Working On the Business vs. In the Business

This post is Day 17 in the 31 Days to a Super-Purposeful Schedule series.

We've made it to part 3! Before we move forward, let's review.

In part 1, we took a "before" picture and talked about what might need to be edited out of our schedules. Then we made some crazy goals, experimented with block scheduling, created a few habits and hopefully made some space to breathe. 

In part 2, we chatted about this concept of batch processing tasks in order to be more efficient. We applied this method to our online content, cooking and cleaning work we do at home. And also made it work for a few key areas that easily stress us out like emails, photos and those big creative projects.

For the next 7 days, we're going to be talking all about SYSTEMS. 

I'm so excited to talk through this next section with you because it's really helpful to learn early if you run a blog or business. If you're like most entrepreneurs, small business owners, and bloggers you're great with the technical side of things. But everything else kind of gets pushed to the back burner.

For example: If you're a photographer, you might naturally spend more time and energy photographing then you do working on your Photography Business. Or if you're a blogger, you probably spend more time and energy blogging then working on your Blog Business. You spend the majority of your time working IN the business instead of ON the business. 

"Aren't they kind of the same thing?" Some of you might wonder.  

While it's true that you wouldn't have a business if it weren't for the technical side of things, it's actually only a small part of what needs to be done. I've talked a little about the three other roles you might play in your business in this post. Sometimes we so naturally excel at this one role of creating, producing, building, writing, etc. that we forget about everything else. And it's that "everything else" that starts to turn into chaos if we aren't purposeful about making time to manage it.

Let me ask you this: If you were to have an emergency come up or wanted to take a long-term sabbatical break from your business, could you hand the entire thing off to someone else? Is your business organized enough to take you completely out of it for a time? Do you have operating manuals, guidelines, workflows and recordkeeping down to a science so that you don't have to be micro-managing your help for it to run smoothly? Systems are what make that possible.

Then even if we really DO want to be there working on our own the majority of the time, systems help us prioritize that time with the best tasks. I'm just starting to get a handle on this concept so right now I'm setting aside over an hour a day to get my systems in order. Once they're in place it frees me up to be able to separate myself from my work. I'm obviously still learning, but this week I'll share specific examples of how we can start to make systems work for us. 

Today's action step: 

Evaluate your business beyond just the technical side or production side. Does it feel like things are running smoothly, giving you extra time and peace of mind? Or do you feel like things are falling through the cracks and it's really tough to keep up? (*Note: if you're already subscribed and are having trouble accessing this page, email me for a refresher on the password. xo)