After beginning my business, I noticed that my single biggest problem has been the one I least expected: what to do with my time. It’s not that I lack things to do. Anyone who runs a small business knows that at any given moment, a thousand tasks cry out for attention: appointments to schedule, phone calls to make, bills to pay, and paperwork to complete. Not to mention activities large and small required for sales, marketing, financing, and operations.

I was surprised because, quite frankly, when I had a “real” job (that is, I worked for someone else), time management was not much of a challenge. Not that I didn’t have to do a lot of juggling and prioritizing but, when it came to making the big decisions, someone else usually called the shots. Spend three hours working on project A or project B? Just ask the boss or ask the client to make the decision for you. The problem with that scenario was feeling that my time was used ineffectively: on activities to make the boss look good, activities to make sure I didn’t get blamed if something went wrong (CYA), or working on the senior vice president’s pet project to create a database for his DVD collection.

Now that I have my own business, the complete freedom to spend the day as I wish feels utterly overwhelming: like being a small boat in the middle of the ocean with no compass to point the way. It’s an unnerving feeling…even scary. And being someone who likes getting stuff done, I find myself filling my days with either administrative work or aimless research. It’s not that I lack ideas for products and services that I could be working on. I have hundreds. It’s not that I lack the knowledge and skills to market those products: I spent years as a consumer research specialist and have a knack for coming up with clever ways to market just about anything. The problem is that I seem unable to make up my mind on which one or two projects I want to focus on.

Here’s an example of how my thoughts go when I’m trying to decide:

“I have a big block of time to develop a project. Cool! What should I work on?”

“Well how about the Failing Forward project?”

“Hmmm. I don’t know. I don’t really feel like working on that?”

“But yesterday, you couldn’t wait to get started.”

“I don’t know. I wish I still felt that way but I don’t”

“Well you have to work on something today!!”

“Hmmm. Well, I have lots of paper stacked up here on my desk. Maybe I can just spend the day getting my paperwork in perfect order. Then I’ll be ready to get to the project.”

“Yeah, paperwork. That’s the ticket. A nice, mindless task that will keep you busy, busy, busy.”

And I spend the remainder of the day doing some paperwork but also doing the ocasional (or not so occasional game of Solitare or Mine Sweeper), answering email, surfing the Internet, etc. At the end of the day I feel as though another day has gone by and I have nothing to show for it.

Of course there is no lack of tools, people, seminars, and so forth to get me focused. I’ve done Franklin Covey. Read many books on the subject. Subscribe to various newsletters and magazines. I mean, people ask me for advice on how to be more productive. I know how to get things done. I’m very good at it.

The problem is choosing the RIGHT things to get done. That’s the tricky part which brings me to the subject of this article.

Every book on starting a business will tell you to create a business plan. That’s excellent advice. At a minimum, you should think about the market you’re in, the products you sell, the customers you serve, and what you’re doing to ensure you’ll be profitable. More sophisticated is creating a long term vision, a mission, objectives, and strategies. And here is the nub of it. I am having difficulty coming up with a vision and mission that feel right.

That “feeling right” I think is the crux of this. In other words, I’ve been trying to “figure it out” seemingly forever. As I mentioned earlier, it’s not for lack of research, puzzling ideas out, or talking to people. Those attempts have been useful to a point but they all have to do with using my intellect to find the answer out there.

There’s nothing that pisses me off more than when someone does the Zen master thing. You know, “all your answers are within Grasshopper.” It pisses me off because they’re probably right. And it’s so damn simple! I always expact that the answer to a really big question is a conundrum. Something really intricate and complicated which must be carefully teased out over time. An analogy would be to getting the knot out of a fine linked-chain. If you’ve ever tried to untangle a necklace made of very fine links you know what I mean. Because the chain is so fine and delicate, you can end up with a large knot which is comprised of many smaller knots. The thinness of the chain makes the knot very compact and difficult to unravel. I know people who have sat for hours with a straight pin painstakingly teasing the knot apart.

The more metaphysical approach is to recognize that the knot will unravel itself without any intervention if you allow it to just “be”. In other words, don’t try to figure it out. Just wait until you have clarity. And if you practice being completely present in the here and now, the answer will come from your subconscious. This approach feels intuitively correct but every bit of my experience and education screams in protest.

