I had handpicked the desk’s team for their brains and ability and we considered ourselves as the rag’s elite squad. We were the swat team that took the day’s hot but often sloppy and vague copy and shaped it into articles or packages that sang, that not only provide in-depth information, but would also reach from the page and grab a reader’s attention.

Naturally, we took this attitude to heart, and would have long discussions about the most effective way to present a story, the best tone to take, and the best way to begin the piece.

Usually, about 20 minutes into these often loud discussions, Mr. Crusty Editor would loom over us and announce: “Just get it frickin’ done, will ya”.

Actually, that’s an approximation. His language was considerably more colorful.

But we always got the message. There’s time for thinking and talking and there’s time for doing. And you better know the difference.

Yes folks, we are talking about productivity here. Everyone needs it, and everyone suffers from its lack.

So, becoming more productive can be the biggest success booster for the entrepreneur who operates a solo or small advisory business.

All businesses need to run on systems that maximize productivity and minimize downtime. This is doubly important for knowledge-based independent businesses that only have so many productive hours in a day.

Large organizations can play with this concept somewhat because they have a lot of slack built into their operations, and often can throw enough people at a job to get it done.

But small service businesses operations don’t have that luxury. They are constantly balancing the imperative to produce with the need to undertake marketing, billing, and other business tasks.

So how does an adviser in a small shop just “get it frickin’ done”?

Here are some ideas:

Get in the flow: A flow state is what you sometimes see athletes operating when they are high performing. Simply, it is completely concentration on the current activity. In a flow state, time flies by, all other senses are muted (you don’t hear distractions) and all the sense are involved in the task at hand. It’s that complete focus that we sometimes experience  when we suddenly look up and realize that it’s three hours later. There are many ways to get into flow — self hypnotism, deep breathing, relaxation techniques, etc — but most involve elimination of distraction.

Work in time chunks. You can’t plunge deeper than merely skimming the surface of a task in only 15 minutes, because it takes some time to get into it. That’s why you have to work in a larger chunk of time. If there is something you have to complete urgently but is deep, set aside an hour or two for it and spend the first half hour just warming up. With practice this warm-up period will shorten. Set a timer so that you know when to start and stop.Give yourself a code word that tells your subconscious that it’s time to enter the flow state and use it often. And don’t make it too long. Working in absolute focus for long periods of time is exhausting and you’ll start to avoid it.

Group the small stuff. Your email box will be constantly bleeping, your social media will always provide a distraction, the phone may ring regularly. Turn them all off and save them for a period of lightness; after you have just emerged from a flow  state for example. It will act as a form of cool down for your brain.

Organize your time. As we have pointed out, you can’t be in flow all the time, so save it for the most important tasks, and spread them throughout your working time. Similarly, try to align them to your bio-rhythms. If you are at your absolute best first thing in the day, then that’s a flow time. Similarly, if you are great after refreshing yourself with exercise or a walk, then that becomes one.  Try not to pack your flow time into one  or two days, but spread them throughout the week. Don’t let other people’s sense of urgency — everything is urgent today — govern your work habits.

Establish a purpose: Know clearly what you want to accomplish in a flow state, and be specific. Don’t settle for something like “I need to get this project done”. Think about what it will be like when it’s completed. It may be a first draft of a report, or an analysis. It may be an outline of a project. Understand what completeness will look like

Visualize success: As with all purpose, or goal, setting, understand what success looks like and write it down. For example, “By 3 pm. I will have made five solid cold calls to prospects and achieved one follow-up meeting”. Sometimes with tasks that require flow, it’s helpful to write down the goal and how you’re going to achieve it (ie a script). This works especially well for planner personalities, and can also act as a warm-up.

Talk To Yourself: Give yourself an order to concentrate. And use positive words such as “I Will …”. Your sub-conscience is often literal and so loves to be told what to do. It will gladly obey an order.

Try these techniques and you’ll be amazed at the increase in your productivity.

Have some favorite tricks of your own to increase your productivity? Let me know. I’m collecting them.

Let’s say right here that no one really likes change. They may say they do, and they may indeed like the idea of change in the abstract.

But the details of change? Not so much.

