Introduction:

Hey Restaurant Owners! In today’s video I’m teaching you how to get 30 minutes, an hour or even two hours back in your week so you can work on the things you love to do, or even enjoy a little more freedom in your life. I call this process taking an “activity inventory.”

When I got into the restaurant business, I was a chef. I loved cooking and thought I could simply partner up with someone, open up a restaurant, and I would just get to cook all day. But probably like you are finding, this was not the case. I found myself doing administration tasks and dealing with people a lot more than I wanted to. I was dealing with customers, with marketing, and doing all kinds of things that we knew we would be doing, but didn’t really know we’d be doing as much as we were.

Whatever the reasons you got into the restaurant business, chances are you’re not doing as much of what you love because you’re doing all these other things. You’re probably getting frustrated because you really want to delegate these tasks to other people, so you hire managers to help you. But when you give them tasks, they come back to you either not done or not done right. Now you find yourself following up with them all day long.

The reason things aren’t getting done for you and your business is because you’re the bottleneck. What I mean by this is that everything has to go through you. Almost every decision, new process or procedure, menu change, marketing, administration task or every fire – you’re the only one who knows how to do it. You haven’t systemized your processes.

The Activity Inventory:

What I want to talk to you about is something call the “activity inventory.” When I learned how to do this, it really freed up a lot of time for me. Remember: in this world you share one thing with everybody in the world no matter what, from the wealthiest people in the world to the poorest to everyone in the middle, we all have the exact same amount of time.

How do some people get so much more done with their time than others? It’s simple – they control their calendar vs. letting it control them. The activity inventory is simply going through your day and writing down all of the things (tasks) you do. This may sound daunting and overwhelming, so I don’t want you to spend a full week writing everything down because that list would just pile up and get huge. All I want you to do is go through your day and find one thing that you wish you didn’t have to do that someone else could instead. Then create a very simple system and document the process around that task.

We’re not going to get into the fine details, but please offload just one 30-minute task this week. It should be one thing that you do every week that takes you 20 or 30 minutes to complete. Take the time to document the task, write down the process, train someone else how to do it, and then remove yourself from that process. Next week repeat this process with one task and then the following week do it again, etc.

Final Thoughts:

So many times we get frustrated and we think, “My gosh, I am never gonna get any freedom, or be able to take any time off.” It’s because you’re looking at it as this huge thing. But when you start inventorying your tasks and start looking at the things that you’re doing, it’s really a 15 minute task here, 10 minutes there, 20 here, etc. It’s not a whole six hours, but rather six hours that’s made up of different 5, 10, 15, 20 minute tasks.

When you free 30 minutes one week, 20 minutes the next, and so on, after a month or two, you’ve got 2, 3, or 4 extra hours in your week! This is where the magic in your business can really start to happen. The point where you can sit down and really concentrate on getting something big done. I hope you enjoyed this week’s tip!