Thoughtful Thursdays – Is time your friend or foe?
It is the age-old issue of running out of time. A colleague says, and I agree, that it is endemic to new business owners. I would also take it a step further and add that at some point everyone experiences the feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. Time becomes the foe rather than friend.
Some seem to be able to achieve an incredible volume of productive activity in a given time and others are overwhelmed and become paralyzed.
It may be that your expectations of what can be accomplished in a certain amount of time are unreasonable. This can lead to over booking yourself and the result will be that you are not able to cross every task of your list. You might benefit from reviewing your processes and re-mapping them to determine total effort and duration required.
You may be allowing more than enough time, but distractions cause delays. It is worthwhile to analyze the source of the distractions and put helpful routines in place. As an example, you may want to block off parts of your day for uninterrupted work. Blocks of two hours are a good length of time. During that time you do not answer the phone or take other meetings, you focus on the job at hand. Stopping and re-starting a task is incredibly unproductive.
If you do this, you want to schedule times when you check voicemail and return calls. Working from a home office requires added discipline to minimize the effect of the numerous distractions that inevitably surface on a daily basis.
Events not in your control are more difficult to address as they often cause a well-timed process to be compressed. Depending on the root cause, you may be able to negotiate for additional time and it is worth having that discussion.
By adopting routines that work to put you in control of your time it can turn it into a best friend. Time does not have to be your foe if used wisely like any other valuable resource.
Good selling,
Richard
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