Reclaim Your Time: How One Small Shift Can Unlock Big Results

When I was in college, I worked on dorm staff, and before the school year started, we all sat through a week of trainings and team-building exercises.

One speaker stood out.

He worked in administration and had survived a serious battle with brain cancer. During treatment, doctors had removed a section of his brain about the size of a grapefruit. He told us about another patient he met in therapy, a man who’d been given just three months to live.

That man became obsessed with prioritizing his time. Not in some vague, “make every moment count” way. Literally. If a discussion felt like it wasn’t worth the precious minutes he had left, he’d walk away. Mid-sentence. No explanation. Nothing. He’d just bounce.

He didn’t apologize. He didn’t linger. He simply reclaimed his time.

And while that might sound extreme, I think about it often.

Because the truth is most of us have more time than we think, but we’re giving it away too easily.

And if you followed the news in the last decade, you might remember Representative Maxine Waters doing exactly the same thing. “Reclaiming my time,” she said, again and again. Calm. Unapologetic.

You deserve to reclaim your time too.

Not because you’re in crisis.

But because your best hours are too valuable to waste.

High-Value Time, By Design

Reclaiming your time isn’t about working fewer hours, although it can be. It’s about making sure your best hours are spent on the work that matters most.

For many business owners, the issue isn’t productivity, it’s proximity. Their time is too close to the day-to-day, spread thin across tasks they never meant to hold onto. Legacy responsibilities. Old habits. Obligations they could hand off or automate, but haven’t.

Reclaiming your time means identifying the tasks that drain your energy or pull you away from high-leverage work and buying them back. Not necessarily with money. Sometimes with help. Sometimes with systems. Sometimes with better boundaries.

Your job isn’t to do everything. It’s to focus on the things only you can do; the ones that create the most value, build momentum, and move the business forward.

This isn’t about time management. It’s about leverage. About priorities. About deliberately designing your week around the things that make your business stronger and your role more valuable and productive.

A fictional example

Meet Rachel. She runs a boutique creative agency with a small team and a strong reputation. Her clients love her work, her referral network is thriving, and the business is on an enviable trajectory.

The problem was time, or lack thereof.

Rachel still managed all client onboarding herself. She reviewed every brief, followed up on missing assets, scheduled every kickoff call, and sent every final invoice. Everyone on her team looked to her for guidance. She was constantly busy. Constantly behind. And constantly frustrated that the strategic projects she wanted to pursue, like developing a new service line or nurturing a referral network, kept falling to the bottom of her list.

So she stepped back and made a list of everything she did in a typical week. Not just the big stuff. The little things as well. They all added up. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was honest.

Then she asked questions about everything on the list:

1. Is this the best use of my time?
2. Is this something I’m uniquely skilled to do?
3. Does this give me energy and help the business grow?
4. Am I the only person who can do it?

If the answer to any of them was no, it got flagged.

She brought on a part-time assistant to take over scheduling and administrative follow-up. She templatized her onboarding and handoff emails. And she blocked time every week for uninterrupted strategic work. No calls, no meetings, no exceptions.

Within two months, she had scoped a new creative service she’d been thinking about for over a year. By month four, she’d launched it, booked her first three clients, and recouped the assistant’s salary.

What changed wasn’t the number of hours she worked.

It was where those hours went.

The math

Let’s say your business brings in $1 million a year. That’s around $83,000 a month.

If you reclaimed just eight hours a week, about one full workday, that gives you 400 hours a year to work with. This is a very conservative estimate, and even if only half of that time goes toward focused, strategic work, that’s still 200 hours redirected toward growth.

Time spent on building a new offer, strengthening referral relationships, or mapping a new marketing strategy. Not the stuff that keeps the business running… the work that helps it thrive.

If those hours contribute even $150 an hour in value, which is also incredibly conservative for most professional service businesses, that’s $30,000. And if that time leads to three new clients, or a retainer offer that finally gets launched, the upside could be much greater.

But the real value isn’t just in what gets added. It’s also in what gets protected.

You make clearer decisions. You show up better for clients. You catch small issues before they become expensive ones. And you start working from a place of intention rather than exhaustion.

This isn’t about trying to work less. It’s about reclaiming the time that makes your business run better, and more profitably, in the process.

What about you?

Think about the last week. What did you spend time on that left you drained instead of energized? What tasks felt necessary but didn’t move the business forward? What work got done at the expense of the work only you can do?

You don’t have to overhaul your calendar overnight. Start smaller.

Pick one task that doesn’t need to be yours. Maybe it’s scheduling. Maybe it’s email follow-ups. Maybe it’s that weekly report you still write by hand because “it’s faster that way.”

Ask yourself:

• Is this the best use of my time?
• Is this something I’m uniquely skilled to do?
• Does this give me energy and help the business grow?

If the answer is no… flag it.

Then reclaim one hour this week. One hour to think, plan, create, or focus without multitasking, without interruptions, and without guilt.

Small shifts add up. This is where you start.

A final thought.

You don’t have to reclaim every lost hour right away. But you do need a plan. And a starting point.

If you’d like help identifying where your time is quietly (or noisily) disappearing to, or how to shift more of it into high-leverage, high-value work, let’s do a quick Strategy Session.

It’s free. It’s simple. And in about twenty minutes, we’ll spot one or two places where a small change could free up time and turn it into real momentum. A smarter way to get your time working for you again.