It’s our busy season. Lots of clients are trying to spend those 2013 marketing dollars and frankly, all of us are ready for a few moments to breathe with our families as the holidays approach. Many small businesses hit crunch time at some point during the year, and the age old wisdom of simply managing your time better doesn’t always work well. It’s what makes this Forbes post by Paul Brown so incredibly attractive.
. . .the problem I have with time management systems is that they assume everything is predictable and that you are going to know how your day is going to go from the moment you walk into the office until you turn off the lights at night. The business world of an entrepreneur is never predictable.
Now, this doesn’t mean you respond immediately to every new thing that comes across your desk, or drop everything every time the phone rings. You always need to stay focused on what the most important things are you need to accomplish. You can’t let the urgent overwhelm the important. Otherwise you will just lurch from crisis to crisis.
I completely understand why people do, however. In a funny way, it is simply easier. Someone is yelling about a minor crisis that they think needs to be resolved immediately; you deal with it, and once you have you think you have accomplished something. But, you really haven’t. You are simply back to where you started, before you knew the problem existed.
It is just another example of confusing activity with accomplishment, much like the constant meetings some organizations have. There’s the monthly staff meeting; the weekly department meeting and the daily “check in” with your immediate reports. These things sure do fill up your calendar; but no creativity comes out of them. There are, to keep with our theme, a waste of time.
But I don’t have a lot of meetings. And I can tell the different between something that is urgent and something truly important. I don’t believe I need any more rules than that.
Instead of following hard and fast rules, I would prefer to stay alert to possibilities that I can grab quickly to help my business grow.
And by making that decision, I have freed up a lot of time,
If you’re having trouble with your own time management, we might be able to help. It’s not a hard and fast rule that you can outsource everything filling up your plate, but we can at least handle your blogging and social media management for you. Give us a call or drop us a line if you’d like a little help this holiday season or beyond.