Change means the unknown, and there aren’t too many creatures on this earth who like the unknown. Unless you’re easily bored (like me) and so require regular stimulation (me again!) or challenges (ditto!) created by the problems change throws at you, you will probably avoid it as much as possible.

However, if you’ve slipped from the comfy corporate couch — whether by choice or  by force of recession layoffs or buyouts — to your own service business you don’t have a lot of choice in the matter.

You’re going to have to embrace change whether you like it or not.

The dynamics of change

First,  let’s drop into lecture mode and look at the basics of  change management.

Change was classically defined as the movement from a “frozen state”, to “unfreezing”, to an eventual “refreezing” in a different state.

Frozen might definitely define how you felt in the corporate world,  but I’m not too sure you want to feel that way again after undertaking a conversion from corporate warrior to entrepreneurial free spirit. That would just be substituting one “frozen” or dead, state with another.

So I would suggest that a modern version of change should be something like: the movement from a frozen state, to unfreezing from that state, to existence in a semi-liquid state, which will suit you much better in an entrepreneurial setting.

This will be difficult for many service providers: They have likely existed in a corporate bubble for many years and have established a relative comfort with sameness. So being “liquid” all the time can frighten them.

Bring In The Change Manager

in my opinion, the best way to deal with this is to be your own change manager.

Leadership trainers often help managers better address employee reactions to change. So why not be the manager who addresses change issues for your employee (you)?

It will give you a task that can occupy you while you’re transitioning. If you have already done so, you can determine where you are on the change continuum and take corrective or future action as appropriate.

Here are seven issues you have to consider when managing your own change:

It’s feels weird. Change makes people feel uncomfortable because they’re learning how to react to new stimuli. And that makes them (you) feel inadequate. So prepare for it and don’t beat yourself up if you feel odd and awkward in your new role.

It focuses on what’s lost. A natural reaction to change is to dwell on what was. This is true even if the change is positive, because we know what was much better than what will be. So understand that there is going to be a bittersweet feeling covering you for some time as you become used to your new role.

It feels lonely. Because change is so personal, people going through it feel their reactions and emotions are unique to them.  This increases isolation considerably and can start a downward spiral of gloom and despair. So seek out others who are going through something similar and share your experiences.

It can make you sick. Too much change all at once can shock any system to the point where it creates dysfunction, paralysis and even physical illness. So ensure that your change is orderly, even if you’ve been downsized or otherwise feel like you’ve been relegated to some kind of scrap heap. Try to continue some kind of routine.

It affects people differently. Some people relish change because they find it interesting: Others detest it because they find it disruptive and threatening. Understand which way you lean and create a change plan that takes that into account.

It can make you worry. When confronted with change in work, most people think first about their wallets: They wonder how it’s going to affect them financially. You probably have as well. So, as part of your change plan, recognize that you may have to take on work that was far below your previous job, and might pay less. It’s all part of the process and eventually you’ll be able to undertake more rewarding work.

It can make you look backward. Because the past is so familiar, most people will revert to previous thinking and habits the moment they forget that they are changing. It’s very easy to slip into old routines, even while you’re in the middle of creating a new one.  So, be a little tough with yourself: The old way is gone, you’re on a new course now and need new habits.

Any change or transition can be wrenching, so there is no point in denying that it’s happening. Change management is all about recognizing the patterns of response that continually occur in these change situations. They are normal results of any change, and tend to be broadly similar in all change situations.

Understanding these  responses and setting up a plan to manage them will make your transition much smoother and successful.

I would have had this blog post out sooner but I procrastinated. I would have had more links in it, but put off finding them.  I would have made more money, but I was too busy planning to make money.

Yes, people, we’re talking here about procrastination: It’s a bad habit that can ensure your advisory business will either die or limp along … forever.

I thought of this while engaged in a bout of procrastination. While roaming around the internet (honest, that newsletter about raising rabbits  had some great information!) I found a cute diagram that gave me a laugh but also made me realize the size of the problem for a solo or micro service business.

The “Procrastination Flowchart” comes  by way of Twitter (told you I had important stuff to do) created on a site called ehdom.com. The site is apparently run by a recent college grad who doesn’t want to be tied down to one thing.

Anyone who’s labored in the corporate world before fleeing to their own business knows that feeling (and also knows it  never goes away).

