Time Management In Construction: How To 10x Your Productivity

Are you spending your time working IN your building company, fighting fires, chasing cash-flow and dealing with tasks that keep you from working ON your business?

What if you could eliminate all of the stress and overwhelm by simply focusing on the activities that give you the biggest return on your most valuable resource….your time?

Working on your business would allow you to grow your building company safely and securely while avoiding the need to spend your evenings and weekends quoting jobs, returning calls from subcontractors, or holding meetings with clients. 

If you are taking on more work, or even if you are planning to take on more work in the future and you do not regularly eliminate some of the tasks you are currently doing, then you’ll always be doing low-value tasks that will permanently block your company's ability to grow.

That means you’ll be constantly hitting a glass ceiling, unable to take your business to the next stage. 

Rocks, Pebbles, Sand

I’m not talking about different types of beaches…

The concept of a “Rock” comes from a book called First Things First by Stephen Covey.

To understand the concept of Rocks, start by thinking about every second, minute, or hour you have available during a workday being contained within a glass cylinder. The cylinder is empty at the start of the day, but beside it, you have the option of filling up the empty space with rocks, pebbles, and sand.

Your rocks are your biggest and most important priorities that span weeks and months of committed work. The pebbles are your important day-to-day responsibilities. While the sand represents everything else - all of the small unimportant tasks that interrupt your productivity.

Most building company owners focus on far too many things at once. They create a lengthy list of objectives and do all of them at a mediocre level. They fill up the cylinder with sand first, then pebbles, and end up having no room left for the most important priorities in their business, the rocks!

Professional builders approach things a little differently. They put their rocks in the cylinder first every day. They focus on those medium-term goals that will move the company toward its vision and help them achieve their aspirations.

Start with your rocks every day, then worry about the pebbles. Forget or delegate the sand!

Delete - Automate - Delegate

Once you are clear on your most important focus areas, your rocks, we recommend using a simple Delete, Automate, Delegate approach to productivity.

The idea is that you create a master list of all your tasks and ruthlessly delete those that don’t contribute to your rocks and vision, automate those that you can with software, and delegate many of the rest to other skilled people on your team or from outsourced partners.

Once you do this, you’ll know how to value your time and decide which tasks should be delegated.

You’ll be able to easily identify where your time goes each day.

You will have the exact formula for identifying which tasks you should and should not be working on.

The best part is that this is a proven and repeatable process that can be followed by each of your team members to improve their own productivity!

Time Management In Construction: Case Study

To illustrate how powerful this process can be, let me tell you a story about APB Business Coaching clients, Gary and Carrie (names changed for privacy reasons).

Gary and Carrie run a custom home-building company that focuses on upper-end projects with beautiful finishes. They deliver first-class workmanship by employing staff internally and obsessing about quality control. 

Their biggest problem was that when they onboarded a new team member, they needed rigorous training to uphold the levels of quality their clients had come to expect. Gary has the technical skills to teach that level of craftsmanship, but he didn't have time to do the work, run the business, and invest the time required into training new team members. 

This led to mistakes, delays, and redos, all of which were eroding margins and frustrating Gary and Carrie. Gary would end up doing most of the work himself because he didn’t trust the delegation process.

As an APB protocol, our coaches continuously work with clients to help them delegate the things that they are not good at, don't like doing, don't have time for, or are better suited to other people. 

In this example, our APB Executive Coach helped Gary understand the importance of delegation and trusting the process. They then identified an APB Rewards Partner, MT Copeland, to step in and both systemise and deliver the training process. 

Having MT Copeland run technical training freed up time for Gary and his main project manager and helped them uphold the high standards of craftsmanship expected by their clients.

Gary is now able to devote the time he was spending on fixing problems to running the business as a whole more efficiently, and they are seeing a steady improvement in margins as a result.

Want to take your time management to the next level and 10x your productivity? Book a call with a construction industry expert from the button below.