aren't the business owner. They didn't have this drive and passion in the first place to go out and buy a business, so they're never going to do as well as you. That's okay. You should not expect them to do as well as you, but you should understand where you can delegate, because delegation is the thing that will give you most of your time back and then after delegation. So we have A, b, c and D. E is the final letter in this system and E is a test that we can eliminate.
Chris Schneider:
So it's something with little or no value that you don't actually need to do. It's something that, if it happens or doesn't happen, the impact on your business is zero. If it happens or doesn't happen, the impact on your life is zero, and there are plenty of things we all do every day that we really don't need to do. An example of a task with little or no value that might be on your to-do list could be talking with the person in the strip mall next to you, or it could be. Hey, I really wanted to go have a conversation with this regular. Now, obviously, those are important, to have conversations with your regulars. But when we're talking about time management, these are things that if you do it, if you don't do it, it's not really going to make a difference and they're great to do.
Chris Schneider:
After you've finished all the tasks that are important for the day. You absolutely need to get done what's urgent and important and will impact your business, before you worry about those things that don't impact your business. And if something has no urgency to it, is not important, isn't really something you can delegate and is not providing any value for your business, it should not be on your to-do list for the day. Because ideally, what we're doing here is we're setting up a to-do list every day that you can achieve, and then you're done with work for that day, and whether that list takes you two hours or eight hours or 12 hours, that's the work to do for the day, and when you're done, you just move on and you can go do whatever you want, and so those E-tasks could fall in after that. But if you find yourself and there are bar owners that do this if you find yourself doing tasks that don't make a difference to your business, that aren't important, that aren't urgent, that really provide zero value to your team or your customers or your business. They shouldn't be on your to-do list. You should just eliminate those tasks to focus on what's important.
Chris Schneider:
Hey there, bar owners, it's Chris Schneider, the bar business coach. Are you tired of the daily grind and ready to skyrocket your profits? I've got the solution. With my coaching and consulting services, we deep dive into menu management, team empowerment and business optimization. Instead of slogging away in your business day in and day out, washing dishes, covering for employees and working 60 plus hours a week, picture this a thriving business that runs like clockwork, whether you're there or not, letting you enjoy the successes that you've dreamed of. Let's make it happen. Visit barbusinesscoachcom to schedule your free 30 minute strategy session with me, or you can book a session just by clicking the link in the show notes below. Together, we will turn your business into a profit powerhouse, because at the Bar Business Coach, our only goal is to help you spend less time working in your bar and more time working on your bar.
Chris Schneider:
Now our third time management strategy is to do the most important tasks first. Every day is to do the most important tasks first. Every day and a lot of us, we wake up in the morning and we have some coffee, we go in the bar, we maybe do some opening paperwork and then we're sitting there looking at what we have to do for the day and we all want to procrastinate the hard stuff and there are definitely things on that list that you do not want to do. But there are a few things here some of them scientific, some of them specifically the bar industry that absolutely mean that your day should start with your most important tasks. If you've rated all your tasks in that A, b, c, d, e system, do A's first, then do B's, then do C's, and here's the reasoning behind that. Here's the reasoning behind that For most bar owners you're coming in before. If you're serving lunch, you're coming in a couple hours before lunch, maybe three hours before lunch really hits. If you're just doing evening service, you're coming in sometime in the afternoon when it's pretty much dead and regardless, the first couple hours you're there every day. You're probably not even open. So you have the opportunity to work without the distraction, without the customers and the team pulling you in these different directions to go deal with issues.
Chris Schneider:
You also, at the beginning of the day, have more brain power, and I know a lot of us like to say that we're night owls and we think better at night, and that, to an extent, is true, but science has shown that you actually think better in the morning, you consider your decisions more carefully, you think more critically and that as you go through your day, you get a little sloppier with your decision making. Now, part of that is that I forget the exact number, but we make something like 35,000 different decisions on a daily basis and that's everything from you know, do I scratch my nose? Do I not scratch my nose To? Should I sell my bar? Should I not sell my bar? All of these are decisions and we make them all in a day, and your brain really is like any other muscle in your body. I know your brain's not a muscle, but it's like a muscle. The more you use it it's going to get tired, and as you go through making all those decisions, the more you've made, the less you really think about them, the less focus you have on the last time and thought you put in about. So your decision capacity, your ability to make a good decision, is only so much in a day, and in the morning, statistically, you're going to make better decisions. So when I say morning, that could be 2 pm in the bar business, that could be 9 am in the bar business. But when you get into work, that first start of your day period is when you should focus on doing all of your urgent and important tasks because, a you're going to do them better. B it's probably a quieter time of day for you because you're not into dinner, you're not into late night, you're not in those time periods that are going to be difficult, but, moreover than that, your brain is just better at doing things.