Here’s the chart. Have a good laugh. And then think about it.

Everybody puts off distasteful tasks

We all procrastinate. It’s part of the human condition. But some of us do it more than others, because it’s a habit, especially if you have spent any amount of time in a corporate setting where you’re paid whether you produce or not.

But if you’re operating your own services company, which is known as an “eat what you kill” business, not producing means not earning. Basically, if you don’t earn by doing something productive, you don’t eat.

So procrastination can be more than a quick laugh. It can be deadly to your dream of escaping the corporate straightjacket and employing your expertise for your own purposes.

There are many small reasons why we fall into the habit of procrastination. But generally the big ones are psychological. They can be summed up as:
Problem 1: No motivation for the project. You had to take it on to earn some cash, but it’s not really turning your crank. So you keep avoiding it, secretly hoping that eventually some “boss” ( i.e. the client) is going to contact you and ask “where the #$*% is my stuff? Then you’ll have to commit.

Solution? Be your own boss (that’s why you became an entrepreneur, remember?). And use the whip and chair. Tell yourself: If I don’t get at this thing, I’m going to lose or blow this project and that’s going to impact my business forever. That should be motivating.
Problem 2. You’re Afraid. When we’re doing projects that stretch our capacity a bit, fear often sneaks up on us. We can suffer from fear of failure – the “what if I screw up” scenario, or we can suffer from fear of success – the “what if I ace it, then I’ll have to do it again” scenario.

Solution: Fear comes when you do something different, and that means learning. And, remember that’s why you started this business in the first place.  You wanted to feel that fear again.
Problem 3. Not high on the ToDo list. We all keep these, and most of us even prioritize the tasks on them. It’s basic time management. But prioritization is usually subjective and we invariably stop at tasks 3 or 4 and congratulate ourselves for doing a great job. Or we cherry pick the list for the task we most want to do instead of  what we should do.

Solution: Focus on the best aspects of doing it. Maybe it will be quick. Maybe it will bring in some fast cash. Maybe you can reward yourself for doing it. Maybe you’ll save some money if you don’t hire someone else to do it.

Problem 4.  It’s beyond you. Sometimes with complex tasks, we believe that we don’t know enough to do them properly. But usually, we take on the task because we wanted it and hoped it would take us into another area that we had been hoping to work in.

Solution: Obvious. You believed you could do it when you landed the job, and that’s probably still true. But you lack information. So get out there and find what you need to get going. If need be, enlist someone to review and critique the final product, so you can do it right. Be careful, however, that this search for information doesn’t just become another way to procrastinate. Be purposeful.

Create a new habit

As we said, procrastination can become a work habit. So can doing.

So start with the recognition of the causes of the procrastination habit. Once you learn to overcome them, you’ll form a new habit that replaces the old one.

Then you won’t have to be telling clients and others that, sorry, I just couldn’t get to it. I was too busy procrastinating.

Some time ago I was discussing career change with an editor for a very large publishing company who was lamenting that he was too specialized to move to another job.

“I’m like a fighter pilot,” he explained, (a little too grandly, I thought, but then editors aren’t usually known for their tiny egos) “I can only do one thing really well, so, even though I’m tired of working here, I’ll probably have to stay until it’s time to retire.”

I’ve heard versions of this fighter pilot analogy before. Older workers often feel trapped in their jobs because they think they have become so specialized they’re incapable of doing anything else. They feel useless.

Frankly, that’s bull. Since when did doing something well mean you can’t do anything else? If anything, I would think it would mean the opposite — that because you learned to do something well, you could probably learn to do something else well too.

So what they’re really saying is they’re comfortable — and afraid.

Afraid to leave the comfort of their current position, afraid to try something new, afraid to lose the prestige that comes with their experience. Maybe afraid to lose the high pay that’s accrued with their years at the firm.

On the other hand, they’re bored or burned out, tired and hopeless. So they dream of doing something else, becoming more cynical and crusty until they become an office caricature and cliche.

I know what they’re talking about. I felt that way too and I was becoming a caricature of myself.

So  I made the leap to entrepreneurship.

Of course jumping from a safe career is frightening, not because it’s so dangerous, but because it involves the unknown.

