This month, we’ve spent a lot of time developing the ideas of entrepreneurship versus small business ownership and I wanted to ask you to play a little game with me for the next two weeks.
It’s really simple and won’t take more than a few minutes each day to do.
I want you to track your time – in two ways. Why? Well, for starters, every day, as I talk to small business owners, they tell me how little time they have. “Busy, busy, busy” but, at the end of the month, they have virtually nothing “extra” to show for it.
The first exercise I want you to do, in week one, is to actually track the time you spend working. Actually calling on clients, doing the job, sending emails, programming, whatever it is you actually do for a living.
Subtract getting a coffee. Don’t count time on Facebook or social media. Delete watching cat videos on YouTube.
Just work.
Log this each day.
I’ll bet you find you don’t work as much as you think you do. At the same time, log any time you spend on work at home, too.
In the end, though, I’ll bet you aren’t really working as much as you think you are.
Next week, though, I want you to document that types of work that occupy your day. Is it managerial tasks? True entrepreneurial tasks, like business growth or expansion? Or, are you simply doing work – the “job” of your business?
You can do both of these exercises with the stopwatch app on your phone or simply with a piece of paper on your desk, but do them.
In the end, I believe you’ll find that A.) you have more time that you thought and B.) you’re not spending enough time growing your business through entrepreneurial and business development tasks.
Once you’ve had a chance to look over the data – data you actually collected – I’d encourage you to start to look at ways that you can better balance out the time you spend in the different roles of your company – simply doing the “job” is not viable and “managing” the business isn’t either. Looking for new opportunities, though – those are! Of course, in the end, having a team to count on – mine, for example, does help you to free up time from the daily management of your company, and, of course, when you need to discuss how we can bring more value to you, we’re here for you!
Sincerely,
