Chances are
you've heard the phrase "Work on your
business rather than in your
business." One of the
questions that I'm most often asked is "How
do I find the time to work ON my
business, when I am not able to keep up with all
of the things I currently have to do?"
Working
on your business means doing the
strategic work of building a
business - thinking, setting the direction,
planning, and asking the right questions about
your business and the future. The other type
of work in a business is the tactical
work of making the sales calls, doing
client work, paying the bills, managing employees,
putting out fires - you know that endless list of
things that comes up every day and prevents you
from doing the strategic work! If you
spend all of your day focused inside the business,
rather focusing on the outside, how can you ever
move your company forward?
I know, right now
you're saying to yourself that if you focus on
making those sales calls, it's business
development and you'll build your business.
Yes, it is possible to grow your top line revenues
by just focusing on tactical work, but as your
business grows, so does its complexity. If
you're not prepared for the added complexity, you
won't truly prosper long-term from that top line
growth. You'll never reach your
entrepreneurial dream, but you will work harder
and harder every day and create a job for
yourself!
Assuming that you
want to achieve the dream that you first had when
you started your business, then you have do more
strategic work, which leads us right back to where
we started, "How do you find the time to
work ON my business?"
First, understand that you cannot and will not
find the time. There is no extra time just
hiding or sitting idle in your already
overscheduled, overcommitted calendar. You
have to make the time and you'll only make the
time when you realize that it is absolutely
essential in order for you to reach your
goals.
Here are
three simple strategies you can
begin to incorporate into your business today, to
help you increase the amount of time you spend
working on your business:
1.
Plan all of your work
2.
Develop a routine schedule
3.
Create a "Stop Doing" list
PLAN YOUR
WORK
Most people
determine what work they do each day based on what
"pops up". You drift aimlessly from one
situation that requires your attention to the
next, without any real purpose. You respond
to client calls. You get distracted by
e-mail. Your employee has an issue that must
be discussed right away. You react and
respond...depending on the severity of a
particular situation, you might say you spend most
of your day "putting out fires." You get to
the end of your day and you know you were busy all
day, but yet you feel like you have not
accomplished a thing.
Why not plan all
of your work - plan when you are going to meet
with clients, staff, vendors, strategic partners,
etc. so you can give them your undivided attention
in a proactive manner? Most
of our financial advisor clients now have a plan
for servicing each individual client, which rolls
into one master schedule (plan). For
example, let's say you use some version of
categorizing your clients into "A, B, C's" and
"A's" are suppose to receive 4 contacts per year,
you would now have them already scheduled on your
2006 calendar and you would already have a plan
for exactly what issue you will be discussing
during those contacts.
By proactively
servicing clients, you will greatly reduce the
reactive work you must do. Based on the
nature of your business, you will never eliminate
it, but you will be able to reduce it and by
minimizing the amount reactive work, you'll lower
your stress and begin to truly enjoy and have fun
in your business again. Another benefit of
having a master schedule it will be easier to see
and then schedule the other work your firm must
do, including the strategic work.
In addition to
the longer term master plan, I want you to also
have a plan for each day, a daily plan.
I plan my work each day. Each morning,
I set aside approximately 15 to 30 minutes for
what I call "Daily Focus". I use that time
to adjust and map out my day on paper using a
simple tool, my Daily
Prioritizer. (If you'd like to get a copy
of my Daily Prioritizer, you can request it by
sending an e-mail message to the address at the
end of this article.)
So you're
probably thinking how does that Daily Prioritizer
differ from your daily schedule in your time
management tool. My Daily Prioritizer is
both a tool and a philosophy. It is what I
use to think about and proactively plan my
day. The difference is, I'm scheduling and
making strategic work-activity driven by my vision
and my annual strategic plan, my top
priorities. After that is done, then and
only then, I create a tactical to-do list focused
on my top three to six other tasks for that
day.
Lastly, my
assistant transfers that information to my online
calendar so I get the benefit of automated
reminders to move on to the next activity, project
or meeting. As the owner of my business, I
did the strategic aspect of the planning process,
while delegating the administrative components to
my assistant. In doing so, she also assumes
the ownership of my schedule and keeps me on
task. Behind every great executive is an
even greater assistant. If you have an
assistant, he or she should be an integral part of
your time management strategy. If you don't
have an assistant, get one.
You'll benefit from increased productivity and
capacity to work on your business!
ROUTINES
WILL SET YOU FREE
One thing almost
all successful entrepreneurs and executives have
in common is that they have a
routine - they do the same things
at the same time each day, consistently. As
just suggested in the last section, they also plan
all of the work they do in advance. To help
facilitate that planning they set aside, specific
blocks of time or timeframes to work on specific
activities. They arrive at the office the
same time everyday. They conduct daily
and weekly meetings at exactly the same time and
day each and every week. They set aside time
to work on specific strategic subjects such as
marketing, client fulfillment and finance. They
get into a rhythm. This discipline is a
strong habit they that develop over time. It
allows them to get the important things done and
move their company forward.
You can also set
aside specific times each week to do your
strategic work. Here are two different, yet
very successful methods that have worked for our
clients. The first is setting aside one hour
per day to do your planned strategic work.
If clients choose this approach, I strongly urge
them to use the first hour of each day for
strategic work, prior to returning any phone calls
and e-mail messages. Do whatever you
have to do to eliminate any interruptions during
this time. Close your office door.
Tell your staff that you are not to be interrupted
during this short, but productive timeframe.
The second
approach is to set aside one day per week to do
all of your strategic work. If it takes you
a little longer to settle in and focus and you
prefer to finish something you start in one
sitting, this method will be best for you.
So that you will not be tempted to "jump" in or be
pulled into the tactical work going on in the
office, you may need to find a quiet, venue like a
home office, library, coffee shop or bookstore
where you can work free of distractions and
interruptions.
Over time, as
your business grows, you'll expand the amount of
time you spend on strategic work because you will
have delegated, outsourced or eliminated most of
the technical work from your personal
schedule. Having the discipline to pre-plan
your work and maintain a routine schedule will not
only enhance your productivity, but also increase
your free time and the time that you are able to
spend away from your business.
STOP
DOING LIST
Let's face it,
there is work you do every day that you should not
be doing. It is very easy in your
business to be extremely busy doing the wrong
things. You have work that can easily be delegated
to staff or outsourced. You spend time on
activities that "some day" may yield results, but
seldom do. (Networking that doesn't yield
consistent results is one common
example.) Every day, you probably have at
least one task or activity that drains and zaps
your energy. Earlier, I recommended that you
keep a top priority list. Now, I want you to
begin to keep a list of activities that you would
love to or need to stop
doing.
This stop doing
list is just the starting point. You then
need a strategy and plan to get that work off your
desk. In general you will either delegate
that work to staff, outsource it or just not do
it. Something's have such minimal impact on
your business that they can be eliminated
altogether.
One
of my favorite quotes is from Marcel Proust:
"The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new
landscapes, but in having new eyes" or in other
words, having a new perspective. If you're
ever to become free of your tactical work and grow
as an entrepreneur, something has to change, and
what has to change is your perspective of how you
view yourself and the work that you do in your
business. Reacting to what happens each day
is not the way to reach your goals - a lot of you
position yourself as a planner, so you already
know how just a little bit of planning can benefit
your clients - use some of these ideas and make
planning a habit for your firm, and you will be
amazed at the results.
