It’s Time
It's time to spend some time talking about our relationship with time.
As I have been working one-on-one with entrepreneurs over the past several months I have started to notice some common themes. Not surprisingly, many of us have challenges around our relationship with time or money...and sometimes both (I'm in the both category, myself). Often our challenges are related to what we believe about time and money.
And, often our challenges with time and money are rooted in a mindset of scarcity.
I'm really trying to get a handle on my relationship with time, and as a result I have spent a lot of TIME lately thinking about time.
It all started when I realized that for my entire adult life when someone has asked me how I am, at least 80% of the time I have responded with "BUSY". '
Sometimes followed by a sigh, sometimes a smile, sometimes an eye roll...but always, “BUSY”. I'm somewhat mystified by how I have managed to exist for so long in this constant state of (real, or perceived) busy. Even my dearest friends are now afraid to ask me to DO anything for fear of adding to my never ending to-do list.
When I think about how I got here, I think a significant portion of it is probably genetic. I think I’m predisposed to be a do-er and on some level I enjoy being busy. I take great satisfaction in getting things done, and If I’m honest, being busy makes me feel important and as a young woman my ego needed that.
Eventually my state of busy started to collide with my role as a mother, and I found BUSY was getting in the way of my ability to be present with my children.
I remember distinctly one day, before the brewery was fully up and running and I was in full startup mode there, while still working a practically full time job at the government, I told one of my kids (who might have been 3 or 4 at the time) that I had a meeting so I wouldn't be home for bedtime. He completely melted down and said something along the lines of "I hate meetings! Why do you always have meetings?"
And so from then on, (and this will probably continue for the rest of my life), I have been working on finding a balance in how I spend my most precious resource: time. A balance between work and play, a balance between being and doing, a balance between creative and productive. And I've experimented a lot. Things are not perfect, but some days they are better. And now, on really, really, good days in my entrepreneurship practice, my relationship with time goes something like this: I get lost in my work, there are no interruptions and I bang out some amazing stuff and look up at the clock and think "Wow, it's only been 30 minutes!" But alas, most days I am still chasing time like the elusive (and scarce) mind-construct it may be.
The pandemic has made this worse. From endless pivots in our businesses to dealing with the lack of child care and the reality of home school or online learning while our recreation options have been limited, there has been no shortage of demands on our time. When I think about the challenges entrepreneurs face around time I see three primary themes:
We spend our time learning and doing things in our business that are not in our zone of genius. We want to do everything ourselves because (choose your favourite):
I can't afford to pay someone else to do this (even though I hate it)
No one else but me knows how to do this properly
I don't have time to teach someone else how to do this (for the spreadsheet geeks like me out there, that's a circular reference if I ever saw one...)
We are overwhelmed by our to-do lists. Depending on how you manage your to-do list this can lead to a number of different outcomes, from burnout to missed opportunities. We beat our heads against this wall because we believe (again, choose your favourite tune):
I am not getting enough done
I have too much to do
I am not working hard enough
We have big ideas and we make great plans that we never start. This is the real tragedy of the entrepreneur that lives in a state of busy all the time. It's the dreaded hamster wheel. Once we have our business up and running we let ourselves procrastinate the big important stuff to grow our business because we believe (choose one or all of the below):
I don't know how to do that
I'll never get that done
That is crazy, I don't have what it takes to make that happen
This morning when I got up I was just going to write one quick post about time...and it's become a novel. These are big challenges. And big opportunities to change our relationship with time in our work. As with many things (including time and money) when we can shift our mindset from scarcity to abundance, we can create big shifts in how we experience time.
More soon. Until next TIME.