You wake up without an alarm. It’s still early and you feel refreshed. You get something to eat and drink, then do your favourite things for your physical and mental well-being. Maybe yoga, swimming, paddling, running, walking, dancing, weights, spinning, or playing a sport.
Then you sit down to work because this is your most creative time. After about 90 minutes of high-level, high-value, important work, you relax a bit and get into the more urgent work. That done, it’s time for lunch. How do you want to do lunch? With whom? Where?
You spend the afternoon having fun, maybe with family and friends. Later in the afternoon or early evening, you drop back into some work, answering communications and doing a bit of administration. Supper is exactly the way you like it. You spend the evening learning or practicing new skills, entertainment and culture.
Sounds like a dream doesn’t it. It’s petty close to the way I live my life. And you could be living this life, too.
Most of us, including me, bought into the idea that running a business means doing things that are not revenue producing. We are told that the way to build a business is by doing marketing, operations, finance and human resources. First of all, no one can do all that, the skills, strengths and temperaments required for each of those are antagonistic. Think of a great marketer, a great numbers person and a great people person. Three distinct personalities come to mind, don’t they? So why do we expect that anyone can be even competent at each of those.
Second of all, business is about providing a value exchange of solution for (usually) money. That other stuff is not your business. The business owners I see who run effortless businesses, focus all of their attention on providing an amazing solution and making their customers delighted.
Then they tell those stories, they don’t worry about fonts, colours, number of eyeballs and customer avatars. They tell stories of happy customers and attract more of the exact customers who love what they offer and pay them happily.
Most of the busy things we do in our businesses don’t need to be done. We spend our time being extremely inefficient and ineffective because we are doing too many of the wrong things and we are trying to do them all at the same time. How often do you look back over your day and wonder if you have even actually done a single hour of real work?
A friend and I talked about working at home with newborns. We talked about how we would care for our children and think about our work so that when they slept, we could sit down and do the work. That time was precious and we had to use it to the maximum. In that way, we found we could keep up with our work in so much less time. That experience changed the way I approached my business.
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