I was having a conversation via Skype with my cousin Ed, an entrepreneur who runs Natural Merchants, an importer of organic foods and wines from Europe to the USA. He lives in Spain. It was 1:00 AM for me on a day that had started at 6:00 AM, and 10:00 AM for him on a day that had started at 5:00 AM and would end around midnight.
Ed is just getting into using social media to expand his customer base (if you like organic European wine and foods, you should become a fan of their page on Facebook), and we were chatting about some of the tools he could use to make his life a little easier as a social media newbie. The conversation came around to the same question it always does: where am I going to find the time?
And we agreed on the answer: if you want to add to the mix of what you’re doing, something else is going to suffer. This goes back to the discussion about work/life balance from a couple of weeks ago. Remember: there is no such thing. Building or growing a business means extra work, and extra work means you won’t have time for something else.
That’s not a bad thing; it just is. Accept it as a fact and move on to deciding what you’re willing to sacrifice to squeeze in that extra work. If you’re not willing to sacrifice anything, forget about committing to the additional work. You can’t do both, at least not with our current understanding of space/time.
For me, I’ve decided to shave an hour or so off my sleep routine. This has a cumulative cost, and I know that every couple of weeks I’m going to have a morning where I sleep in a few extra hours. I shoot for Sunday, but it doesn’t always work out that way. I fought it for a long time, and suffered as a result of my stubbornness. Since I learned to just roll with it, I got rid of the guilt and made my life that much easier.
And I think that’s part of the answer, too. Whatever you decide to do, you’ve got to arrange things so that you don’t feel guilty about what you’re doing. If you’re working late on a new product and feeling guilty the entire time because you had to miss your kid’s soccer game, are you really going to be performing at your peak potential? Probably not, so don’t so that to yourself. It’s a recipe for disaster.
Communication is key. You need to let the people around you know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how long you plan to be doing it for. If your loved ones know what to expect, it’s less likely that there will be drama to undermine your efforts. Everyone involved should be in agreement about the rules of engagement, and you should do your best to live within those rules, so define them carefully.
When you commit to your entrepreneurial dream, you need to be ready for some changes. Don’t operate under the illusion that everything in your life will be the same as you try to build your business. Rarely does that happen. The good news is that if you’re prepared for the changes, they’ll be easier to deal with.
And don’t worry too much about losing a little sleep. Sleep is overrated, anyways, and you’ll have plenty of time to catch up on your rest when you’ve created the business of your dreams. In the meantime, be ready for some hard work, and a whole lot of fun, too.
[...] written here before about the fact that I don’t really believe in work-life balance. I’ve made a conscious decision that, for the foreseeable future at least, I’m going [...]