One of the things I often notice about myself is that I’m incredibly busy, all the time. The problem is that what I’m often busy doing is the wrong stuff. For example, I just looked at my to do list. I have programming tasks, personal task (these are must do:D ), marketing tasks, plus some other things… While some of these are vital, it’s often good to stop and do a sanity check on what you should be doing.
Now Perry Marshall often talks about increasing your hourly wage. There are things you can do that earn you $10/hr, $100/hr, $1000/hr or more… Now the problem I have with this concept is that you often still have to do the $10/hr tasks unless you have a fully staffed business. For example as a small company, I can’t really afford for someone to write this blog for me, someone to enter in my day to day expenses, or someone to take the trash out for me on Tuesday morning. I have allocated some funds to pay some programmers to help me, but even that takes up my time because I have to write the specifications, test what they did, report back any errors and repeat. This does help, because I’m not down in the trenches figuring out why a select statement returns too many values. So when you can afford to have people help you, I totally agree about delegating out the things you aren’t good at, or that you can easily train someone else to do. The problem is when you’re small, you don’t always have the funds to pay someone else… that means your stuck doing it yourself.
This makes it even MORE important to scrutinize your to-do list. Because there will always be things you have to do (say submit your taxes, or pay your contractors)… they may not be $1000/hr tasks, but until you’re making enough money, you HAVE to do them. So the remaining tasks better be getting you toward making that money. For me, it’s meant that I have to focus on the upcoming SAPPHIRE conference. It’s not what I’m best at… but right now, it’s my best upcoming shot at getting prospects, and without prospects, there is no $$$. Anyway, make sure what keeps you busy is worth your time. It might be that you need to delay it for a while, and pick it up again in a couple of months. I had to do that with blogging…
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike