- Interruptions
- Unrealistically tight deadlines
- Pressure from your boss
- Competition from colleagues
- Unreliable colleagues
- Unreliable suppliers
- Pointlessly lengthy meetings
- Overload of work
- Firing people
- Hiring people
- Travelling to and from work
- Meeting budget targets
- Worries about job security
- Interruptions: Use an answer phone; give instructions that you will only accept certain calls; make it clear what people can and should interrupt you with.
- Unrealistically tight deadlines: Agree to realistic deadlines; if you are struggling to meet them, keep the customer informed.
- Pressure from your boss: Not if you are the boss; but remember how you felt, there is no point in pressurizing people simply to exert your authority.
- Competition from colleagues: Encourage team working; make it clear that your only competition is with competing companies, not with each other.
- Unreliable colleagues: You recruit them so this is your responsibility.
- Unreliable suppliers: Develop relationships with suppliers so that they, too, feel as if they are part of your team.
- Pointlessly lengthy meetings: Don't allow them; make sure that meetings are organized, useful and brief.
- Overload of work: Working 16 hours a day can mean that you are poor at delegating or need more staff.
- Firing people: Take recruiting people seriously and invest time in finding the right person, then you may be able to avoid having to dismiss them.
- Hiring people: A sign that your business is developing.
- Travelling to and from work: Usually reduced, often eliminated.
- Meeting budget targets: Set realistic, but challenging, targets.
- Worries about job security: Simply replaced with worries about your business.
Self-employment demands a large amount of self-discipline. Nowhere is this more evident than in managing your time. The temptation to avoid doing any work is often very strong. Working at home, for example, you might prefer to do a spot of painting, hovering, read the papers or do the washing up rather than getting down to work. Sometimes you will be able to do so. On most occasions you have to get back to work -there is nearly always something that needs attention.
It is unlikely that you will work a 40-hour week. A common complaint among the self-employed is that work is often a case of feast or famine. As a result, you may find yourself working 100 hours during one week when you're deluged with work and only a few hours during the next when the work comes to an end. In many ways this sounds quite attractive -concentrated well-paid effort followed by a period of relaxation. In fact, it is far from satisfying unless you know that more work is imminent, rather than relaxing you will find yourself worrying about where the next job is coming from.
It is worth remembering that working by yourself is often more productive. If you work for an organization there are a host of distractions, from gossip around the coffee machine to pointless meetings. Indeed, if you ring half-a-dozen people in large companies it is a fair bet that at least three of them will be in a meeting at any one time. The lack of such commonplace distractions means that, generally, the self-employed are highly efficient (and when it comes to meetings are keen to get on with the real business).
This is no great achievement when one considers life in an organization. In the 1970s the Canadian management expert, Henry Mintzberg, spent time with five organizations and analyzed how their chief executives organized their time. His book, The Nature of Managerial Work, revealed managers to be hostages to interruptions, flitting from subject to subject, rarely giving undivided attention to anything. The pressure of the managerial environment does not encourage the development of reflective planners,' Mintzberg observed. The job breeds adaptive information-manipulators who prefer the live, concrete situation. The manager works in an environment of stimulus-response, and he develops in his work a clear preference for live action.' Instead of being isolated figureheads analyzing and generating carefully thought-out strategy, managers were suddenly exposed as fallible and human. They were rarely able to concentrate on a particular task for any length of time.
In contrast, the self-employed can exercise a greater degree of control over what they do and how they do it. Key to this are:
- Balancing administration with money-earning activities. Efficiency does not mean spending all your time filing things neatly away. A balance has to be struck between the day-to-day administration of your business and activities which earn you money.
- Not seeking escape into non-essential tasks. You have to recognize what you don't like doing whether it is making sales calls, doing your VAT returns or writing proposals. You can put some jobs off, but others have to be done regularly and efficiently if you are to run your business properly.
- Planning ahead. You need to try to be aware of when your busy periods are going to be and plan accordingly. If you know you are going to be busy next week, sort out your accounts now.
- Minimizing time-wasting meetings, travel and pointless sales calls. You need to evaluate how good a use of your time a particular activity is. Meetings can prove particularly wasteful. It may sound a good idea to have a weekly meeting with all your staff, but it is pointless if one person dominates or the phone keeps ringing. You have to make sure that everyone gets the most from meetings so that everyone thinks they are a good use of time.
