Daily Archives: January 31, 2011

In my post two weeks ago, Business Sense, I talked about putting myself on a schedule that would allow (i.e., force) me to stay focused on specific work tasks for short periods of time.  The goal was to try really hard to stay on track for 2 weeks and see if my work habits would improve.  The other goal was to work less overall.  I printed out a timesheet and kept track of my actual hours as well as using my google calendar to visually see the schedule and send me alerts.

Guess what?  I DID IT!  I veered a little when certain things came up, and I had a couple days that I wasn’t feeling well so I pushed the schedule back or even moved a less-important task to the next day.  But overall I stayed on track and got most of the things on my To-Do list crossed off (including some I’ll get to it someday stuff).  And here’s the kicker:  The first week I worked a grand total of 15.5 hours, 18 hours in week 2.  OMG, what???

Yeah, less than a 16 hour workweek.  I checked work email a total of 3 times during the weekend and that was because I was actually coordinating a delivery on Saturday.  I spent the rest of the weekend off.  Our sales were actually a little better than normal, our shipments all went out on time, accounting and purchasing got done and customers were happy as usual.

Which leads me to wonder “what did I used to do for the other 34 hours?”  Exactly the same thing.  Just more scattered and impulsive.  I can say with Abe-honesty that I was a busy little bee every day before – no afternoons of bon-bon eating and reality show watching.  I worked with all the passion and fear that any good business owner pulls out of their (where?)… And I was scared.  If I stopped working I thought the business would stop working.  But I had to try it out.  Work smarter, not harder, ya know?

Totally worth it.

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