In the start up phases of any new venture, your input seems to be way, way , waaaay more than economic output. It seems like hours upon hours are spent in the organizing, planning and development of business models and cost benefit analyses. How then do we keep our sanity to continue the good fight? How, in today’s more democratic, more competitive marketplace- do we strike a balance between input and output. Or more prefarably, shift that balance toward the receiving of more economic resources and free time from the minimum of raw time and energy spent? It’s not alchemy, and the Universe has no law regarding equivalence of exchange between time and energy spent and the raw economic output that helps to drive the capitalist engine.
I don’t profess to have mastered any of the following yet, but I’ve come across a lot of advice in the blogosphere, and here’s some of it I feel worthy to mention and to try out.
Outsource tasks which you don’t like doing.
Now, this could be anything, simply stated. But I hope you aren’t freelancing and still hate your job. That said, I encourage you to think about the everyday tasks-some may be work oriented- which take substantial amount of time or effort to accomplish: laundry, post office runs, website/server maintenance, or perhaps child care. Now, I definitely believe that many freelancers will be used to having complete control over the work related tasks, and we believe we need it too. Truth be told, there isn’t much I can personally vouch for having delegated, but I am certainly considering having some of my clothes laundered and folded at the laundromat. I’ll give up that kind of chore pretty freely 
. The key is to identify the things which for one reason or another always endup taking an entire day, yet are necessary components of your life, or your business. If you’re lucky enough to have a partner in business, and in life, you can hopefully find a happy balance between the two of you in handling the mundane domestic affairs. When it comes to website development, geeky server protocols and language, it may be best to never get your hands on that stuff at all. If you know you don’t have the patience, nor aptitude to mess with the web hands on, hire someone to take care of it. I highly recommend it. I could’ve had my web presence as early as February-March, and been ready to market my services way before wedding season, had I done this. Instead, I wasted two or three months doing what I could on weekends, learning how to interact with servers, implement php scripts,manage them, and finally have a somewhat well integrated site in JUNE. If you’re about business, and I hope you are…then delegate all that mess to someone who does it for a living. It cost me weekends, and potential dollars that I missed out on with not having a site up and ready to promote to clients. Shucks.
Second piece of advice:
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Quit Multitasking.
Be mindful of how you consume information, twitter and facebook, namely.
The ability to multitask seems to be increasingly forced upon people today. We easily speak and think proudly of ourselves in that ability, and we esteem that ability in others. Sadly, the disturbing truth is that more and more studies confirm that multitasking diminishes our productivity. We like to think that we’re accomplishing even more when we’re juggling several things at a time, but the research suggests that we’re accomplishing even less. The invention of Quad core computer processing so easily facilitates a multitasking environment, and I’m definitely guilty of using such a machine to handle my state of M.A.D’ness( multi-attentive-disorder) on the computer. I could boast about running several multi-tabbed sessions of Google chrome, several tabs of Internet explorer open in another window, running Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop simultaneously across my Windows 7 dual monitor setup. *Sigh* But now, I know better than to boast.
Instead of multitasking, I have begun to designate each task its allotted segment of my 4 computer processors time. Things do get done faster that way, however multitasking isn’t the only detriment to productivity.
In today’s increasingly internet addicted and saavy society we are subjected to a barrage of information streams. We get to choose our poison (fodder for another days blog) but none the less, activities such as attending to our facebook homepage and twitter feeds are radically affecting our brains, and our attending skills. Like our diminished performance in handling multitasked duties, our divided attention to various information streams affects our ability to effectively focus on the task at hand. It’s a vicious cycle. Multitasking seems to cause what I coined earlier as multi-attentive-disorder M.A.D. And thanks to convenient smartphone technology, we’re afforded the ability to consume copious tidbits of information at will. Stop. The impulsivity of this manner of attention is seriously lethal to productivity, as this article of the NY Times accounts. In it, Kord Campbell neglected a message that expressed someones interest in purchasing his internet start-up company. The article also cites research which suggests that in a barrage of infomation, it becomes harder and harder to select the important and discard the irrelevant. I can attest to this becoming increasingly difficult since I joined the twitterverse, even with the moderate 50 or so users that I follow. How does one manage 500, 1000, or 1,000,000 followers? It’s literally madness.
As part-time freelancers, or full-time freelancers, it’s helpful to remind ourselves that any free time we come across isn’t meant to be stuffed with loose ends of work, whether it be some minor changes to a site design, photo processing, or photo taking. Nor should it be taken up with consuming of tidbits of infomation. We need to remember that our time truly is the valuable resource. We need to be present, and realize that there are actually other things to prioritize, like time with family and friends; doing the things we love and sharing the fruits of our labor, cuz isn’t that part of the motivation behind our whole enterprise. It’s too easy to become gobbled up by work that needs to be done, and irrelevant information streams. So, finally take note of where and how you’re spending your time. If you can delegate a task, do so if you can afford it. Someone else will happily take that economic fuel to create their own version of happiness.
[...] it might be, that they’re actually right about this.I wrote previously about the perils of multi-tasking and balancing life, which quite honestly is still a struggle; though I do earnestly believe I’m a better [...]
[...] wrote previously about the perils of multi-tasking and balancing life, which quite honestly is still a struggle; though I do earnestly believe I’m a better [...]
[...] wrote previously about the perils of multi-tasking and balancing life, which quite honestly is still a struggle for me; though I do earnestly believe I’m a more [...]
[...] wrote previously about the perils of multi-tasking and balancing life, which quite honestly is still a struggle for me; though I do earnestly believe I’m a more [...]