More Than WE Know

In last week’s post I wrote about how I don’t want to work a four hour work week.  I’d rather have a business that I enjoyed so much, any thought of time simply disappeared, so that forty hours felt like four.

Later last week I met with a client who was in exactly that position.  Her business was so enjoyable that it was consuming every waking moment.  It was interfering with her ability to spend time with her family and on her hobbies. 

She had intentionally left the corporate world because she wanted more flexibility in her schedule. And now here she was in her own business, recreating the same kind of crazy schedule herself.

On the surface this appears to be a simple time management issue - reschedule priorities, delegate, delay, delete tasks, until everything fits within the time available.

But after we spent some time digging deeper, we realized that this issue was not just about learning to schedule time more effectively - it was about fear and self-confidence.

When my client was first starting her business, she felt she needed to always be available. She was in such a hurry to fill her client roster, that she agreed to appointments at any time regardless of what it meant to her personal life.

This might have been appropriate in the first few months of building her business, but it is not a sustainable practice.

In order to build the life she wanted, she was going to have to learn to say no to some opportunities.  And she was going to have to have confidence that her prospective clients would still want her services even if she were not always available.

Limiting your availablity has many of the same fears and issues associated with it as does asking for more money. 

Setting boundaries is difficult for many Women Entrepreneurs.  Many times one of our main motivations to go into business is to help other people. So limiting our availability or asking for more money both feel uncomfortable and selfish.

It’s important to remember that you are building a business that must meet your needs as well as your customers.  If you don’t create practices that are sustainable financially, physically and emotionally, you won’t be around long enough to help any customers. 

After some further consideration, my client came up with a “work schedule” that felt right to her. It allowed her to take her children to school and be home when they got home. It allowed her to see clients or attend networking events two nights per week and to work from home one night per week. But it kept her Wednesdays, Fridays and weekends free. 

It was great to see her physically relax as she set boundaries to safeguard her time and health.

As we worked through her schedule she began to realize that many of her clients probably could accomodate her new schedule.  They might have preferred their old time slots, but they would rather adjust their scheules and still work with her, than go work with someone else.

She also needed to realize that not everyone would agree to the new schedule. Some might leave. And that’s okay. She’s building a sustainable practice and those clients are not the ones she needs to sustain it.  By leaving, they were freeing up her energy and time to focus on obtaining new clients who could fit her schedule.

So, how about you? Are the hours you are working sustainable? Are you honoring your own time as much as your customers?  If not, what’s holding you back?

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Deleegation is the key to success.

I know many Women Entrepreneurs don’t want to hear that and don’t believe it - but it’s true. As long as we try to do everything ourselves - we limit our effectiveness.  We are constrained by our own time, talent and energy.  And we put a limit on how big our business can grow.

When we delegate - we increase our power and our productivity. We leverage other people’s time, other people’s talent and other people’s energy.  We take the limits off of our success.                                    

Reasons I hear for not delegating are:

• money - it’s cheaper to do it myself
• skill - no one else can do it as well as I can
• time - I can do it myself faster than explaining how to someone else

All three of these reasons are limiting beliefs that will get in your way of achieving success.

Money - You may believe you are saving money when you do everything yourself. But in reality all you are doing is wasting time and energy.   That time and energy could be spent on doing more profitable and more important tasks for your business.

Skill - It may or may not be true that no one else can do the task as well as you can. But even if it is true, the question to ask yourself, is “does it matter?” As heretical as it sounds - not every task needs to be done to perfection.  Some tasks just need to be good enough.  Anything more is a waste of time and energy. 

Time - Time is important. It is your most finite resource, even more than energy and money. You can increase your energy level, and you can make more money - but you only have a limited amount of time.  The only way to increase time, is to use other people’s.  And the only wise way to do that - is to invest the time upfront, once, to get their help.

In the coming weeks, I’ll discuss more about how to decide what to delegate, and who to delegate it to. 

In the meantime, let me ask you - what is stopping you from delegating for success?

Photos by jsc*

Last week, I discussed the importance of analyzing your to do list so that you are working on the most important tasks rather than the most urgent tasks. 

Many times, we find ourselves terribly busy, but not really getting much done.

This is when we are being bossed around by our to-do list - working on the Urgent stuff rather than the Important stuff. 

Sharon Marsh wrote a comment on that post that said:  

I agree that you have to take into consideration the deadline factor for many items on your list but the real focus should be on the items that will ultimately keep money coming in to your business.

If it’s not revenue-generating, then in most cases, those activities should be the ones that are deleted, delegated or moved to the bottom of the list - until the urgency deadline approaches.

I agree with many parts of Sharon’s comment, but there is one aspect of it that disturbs me enough that I wanted to respond in a post rather than in the comments.

It’s the idea that only the “revenue generating” aspects of your business are the most important.

While obviously revenue generation is important (essential!) the problem comes when we are only focusing on the revenue that can be generated today and not looking at the long-term sustainability of our revenue.

To really grow your business, you need to be spending a good percentage of your time laying the foundation for future business. This includes activities such as Networking, Marketing, Developing New Products and Developing your Employees (even if that is just you…….especially if that is just you!!)