However, it’s also thrilling, exciting, and enlivening. It gives you a new lease on life. Instead of climbing into that cockpit every day and flying on autopilot, you actually have to think about what you’re doing.

It’s like being young again. So  why not approach it as a young person?

In that vein, here are some tips for grounded fighter pilots:

Design a learning path. Take your severance money, buyout plan, savings, or unemployment (if you can get it) and use it to learn how to do something else, something that interests you. They used to call this “retraining”. But in a knowledge economy it’s much more than that, it’s learning how to rethink. Adapt your skills to another setting.

Get into business for yourself. Doesn’t matter if you design it from scratch, buy a franchise, or buy into someone elses  business, you’re being an entrepreneur. Want to undertake a steep learning curve? You’ll get it — in spades — by going the entrepreneurial route.

Be ruthless with yourself: You’ll have to do some serious self-assessment after you leave the corporate nest, because, to paraphrase Rick in the movie Casablanca, “the problems of one person don’t mean a hill of beans in this crazy world”. While at your old job, you may have been able to whine about how corporate soulessness was destroying your life. Out there in the bigger world, you can’t blame anybody but yourself. So stop playing the self-centered Hamlet, and develop some much needed humility. Recognize what you can really offer the world.

Join a small company. This way you can have a job and be an entrepreneur at the same time. A small company might like and admire that you were a fighter pilot. But they’ll want you to do a lot more than that, like fly freight planes, and probably fix them them as well. While valuing experience, small companies need good generalists who aren’t afraid to take on many roles (in fact ,centering around a star specialist is often the reason many start ups fail). In a young company you’re going to find yourself working with a lot of energetic kids who are eager to learn. Your job is to provide some much needed perspective to them, not to squelch their enthusiasm.

The thinking is that without the corporate structure blocking you from customers, you can provide that expertise directly to clients.

This is especially relevant for older, i.e. Baby Boomer, independent advisers who have launched businesses because they don’t want to “retire” in the traditional sense.

This is a growing cohort of new consultants. A study commissioned by Charles Schwab & Co. Inc showed that 71 per cent of pre retirees surveyed said they wanted to work in retirement. A study in Canada that showed similar results also indicated that of that number, as many as 35 per cent said they would work as “consultants”, or advisors.

It’s a big leap when you go independent.

You may be a subject matter expert par excellence, and you may think that expertise is the reason why people will hire you. However,  it takes far more than an impressive CV to turn prospects into buyers.

When you’re an independent advisor, you are, in essence, a consultant. The consulting services business model can be much different from a customer business model, or the way a customer views your business.

So an independent advisory business requires considerable consultancy strategic planning if it’s going to survive among much bigger competitors.

The heart of this planning is an understanding of consulting business (or expertise) marketing. You have to know why people hire advisors and how that relates to you.

Here are several reasons why clients hire advisors.

1.    General expertise is definitely a big consideration. There’s nothing like a track record to convince prospects that you can deliver. However, consulting is changing, and buyers today want extremely specific expertise. You may have to ally with ancillary consultants to provide exactly what a new client wants.
2.   Problem identification is often at the top of a prospect’s wish list. Individuals sometimes can’t see what’s clear to others. And in some businesses, employees can be too close to the problem and may need an outside eye to see more clearly.
3.   Staff supplementation is also a common reason for hiring an independent. Especially in these lean times, companies often find it’s more cost effective to hire an independent than to bring someone on staff. Many new advisors begin in this area.
4.    Objectivity is another aspect of the outside eye imperative. An outsider who is free from organizational politics or individual emotions often provides objective and fresh thinking.
5.    Someone to blame. Sometimes organizations (and individuals) are reluctant to shake things up even though they know they must. So they hire an outsider for change management. The consultant becomes the coach/bad guy who keeps people on track.
6.    A designer of new business. Some companies can’t see the forest for the trees, so they bring in a creative outsider to help them develop new products or services, form an innovation strategy, or create a turnaround strategy.
7.    A great network. Yes, it’s true. Sometimes advisors are hired simply because they have a great Rolodex and may be able to connect the hirer to someone that can help them. For example, advisors are often hired to help companies find funding. Others are hired for their connection to governments.

Determine which of these form your primary areas of expertise and which are in most demand.