Chris Schneider:
Now, with the decision capacity, with the fact that we all can only make so many decisions in a day and that there are effects on our ability, our cognitive ability, as the day goes on and we get more tired, and effects on our decision-making ability, one thing you don't want to do is have too many tasks in a day that are both urgent and important. Now, if every night you're writing out your tasks for the next day, if every morning you're organizing those tasks and saying what's urgent and important and what's not urgent and important, frankly there shouldn't be all that much every day. That is a must happen. That is going to absolutely screw you in your business if you don't get it done. If there is, you have to deal with that.
Chris Schneider:
But ideally you want to limit those A-level tasks for your day the things that are urgent and important, that are going to require work and effort and thought to know more than three of those per day. Three big items a day. If you do three big things a day, your brain has plenty of time and ability to focus on them. If you start stretching that to five, six, seven, eight things, your brain's going to get more tired. You've already made a lot of decisions and your thinking gets more sloppy. So try to stick with three a tasks every day and you will make better decisions. You will have a better thought process about those tasks.
Chris Schneider:
Now that takes us to our fourth time management strategy, which this is something I kind of came up with on my own and, honestly, I kind of got this idea from watching a video on Facebook where some British guy was talking about how Americans, when we drive somewhere, you put your destination in your GPS and for most of us our goal is to beat the GPS time. So if it says it's going to take me 25 minutes to get there, can I get there in 24? But again, can I get there in 20? And so we constantly kind of have this race with ourselves to see if we can be more productive in a span of time. And as someone with ADHD, I know when I gamify things I focus more, I work harder, I'm less distracted by what's around me.
Chris Schneider:
So one thing I like to do and I do with a lot of tasks, like even making this podcast I have all this figured out for the podcast, so I can kind of gamify it with myself is that I measure the time it takes to do tasks that I routinely do. So using this podcast as example, my episodes are between 30 and 40 minutes. It takes me about 30 or 40 minutes generally to edit them, sometimes 50, and then produce clips and upload them and schedule all the social media and all that all in my times at about four hours. So I know that time is four hours, I know how much time the task should take because I measure it, I collect that data and I understand it and then my whole goal becomes. Sometimes I just want to beat myself. My goal is can I get this done quickly? Can I? Can I produce great results faster than I normally do? And, frankly, even if I'm not necessarily faster, knowing that on average, a complete podcast takes me about three and a half hours from when I start the recording to when I have all my social media scheduled and everything else, it gives me motivation. It makes me want to get it done in that three and a half hours. Sometimes it takes four hours and I understand that. Sometimes it takes four hours and I understand that. But it helps you focus when you have a goal and a game, especially with ADHD, at least in my experience. I'm not a doctor, but I'm fully able to tell you what works for me. But it makes it a game and when you beat yourself or focus on beating yourself, you can maintain accuracy, maintain speed and really have more motivation and deal with less distractions around you.
Chris Schneider:
Now our fifth time management strategy is that you need sufficient time to recharge, and what I mean by that. So when we're talking about doing your important tasks first, one of the things I mentioned there's a lot of data out there. There's a lot of studies that say, hey, you only make so many decisions in a day. At some point, the more decisions you make, your brain gets tired. Well, that's true day in and day out. And, yes, you sleep, you recharge, you're back at work, but that's also assuming you get a full night's sleep.
Chris Schneider:
I don't know many bar owners that actually do get a full night's sleep. You know, when I say full night, I mean eight hours. I don't know how many people that are getting eight hours of sleep a night in the bar. Now, I'm sure some of us are, but a lot of us aren't and a lot of us have a tendency, and it's a bar business thing. You know, you're working six days a week. You're working seven days a week. You're even if you're not working. You're working five days a week, but the other two days that you're off you stop by the bar and you check things out and you talk to some regulars and you just kind of hobnob around and schmooze for a little bit. What's happening is your brain is constantly running, you're constantly focused on this bar and you're not separating yourself from it, you're not giving yourself time to think and you're too stressed and you're too tired and because of that, in the long run, your ability to problem solve, your ability to think critically. All of that suffers. So it becomes very important that you give yourself breaks.
Chris Schneider:
Now, something I did the whole time I had a bar was that I refused to work Sundays. I'm not a religious person. Sunday just made sense. It was a slow day. Nothing really happened on Sundays at the bar, so Sundays were the day that I always religiously took off and it didn't matter what happened. My managers knew that you only call me if the building's on fire. Now they did call me once on a. Call me if the building's on fire. Now they did call me once on a Sunday because literally the roof caved in and it was not a great situation. So I went up for that. But generally speaking, I would never work on a Sunday because I needed that day to reset my brain, to relax, to not focus on work but to focus on myself, doing things around my house, taking care of myself and enjoying time with friends and family, and just not working, so that when I went back in on Monday my brain was sharp, I was ready to go again. Now that's true in a week.
