I could almost bet my house on it that we have all been guilty of using this expression at least once to describe the manic that is being self employed. For me this was always the excuse for not getting things done. Truth of the matter is I haven't always been efficient with my time management. So I tend to come up with this line as an excuse for not hitting on of my daily goals.
See, When you work for a company you tend to find things get delegated and instructions fired out for the tasks than need to be completed. At least that was always how it was for me in the corporate world. You would have meeting and emails from the bosses. Being self employed is nothing like that. I guess the clue is in the description SELF EMPLOYED. I literally employee myself, and that makes me both the boss, and the employee.
Setting Targets
I've never really been a natural born leader. But now I have to be. See, I started this business because I love being behind a camera. I literally obsess over it. I spend hours upon hours training myself on my craft but like my last blog said, i'm not just the photographer now. So here comes one of my problems. How do I discipline myself to do the more mundane tasks associated with running my business? Drinking. Yep you heard that correct. I drink!. Water. Lots of it.
I've always had this thing where I don't drink enough. I don't know why, I guess its just laziness. Procrastination in its purest form. And i've been exactly the same with my business. I've not spent enough time tweaking my marketing, or networking, or chasing payments etc etc. So how has drinking water helped me become better managed?
Drinking through it all
I set myself a daily target now of drinking 2 liters of water, but if your anything like me setting targets its a complete waste of time. So what I do now is fill a big 2 litre bottle of water up and slap it on my desk. By doing this I can't avoid it, it's there just looking strait at me. I can't run from it, I can't avoid it. Now this might seem so trivial to those reading this but unless something is physically unavoidable i'm not going to do it unless I really want to. And this has really helped me. I now drink 2 litres of water every day.
I now employ this same technique to my business. I make my tasks have a physical appearance in front of me. There are many ways you can do this but for me I write things down on a piece of paper that also sits front and center on my desk. To me there is just something about having a list that helps me. So away I go, taking each task on the list one by one. It's actually quite satisfying crossing them off till the list is done. I really don't know why I wasn't doing this earlier as I have probably lost so much time. Not because "there isn't enough hours in the day" but because I wasn't working smart and delegating my time properly. I think I may even upgrade to a whiteboard. This has helped me set times to market, times to respond to emails and times to actually do those profit making exercises like editing.
If i'm being really honest, The last thing on my list infront of me right now is writing up this blog today. if it wasn't on that list I truly wonder if I would have even finished.......