Then, from that you can form a consulting business strategy that’s the best fit for you.  For example, you may want to avoid attempting to be a full-service consultancy and pick one or two areas in which you have a business advantage.

Several months ago, I posted this blog about how people with active minds and multiple interests can make a living, and put out the concept on the social networking site Linked In to see what others thought about it.

I was stunned by the response.  From all over the world, people seemed so happy to be able to discuss the question and share their experience.

From New Zealand, the UK, Rome, and several locations in the United States, respondents told how they had struggled with this problem and had found various ways to cope with it.

The “Curse” of Many Minds

People with active minds and many interests generally conform to society’s demands until they reach the mid career point, when they start to chafe at being put into a single slot.

There comes a point when it’s not enough to put on the mental clothes of the job, and then change them in the privacy of our own homes.

Caught up in a world where everyone is usually jammed into a role or job description, they have to work hard to correlate their many interests with a single dominant role. Eventually they tire of the struggle.

It’s a time when many professionals or managers  consider starting their own service businesses based on their various points of expertise.

You have to scratch that itch.

Trying to ignore this thinking won’t make it go away. The thrill has gone from your profession or job because it wasn’t completely you in the first place. It was only part of you, and now you’ve grown into someone else.  That someone else has to be satisfied.

In many cases, these professionals opt out of their role completely, ignoring the single expertise business and starting businesses that offer multiple services. This makes them much happier and has the bonus of providing multiple streams of income that protect them from downturns because when one stream goes south, another picks.

That’s why many people who contacted me started a service business, sometimes an online service business, sometimes a home service business, sometimes a business support service, and sometimes all three, or two of the three.

Offering several services to different markets became their service marketing strategy. Think the dentist who also did network marketing, the project manager who also developed software, the manager who also became a sales consultant.

“I cannot be truly happy unless I fully express the range of my capabilities,” explained one man who offered services involving writing, coaching, and sometimes helping other coaches with writing. “I do what I love and what I have a talent for and the rest falls into place.”

If you’re leaving your long time gig to start your own advisory business, you’ve probably already heard all the advice about business start up.

Develop your product or service, get your systems in place, target your market, hire some sales people.  Most of all, write your business plan.

Problem is that most of it is wrong. Or to put it more accurately, it’s wrong at your stage of business.
You may do all that eventually, but  if you’re opening an independent, perhaps solo, operation that’s going to consult, coach, or offer some product or service, you have to be very aware how your “experience” can hurt as much as help your new venture.

There are several reasons for this.

1. You need time to adjust from being a worker or manager to being an entrepreneur.

2. You’re used to bigger budgets. But in your new business, you don’t have any cash flow, so spending on anything is going to put you in a big hole.

3. While you were in your old job, you didn’t have to worry about things like markets very much. They were probably already established.

In your new role as entrepreneur, you don’t know who or why someone will buy your product or service. Sure, you may encounter the odd person who is ready right now and is willing to fork over a few dollars for what you’re selling. But they’re few and far between. Most people take much longer to make a decision about a service.

So the best thing you can do in the first year of your business is pretty simple, yet is often ignored by people coming out of organizations that have large and often intricate systems in place.

You have to find customers

Too many new businesses work at making a product or service they think is the perfect solution to some vaguely defined problem.  It’s one of the main reasons businesses fail.

It’s my belief that failure happens because new business operators insist that they know their customers when they really don’t. They come at it from an experience point of view, and don’t recognize that what they think to be true doesn’t matter.

What prospective customers think does.

You can devise the greatest service existent, but if customers don’t want it you don’t have a business. You’ll find yourself in that proverbial situation where you open a store, and nobody comes in. There’s nothing more dispiriting to a new entrepreneur.

So the most important task you can undertake when starting a business is to pick a market, drill down to a particular niche in it, and then go out and talk to people you think may be in that niche who would be likely customers for your service.

This doesn’t involve offices, a team of support personnel, or a $30,000 market study. It involves you.
To truly know who will pay for the help that your service provides, you have to discover their real problems and needs.

For example, you may think their primary need is some technology implementation, since that’s what you did in your old job and that’s what you plan to do now. But it could be that it’s really something much more fundamental and crucial: They may be afraid of technology, or afraid of the discomfort that comes with learning something new. When people feel that way, they don’t buy, no matter how much you drone on about your value proposition.

