As an entrepreneur or business person, time is something you commonly have very little of. You are always working in or on your business. Your family shares you with your business and your clients. Often times vacations and days off are not taken. This is the life when you are starting a business.
Now, as you mature in your business, hopefully you find success through acquiring better pricing, developing more efficient practices, getting a better understanding of your financials and a host of other pieces of information and experience that you should have picked up along the way.
This is the audience that I am writing this for. You scraped, struggled and had countless nights of lost sleep. I am assuming that this is not your end goal. Right? I am assuming that you want to be able to enjoy the fruits of your labor. After all, success is not just measured in dollars. It is measured in how good of a parent you are, how you act as a spouse, being a meaningful member of your community and many other metrics. If you are always working in and on your business, you never have the ability to develop the other facets of your life.
Once you begin to see some measure of professional success in your business, you are going to be struck with a very, very uncomfortable feeling. And before I dive into it, I want to tell you that “it is okay and it is normal.” As your well defined processes begin to run the business and your employees, who you delegated tasks and authority to, begin to efficiently manage your business processes, you are going to find yourself with a caught up task list and nothing left to do. A feeling of accomplishment will wash over you. And then…that’s when the thoughts begin to sink in of “what am I missing? what should I be doing right now?”
You want the answer? Concentrate on the other facets of your life. As Timothy Ferriss states it, “Being busy is not the same as being productive.” I keep this quote in my mind on a regular basis. For one, just because you are busy does not mean you are productive. And, the converse can also be true. Just because you are not busy does not mean you are not productive.
If everything is running as it should. Your business is running like a well-oiled machine. And there are no problems. When your task list is empty, clock out of your business and clock-in to your other parts of life. Enjoy them knowing that you have strong processes in place and reliable people managing them. Your business should enable your life rather than being your life.