How many slices will you cut and what are their sizes?
Imagine all the activities you perform — daily and weekly — as slices of a pie.
- Your job
- Household maintenance
- Socialize with family and friends
- Religious worship
- Exercise
- Reading and other hobbies
- Volunteer
Look. Your pie is completely sliced up.
Now, you decide that, to grow your business, you should take a class.
But how? Your time is all fully allocated. Cutting another piece in the pie will make the other slices smaller.
Here are your choices: skipping, tackling one more thing, dropping and outsourcing.
- You can skip the class. You’ve gotten this far without it, so you rationalize that you don’t really need it.
- You might tackle the class on top of everything else you have on your plate. That may not turn out so well. You’re already working at full capacity and you do want to learn the material. You have high standards for yourself.
- You could drop one activity, even though it’s good for your mental or physical health.
- You might outsource something. Hand it over to a person who knows how to do it better than you and probably charges a lower fee. For example, perhaps you hire someone to take care of the weekly laundry and housekeeping.
You probably have ordered a meal or two for take out in recent months.
Consider that is outsourcing your food preparation.
By doing so, you did not shop, chop, cook or clean up the kitchen to make that delicious dinner.
Do you feel inadequate that you outsourced your meal preparation?
Not at all. You think you are smart. In fact, you applaud yourself for supporting local restaurants during an economic downturn.
Now, consider your business as Your Work Pie of Time:
- Executing client projects
- Meeting with clients and staff
- Keeping up with client industry trends
- Professional development
- Marketing your business
- Networking with colleagues and referral sources
- Mentoring employees
Look, that work pie of time is fully sliced also.
Consider which of the four approaches above – skipping, tackling one more thing, dropping or outsourcing – would be most helpful to manage the work pie of your time.
This Month’s Tip
Saying NO to one activity means saying YES to something else. Make a list of the many projects and tasks on your plate. Prioritize them by client score. That is, are they necessary for current clients? Will they attract future clients?
When you prioritize the activities from your Work Pie of Time, you will see which ones are the best use of your valuable time. Some can be handled by others and some may even be set aside, not to re-surface for a while. That’s okay. Not now does not mean never.
Contact
Want to take some Marketing tasks off your plate? Contact me at Janet@JanetLFalk.com , set an appointment here or call me at 212.677.5770 so you can help yourself to another slice from your Pie of Free Time.
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