After you’ve talked to enough people, you can determine some common characteristics or needs among those in your target market. And you’ll be able to speak to those characteristics and needs as one of them.

When to start marketing

You start your start marketing while you’re developing your service and when you have a clear sense of customer needs.

Begin engaging people through reading and research, physical networking, blogs and online conversations. Talk with them about issues they are facing and offer some advice. Then when they appear interested, turn the conversation to how you can help and what products or services you offer that might relieve their problem.

This is market exploration and it will let you take your stumbles early when they’re not fatal. As the saying goes, fail early.

This isn’t the traditional way of starting a business, where you have a whack of financing and all your ducks in a row before you launch. It’s slower, and requires more patience – something that’s often in short supply in these days when people promise to make you an Internet millionaire in a month.

In new business, patience is a virtue. You have to go slow to succeed. It’s not always fun, and you may find yourself confused and despairing sometimes, but I believe that’s the way it has to be.

Others may have problems with that, however. So I’d like to hear your thoughts on it.

So, it you find Retrain The Brain valuable, please re-subscribe by hitting the squiggly button at the top of this page.

I hate to see you go.

Thanks

Tony

A recent comment about a previous post sparked a discussion on a forum about how to be an adviser in a world where information is everywhere, and usually free or very low cost.

How can advisers make a living, one consultant asked, when information is so freely available? And he answered his own question by suggesting that advisers have to work the regulatory end of the market, such as where compliance is an issue, or where ongoing education is required.

I can’t disagree with that. It’s a tried and true method of consulting and many advisers survive on education and compliance work.

But that can be a pretty crowded field, and is usually dominated by established advisory businesses that have spent years cultivating the relationships that lead to that kind of steady work.

But an advisor can thrive in the world of free if they view their advisory business from the right angle.

Information May be Free. But Knowledge Isn’t

First, let’s step back a bit. Information is not knowledge. The chain goes as follows.

–Data is raw facts and measures.
–Information is data that’s organized and put in a more understandable form, like a report.
–Knowledge is information that’s synthesized with other information or knowledge to create something that’s more useable.

So, advisers should be most concerned about knowledge instead of information.

Let’s take an example. You’re an accountant who has started a business advising other businesses on some specific  tax problem. You have a specialized knowledge of all the information relevant to the subject, how it fits into the existing structure, and how it can be applied in specific situations.

Sure, some of these potential clients can find that information themselves, if they have the ability and the time. But most don’t, and so they need someone to explain it to them.

As an adviser, your marketing job is to find those people who will pay for that knowledge and service. Here are some methods

1.    Provide value. Most of that “free” information is sheer low-end marketing, and so its value is very slight. Specific knowledge about a couple of subjects is far more useful. So provide something that’s useful and people will pay for, not something that’s a commodity in the marketplace. This is what it’s all about, isn’t it? No one buys something that has no value to them, so why would you waste your time trying to sell it?

2.    Be Authentic. The old sales model is about putting on some mask and then trying to convince everybody that you’re really helping them all. But the truth is that you’re only really able to help a few. So why not say so? Open the kimono a bit and be real, caring, and human. Let people know what you can and can’t do, and how you can specifically help them. An adviser with a heart is far more valuable to a client than some nameless, featureless dispenser of information.

3.    Talk to the right people. In previous times, everything was about the mass. You formed a service and tried to sell it to everybody. But those days are gone. Today, you have to carve out a specific niche and provide your service only to that niche, which can be quite large if you are talkign about the Internet. Instead of shouting to 100o people that you can help them, and trying to force them to listen, find the 10o that really need it and talk with them (not at them).

4.    Be Patient. The world of free has made many people believe that everything has to be instant. But that’s not the nature of people who buy services. Prospective clients who are struggling with a problem need to trust that you’ll help them with it. And that takes time. You may have to be willing to be around for a while before they’re willing to trust you enough to buy from you.

Those are my thoughts on the world of free, but I’m not so arrogant that I think they are the only solutions. Perhaps some of you have some that work for you. I’d like to hear them, not only for myself, but to help others.

So feel …um…free to share.