So, if you were to divide your time into sections, it might look something like this:

• Current revenue - 30%
  • sales
  • clients
  • seminars
• Future revenue  - 50%
  • Networking
  • Marketing
  • Developing New Products
• Employee Development - 10%
  • Training and Education 
  • Exercise and Health
• Maintenance - 10%
  • Accounting
  • Administrative

Do those percentages surprise you?

Yours might vary slightly. But if you are not putting at least as much energy into expanding your business as you are into the business you have today - your success will be short-lived. 

How right or wrong do those percentages feel to you? Are you happy with the balance in your business  or do you think it should be different?

 Last week I mentioned that I was going to take a look at the bottom of my to do list for the things that get carried over day after day to see what they said about my challenges with time management. 

I determined that I wasn’t deleting them because they were things that were actually important. But then, again, I wasn’t doing them because they didn’t have a looming deadline. 

I knew that I would do them when they became urgent. But in the meantime, I was feeling burdened every day having them hanging over my head.  

In reality I had two options to stop carrying them around every day. 

1) I could have taken them off my list until they became urgent, at which point I would add them and do them. 

2) I could go ahead and do them now, before they became urgent and get them off my list.

I chose option two and completed a little over half of my list last week.

And I realized something - not only did it feel good to get these things done before they became urgent, it also reminded me that this is where I want to spend more of my time this year.

Steven Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People categorizes tasks into four quadrants based on whether they are important or urgent.

And guess what? Most of us spend a lot of our time on the urgent items, whether they are important or not. 

Examples of urgent and important - meeting a work deadline, handling a crisis.   

Example of urgent and not important - some text messaging,  email, phonecalls, and other interruptions.

When we are not working on the urgent stuff, guess where we spend the rest of our time?

Most likely on the items that are Not urgent and Not important - surfing the internet, responding to unimportant email or phone calls, redesigning our business cards, etc.

Where we are least likely to spend our time is on the items that are important but not urgent. 

Why?

Most likely because they are hard, complicated, unclear or stressful. We want to do a good job on them. We are not sure how to start. We are not convinced we are up to the task. 

So, we put them off.

Because we can.

When do we do them?

When they have managed to migrate up the list and have become urgent.

Then we jump in and do them. If we don’t know exactly how, we make it up, because afterall we’re under a deadline and it can’t be helped. If we don’t do them as well as we should, we overlook it, because there’s no time to do a better job.

What types of things fall in the category of important but not urgent?

• designing a new seminar or product
• networking with new clients
• following up on current contacts
• tracking our finances
• taking care of our health
• spending time with our family
• catching up with our friends

I’ll write more about this topic next week. But in the meantime, take a look at your list - is it upside down?

Are the really important things hanging around at the bottom until they become urgent?

What’s on the bottom of your list that you could be doing right now??

Come on - be honest - aren’t there some items on your list that you just keep moving from one day to the next?

You know you should be doing them, so you diligently add them to the next day’s list.  But if you were honest with yourself you’d admit you weren’t going to do them tomorrow anymore than you did them today.

This weekend, I took a look at my “carry over list” to see if I could find any pattern that would help me understand why I never did these items, and yet, never erased them from my list either.

If you read this blog regularly you know that I do a lot of different things - corporate career, small business, doctoral studies, travel, etc.  Most things I have no trouble doing, while others just seem to linger at the bottom of my list - until they become unavoidable crises that I have to manage.

Here’s the list I’ve been carrying over for a couple of weeks:  

• call maintenance to investigate the mysterious line of small brown spots on the ceiling in the kitchen (leak from upstairs apartment?)
• call salon to make appt. for a haircut
• call Dr to arrange a bone density test
• submit paperwork for recertification of my Project Management Credentials
• submit paperwork of final portfolio for my coaching certification
• obtain absentee voter form (I’ll be traveling on my state’s primary day)
• update my passport
• add my new blog to topline community forum

These are all obviously important, which is why I can’t just remove them from my list. So why aren’t I doing them?

When I looked more closely at the list, I could see that the common theme was that I had to deal with some form of bureaucracy in order to accomplish the task. 

I really dislike bureaucracy.  Not that anyone Likes it. But I Dread it. I am always sure it is going to be a nightmare to deal with receptionists, clerks, policies and procedures.

Even something as simple as talking to the receptionist at the beauty salon seems to defeat me - I assume that I am not going to be able to find a time to fit in with my schedule, etc.  The irony is that I then wait until my hair is so out of control that I am desparate and take whatever they have, totally disrupting my schedule.

The same with the rest of these items. They all have deadlines which will soon become imminent and I will be forced to deal with them. Why not deal with them now before they become a crisis?

So, this week, I am going to face my gremlins - and deal with bureaucracy.  I’m going to concentrate on getting these items off of my to do list for good. 

Next week I’ll report back to you how I did. 

If I didn’t take care of at least 4 of the 7 items, I will do an extra mile on the eliptical machine at the gym. (since I only recently started going back to the gym - this is more grueling than it sounds!!)

If I do get 4 of them taken care of, besides the great feeling of having them off my list, I’ll treat myself to a new novel, just for fun!

So, how about you?

What’s lingering on your to-do list? What can you learn about yourself by looking at the activities you most avoid? 

What can you get done by next week and how will you reward/challenge yourself to get it done?