Split your time?

Are you a small business?  A service provider?  Are you the visionary, the rainmaker, the doer?  Most of us are.  Some of the best advice I ever got when I started up my business over 19 years ago was ‘to succeed in business, especially as a consultancy, you have to spend a third of your time planning, a third of your time selling and a third of your time on doing’ (thanks Vic).  If you don’t, you will go broke and your business will fail.  Did you get that message.  Let me repeat it.  If you don’t, you will go broke and your business will fail.

So you can do this in a few ways and do it that best serves your time management and your business.  My favoured way is to do each every day in small manageable bits.  They don’t have to get equal time every time but on average over the course of a week, they should.  Perhaps the planning phase could do with a little less face to face time, but my normal planning reviews and activities normally generate a raft of selling and doing activities which I attribute to planning thus giving you the balance.  But don’t get too hung up on the splits, just make sure you do.

However, I have added a final dimension, the fourth quadrant / quotient of your time.  Down time, fun time, me time.  Call it what you want but get it and give it at least an equal proportion of your time split.  If you get the other three right, you might be able to have those other three added up to equal the fourth.  And isn’t that why we run our own businesses?  Really?  You bet it is.  Only 3 plus months to my next holiday.

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