I’m not criticizing outside-the-box thinking because it is needed for creativity, innovation, and reinvention. But when you’re in the process of transition, you really don’t have that much time for grand visionary thinking. Rather, you need to perform in one role, and envision in another.  And to do that you need  to learn to switch your mind quickly from role to another.

So today, in this post, we’ll examine the nuts and bolts of how you can do that.  Here’s the nitty-gritty of multiple role tasking.

Schedule rigorously

Most of us hate scheduling, which is why we fall off the grid often. Schedules make us feel like we’re restricted, constrained, and  mechanized, less human somehow.  But when you’re overtaxed, schedules do keep you from wasting precious time. And, if viewed as a tool and not  a prison sentence,  they can improve your life considerably.

When launching a business, you must clearly determine how many hours need to be devoted to  “doing”, i.e. producing  in your job or business , and how many hours should be designated for  thinking, dreaming, and planning your new advisory business.

Depending on how your mind works, this can mean daily, or hourly, segments, and should include time you can “steal” from some other time bloc. The important point is that YOU – and not your clients, or co-workers or anyone else who will make demands on your time– have to determine what works best.

One point you should be very careful about: No matter how much time you schedule for one role or the other, don’t let one role bleed into the other. When that happens, everything starts to get mixed up, and nothing is done well. You’ll find you’re constantly behind, and frantic, so keep the lines clear. If you don’t get it all done in time …. well … so what?

The point here is that much-ballyhooed “multitasking” doesn’t work because you can’t concentrate on two things at the same time. But serial tasking works very well, because you can switch your mind from one sphere to another. You may need a few minutes to transition, however, so, when you finish one task, take a break, go for a walk or something to clear your mind, and then come back to the new task.
Be flexible

Ok, this is where time management tools are good aids. If you try to keep all these schedules in your head or in one place, you’ll probably forget them. I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to get so involved in something, I don’t even know where I am sometimes.  So (co-ordinated) multiple schedules and logs work for me.
After you’ve divided up your time between different roles,  form task schedules for each of them. But be flexible in them. If you schedule yourself to the minute, as per a scheduler, you’ll likely break the boundaries often, which leads to frustration and eventual abandonment.  So put in the schedule a buffer between each of role or task. This may mean you won’t accurately use one of those perfectly organized schedules, with every minute accounted for. But the purpose isn’t to pass an exam on scheduling, is it? Lose the aim to be perfectly correct, and use what works.

This buffer is very important if you are trying to take on different roles in the same day, or in times chunks that abut each other. Buffers will allow you to turn off one part of your brain and turn on another.

Keep logs

For each role you’re occupying, keep running logs of what’s been done, and what needs to be done. And sketch out a few notes on how you felt while doing the task,  so that you can find areas of improvement, or areas you need to work on. This is a wonderful way to recognize your strengths and weakness and work on them.

You can do this electronically in one of the many note-taking software vehicles out there, or, if your mind works that way, on paper in various notebooks. Each evening, organize the next day’s tasks, and prioritize them. We all have a tendency to overdo planning, so attack the priorities first, because likely that’s all you’ll be able to get done.

A very important part of keeping logs is the idea log. As you’re working, ideas will continually flood into your mind, often about something in the other role. The brain likes to correlate information to all the tasks it has to manage,  so these cross-functional ideas will happen.  But if you stop to think about them, you’ll lose your focus and start drifting. So, jot them down in an idea log and get back to the task at hand. Then, at the end of each day, put them in a bigger idea log created for specific roles, or pursuits.

Idea logs are also good tools to use for the various down times you have (I hope) built into each day. When you’re exercising, or having a conversation,  or simply winding down, keep the log handy. You can record information for followup, or jot down whatever comes into your mind.

Another  idea logging tool, taken from creativity facilitation, is to force yourself into idea generation and keep a kind of white board of the results in your notebook. But we’ll get into that in another post.

Share your thoughts

In these three posts, there has been a considerable amount of information regarding how an expert can switch from one business to another. But, it’s not perfect, and probably isn’t enough.

I’m sure many of you are also struggling with this, and have devised various forms of coping. I’d like to hear them.

Sharing techniques, successes and failures is an important aspect of community, so I encourage you to please post your thoughts here. Others may learn from them.