@andy I really enjoyed The 4 Hour Work Week. It’s got some really great advice on working less and doing more. Although I didn’t have much luck with the strict email policy. A lot of people consider email to be an instant form of communication and can get pretty upset if you take too long getting back to them.

Great post. I’m in a process of looking at this for myself too!

Busy is such a bad word isn’t it? We all seem to think that being busy is good. I believe my business coach when he says that we’ve learned this mindset from our stint as employees, who have to perfect the art of being “busy”. Unfortunately, as business owners, the market doesn’t care how busy we are, but on our results.

His advice was to start defining how well our day went based on our results, rather than how busy we were. It’s a hard habit to break, but I’m working on it.

My first positive change this week was to not answer my emails as soon as I turned on the computer. I now check them at 12:00 and 16:00 (as per the “4 Hour Work Week”)… and what a difference it has made!

Best of luck and keep us updated with this one! We all need help redefining our definition of productive.

Andy

I’m just wondering how you’re managing BNI referalls in all of this? I would imagine that you get quite a few of them, I felt that I was under pressure to turn around proposals all the time which detracted from the work that was actually paying. Hence I ended up in a situation like you’ve described above, mostly because I didn’t know how to say No but also because I didn’t know how to make the call and say ‘Yes I’ll do the work but in 2 months time’. It’s been an important lesson for me now that I have the luxury of hindsight.

Phil

You’re absolutely right about the week filling up on it’s own. It’s really another form of Parkinson’s Law which says that ‘Work will expand to fill the time available for it’s completion’.

I first heard of this when studying for my Leaving cert, where we all aimed to peak right on the day of the exam. As did everyone else. It just wouldn’t have made any sense to stop studying for the exams a month before they started. We studied right up until the deadline, because that’s how long we were given.

Work is like this too, if you stay sitting in your seat, you’ll find work to do until it’s time to go home. The trick is to choose work that’s urgent and important. The book The Seven Habit’s of Highly Effective People describes this method of time management in a lot of detail. It’s definitely worth a read.

Good post, its appropriately timed for me too, I’m always interested to learn how others manage their projects. Since going out on my own this summer I’ve taken on plenty of projects. I’m learning the value not only of daily work time, but also the value of taking the time away from the computer on a Sunday.

I continue to read books on personal productivity such as Mark Forrester’s ‘Do it tomorrow’ (I’ve even taken to listening to them in audio book form in the car to and from the office). For me the key is to be able to allocate my time more efficiently. There are periods of the day now where I don’t check my email and I always try to schedule meetings so that I have days of meetings and days without meetings for coding and planning.

Overall, I think fore-planning is the key, if you don’t plan a day or a week, it will fill up on its own.

Thanks for the comment. My guess is that there’s a lot more people out there with the same problem. They just won’t admit it.

I’ve found that a combination of Google Calendar and Basecamp is a great way to help you get yourself and your team organised. Add some active client management on top of that and I think you’ll see a vast improvement. We definitely did.

Saying g’day from Australia.

A friend sent me this blog post and i must admit you have summed up my life perfectly. Always so busy, juggling 6-7 projects at one time, making un-realistic promises which see’s me working to all hours of the night!!!

In the coming months i too hope to put better structure and schedules into my project management, and like you said, the client is usually fine with it as long as they know it will get done.

Good luck with your business!!!