Warning: this one’s on the longish side

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2004 at 12:02 pm and is filed under What I'm working on.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.