So another question that occurs to me as I write this is, what am I supposed to be doing in the “meantime” while I wait for clarity? It seems I should be doing something to make money: whether it is or is not related to my vision. See, I’m complicating things again. Arghh.

Since then, I’ve been a lot more productive and active.

I’m attributing this improvement to my experience at the Absence of You conference. Let me explain further.

Absence of You was really two seperate events. The conference itself was sponsored by Coachville and the concept, Absence of You, is based on a program developed by Thomas J. Leonard.

The idea behind Absence of You is that the combination of human nature and social conditioning makes it difficult for us to get out of our own way. There are a million ways this shows up in every day life. Procrastinating on a project where there is a lot at stake (or at least feels like there’s a lot at stake) is a common one. Other examples are holding on to something: a relationship, a job, a way of doing something that doesn’t work any more, but the prospect of losing whatever it is, is just too painful. Judging people or situations harshly, gossiping and speculating about someone’s behavior is another. This is what most of us (including me) consider “normal.”

I’m beginning to realize that getting in my own way is not necessary.

So during the Absence of You segment, we learned about the reasons behind getting in our own way. The reasons are explained by the 12 Core Dynamics. The three major dynamics are “resisting feeling things fully,” “trying to force an outcome,” and “looking for yourself where you are not.”

There’s a lot more information at http://www.innerhumandesign and http://www.absenceofyou.

Once I understood the dynamics, the natural question was, “so what do I do to get rid of them.” There are several exercises presented at the conference.

The dynamic I worked on at the conference was “Limited Self Expression.” I felt this was the dynamic underlying my “stuckness.’

What I’ve been spending serveral paragraphs getting to was that it worked.

Last Wednesday, 1/21, I sat down at my desk and I did stuff I’d been thinking about for months. I picked up the phone and called people I needed to talk with. I got this blog going. I began writing again. I’m even drawing again. Something I haven’t done for years. Interesting.

I liked the results so much that I’m thinking of seeing a coach who specializing in “neutralizing” the core dynamics to do more work on some of the other blocks that have been bedeviling me.

Interesting stuff.

We will be rescheduling for Tuesday, February 3 and hope you will be able to join us.

In the spirit of building reserves we will make sure we have an alternative number and that we use a more reliable service.

Judy

I made the decision to become a professional coach a couple years ago and since then have made a lot of changes. I’ve started a business, Murdoch Coaching, taken classes through Coachville, and done an awful lot of thinking on what the focus of my practice should be. I’m very enthusiastic and interested by nature and you’d think choosing a practice focus would be pretty easy. It’s been a surprise to me that it’s been so difficult.

The irony is that much of what I like to help clients with is on product development and marketing. I feel very comfortable working with clients to understand what their customers want and how to market those products to customers. And I can’t seem to take action to do it for myself. I get really frustrated when I think about it. Which is why I don’t think about it too much these days. Thinking doesn’t work.

Which gets me back to the conference.

It seems to me that there are two separate issues most folks face when they want to make a significant change in their lives. First is getting clear on the change. It’s one thing to say “I hate my job!” People say it all the time. It gets tricky when you know you don’t want to get a job in the same industry. You used to be a programmer and getting another programming job is entirely unappealing.

So now you need to start getting clear on what do you want to do. Change careers? Start your business? Both?

And once you get some clarity, you have to begin taking the action to get yourself there. That means doing things like picking up the phone, doing research, sending emails.

Coaches work with their clients on both.

What’s interesting though is why we don’t do what we know we need to do. For example, I KNOW I need to make some phone calls to get a book project going. In fact, it’s been on my “to do” list now for about three weeks. So what’s up?

And that’s where the Core Dynamics come in.

OK, I’m tapped out for now. Hopefully I’ll feel like writing Part II tomorrow.

I decided to go with Type Pad because the blog looks nice and it’s easy to use. I’m comfortable with technology but I’m still a little confused by how blogs work versus web sites and how the two fit together. I like things being integrated. Being lazy, I don’t like having to click to open a pdf file or open Microsoft Word attachments. I suspect this is where technology is going but it’s not there today.