Balancing Your Business with Your Business Growth Goals

April 22, 2010 by +Marj Wyatt
Filed under Business Basics, Entrepreneur Mindset, Featured

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We all set Goals in some form. At the time we establish them, they feel exciting and new. Sometimes are goals are set with a purpose of diverging from our ordinary daily lives. These sorts of ideas enthuse us, no matter what they are related to.

One such goal could be to branch out in your business. Many pursue the goal of passive income and this doesn’t always entail joining a business opportunity or MLM, thank goodness. The difficulty that exists, however, is that you can become swept away by your primary income-earning activities because you enjoy what you do, have built a reliable reputation and you like the people with whom you are working.

My primary business is project based. A very high percentage of that business is returning customers with new projects. If the experience of working with them in the past was mutually beneficial, as well as being fun, I have no qualms about taking on their requests. On the other hand, there are some clients whose projects I can’t wait to finish and with whom I will not work again.

New projects and cash flow are great to have, and hard to say no to. But, with only 24-hours in a day, you begin to wonder if you are spreading yourself too tasks to forego are the ones that aren’t producing income for you yet . It is true that you can outsource some aspects of your business but, when YOU ARE THE COMMODITY that people are seeking, you ultimately must decide if you want to decline new business so you can stick with your business building plans.

This is what I lovingly refer to as a Creative Conundrum.

The best strategy that I’ve found for achieving balance between what I have and what I want is to list all of the things that I want to do, as well as the things that I must do, on a schedule of some sort. Don’t forget to set aside “me” time.

Blocking time is not a new concept but it works. In fact, this was the basis of Steven Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Among other things, Covey recommended establishing your task list, prioritizing those tasks and checking them off or updating their status on a daily basis.

A little more tedious, but also helpful, is keeping some sort of log on how your time is being spent. If you do this for a week or so, you will notice patterns in your days and where you are spending time that takes away from your business building or income generating activities.

Once you have a handle on how your time is being spent, you are in a position to determine what you can spend less time on, or possibly stop doing, so you have more time to pursue your creative goals. Those are the things that you really wanted to do when you imagined them, right?