Here’s the deal…
Your creativity is your competitive advantage. It’s innate. You’re born this way.
The problem is that as an entrepreneur you have so much ish on your plate that finding time to nurture your creativity and express it through your business becomes a low priority. Or, it may not even be a priority all.
I watched this webinar led by one of my favorite business strategists Tara Gentile on the topic of “5 Ways to Make the Time to Grow Your Business”. I loved that Tara focused on reallocating the time you already spend on your business (by being more strategic) instead of wrangling more time to work on your business.
You may be:
- Building a business while working full-time
- Balancing your business with family life
- Running multiple businesses
- Volunteering in your community
The truth is, you may not actually have more time.
Tara taught us that we need to edit out time-wasting activities in our business that aren’t aligned with where we are headed.
What can you edit out of your business?
That question resonated with me and I immediately went to work. I did a little exercise that I wanted to share with you.
First, I made a list of what my ideal business looks like. My list included:
- Serving clients
- Building a successful law + biz blog
- Teaching small group, in-person workshops
- Contributing regularly on law/biz/innovation to a major publication
and a few other things.
I challenge you to ask yourself this question and list everything out that you want:
What does my ideal business look like?
Next, I asked myself these questions:
- What are all of the tasks + projects I’m doing now in my business?
- What are the projects that are on the horizon for my business?
- Why am I doing each of these things?
The key here was to not overthink but to make a laundry list of everything that came to mind. I quickly discovered that some tasks I was doing because I felt like I had too and others I was undertaking out of fear.
I’ll explain…
How many times do you pile on to-do’s because:
- Someone else said you absolutely had to do [insert a task/project]?
- You saw someone else doing [insert a task/project] and thought you needed to do it too?
I think we’re all guilty.
When asking myself that hard question: Why am I doing this? I discovered that the biggest offender was social media. For example, Pinterest does absolutely nothing for my business, it’s not really tied to that business vision, and I don’t absolutely love it, but I’m over there because I thought I should be.
That’s not a good enough reason.
Pinterest is getting the ax. I’ll keep the profile up only because it doesn’t make sense to delete it.
Over the last 8 months or so, I had fleshed out this really great way expand services [insert sarcasm]. Guess what? That got the ax too. This exercise made me realize my decision to add these niche, bundled services was actually motivated by fear. Fear that my business couldn’t sustain on my current business model. That’s absolutely not true. I realized that instead of putting energy into taking on new projects, I needed to edit that out completely and use the time to enhance what I’ve already created.
Going through this simple exercise allowed me to remove three major projects and one social media platform from my plate.
It feels darn good already.
So now, I’m able to reinvest that time in my creative work that is directly tied to my business vision + growth. For example, I can now really dig deep into Instagram and Periscope which is where I’ll spend my social media time. Those are the outlets that really allow me to bring value to my online peeps in my creative way. Also, I can love on this blog more which is how I share law + biz in my way.
Again, this all matters because…
Creativity is our competitive advantage.
I’d love for you to do these exercises for yourself. Join me on Periscope (Follow me at creative_esq) and tell me what time wasters you discovered in your business.