Chris Schneider:
You need, in my opinion, every bar owner, you should be giving yourself a day a week that you don't think about the bar, but every once in a while you're going to need more than that. You need to take a vacation. Sometimes. If you work 52 weeks out of the year, you're probably less effective than if you work 50 weeks out of the year. Not only does that time away give your brain time to get off of that subject, for you to decompress, for you to just not think about the bar for a little bit and when I say for a little bit, I mean hell. If you don't think about your bar for an hour, you're winning, because every day you're on vacation, you're going to think about some, you're going to call some, there's going to be some work involved there. But if you can give yourself four or five hours a day not to think about the bar, you're winning. So take that week vacation once or twice a year. Take a day, a week off, Take some long weekends sometimes.
Chris Schneider:
But you need to focus yourself, you need to recharge yourself, because I can tell you from my own experience and from plenty of books and reading and going through data that's available when you're stressed, when you're tired, you're not going to make great decisions. So you have to give yourself sufficient time to recharge in order to manage your time well, because when you get stressed and overworked and tired, you just run around in circles. You're not actually doing anything productive, you're just busy, and that goes back to where we started, right, saying I'm too busy, saying that I don't have enough time, is BS, because you do, and what you're doing is you're using your time ineffectively, and so part of being able to use your time effectively is making sure you give yourself time off to recharge and recuperate from the work that you've been doing. So I know this has been a bit of a different type of episode. We're not talking straight numbers today, we're not talking anything like that, but I think, frankly, making sure that you plan your time well, doing good time management and all of that is essential. It's absolutely imperative to being able to make money in the bar business, because if you're not thinking properly, if you're not making great decisions, if you don't have a structured way to attack everything that needs to get done, things will fall through the cracks, things won't get done, poor decisions will be made and you won't make less money. It's just how it works and, like I said, this is true in bars, but this is true in every business. It's just how it works and, like I said, this is true in bars, but this is true in every business. It's really true everything in life. You have to manage your time well in order to produce great results. And one thing I will leave you with here before we go I was reading something the other day about I was looking at how much time people actually spend working, and so let's think about your average office employee that works a nine to five 40 hours a week.
Chris Schneider:
They spend something like 15 or 20 hours of their week getting water, having lunch, talking to coworkers, not actually producing anything. So the average person in the world or in the US, I should say does about 20, maybe 25 hours a week of real work. And yet entire companies are built on the backs of people doing 20, 25 hours a week of real work, and huge, giant companies that are very productive, that do great things for the world and that produce great products and have great customers. Most bar owners are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and I bet you I'd bet good money they aren't putting in 40 productive hours in a week. So they're less productive per hour, per unit of time, than your average office employee because at least that average office employee is doing productive work half the time. Your average office employee, because at least that average office employee is doing productive work half the time. I think for a lot of bar owners we work 80 and we're productive for 30.
Chris Schneider:
When you put in place time management programs, when you rate what you're going to do, when you plan out your day, when you realize what's important and focus on that to start every day, what ends up happening is your former 80 hours of running around turns into 30 hours of really good work, or even 25 hours of really good work, which means that you're out working most people in the world and you get that 25 hours done quick. You get that 30 hours done quick. You now have, if you were working 80 hours, to do 30 hours of work and now you're focusing so that you get 30 hours of work done in 30 hours done quick. You now have, if you were working 80 hours, to do 30 hours of work and now you're focusing so that you get 30 hours of work done in 30 hours. You have 50 hours. You can spend that with your family, with your friends. You can go to the park, you can schmooze your guests. You can grow your business. You can work on new strategic partnerships, talk to more people, network more so you can do work-like things there. But the only way to free yourself up is to spend the time and the effort to get what you need to do every day organized and to really master your time. So that about wraps us up for today.
Chris Schneider:
If you enjoyed the insights, make sure to like, subscribe and leave a review. If you want to gain more insights, join our Bar Business Nation Facebook group. If you want to gain more insights, join our bar business nation Facebook group. Uh, we're having some great conversations. There are a lot of stuff going on there.
Chris Schneider:
It's a wonderful resource for bar owners. Highly encourage you to join, ask questions, interact with me, with everyone else that's in that community, cause we have some great consultants in there. We have some great bar owners in there. We have people looking to get in the bar business there. We have managers a wonderful cross section of people that really run bars and work in and around bars, that have some wonderful insights into different things. And, if you want to work with me, if you're interested in learning more about like what I do on the consulting end, which is mostly financial, but we can also talk about time management. There's a link in the show notes below to go ahead and schedule a strategy session with me and with that guys. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your week and we will talk again later.
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