Being "Productive" is Seductive...And It's Ruining Your Business

https://jamesarcher.co - Being productive is seductive. If you're a business owner, you're probably all too used to that feeling of being a firefighter—running from thing to thing, trying to solve a problem. As soon as you solve one problem, another one pops up. All day long, you're dealing with emails, texts, tasks, people asking you questions. Then you look back on your week and realize you really haven't accomplished much from a strategic perspective—none of the big things you wanted to get done—because you were just lost in the weeds doing the small stuff. At every point, it felt like you were doing the right thing: someone needed something, you didn't want to keep them waiting, you didn't want to delay your own team, you didn't want a client to have to wait, and you didn't want a problem to fester. So you jump on it as soon as possible and get that thing done. The problem is, when you do this, you're stunting your own business. Five years from now, that phone call, that email, that text message, that question that someone had—it’s not going to matter that you answered it right now or an hour later. What will matter five years from now, though, is whether you built a business that can handle those things without you operating as the firefighter in between. As long as you’re doing that, as long as you’re fulfilling that role, the business doesn’t have to build the muscles, the infrastructure, the tooling, the systems, the processes, and the reflexes to be able to solve those problems without you. Let's say you're doing sales for your business. You might get off a call and feel like you just don’t have time to take notes because you’ve got to hop on the next call. You’re hustling, hustling, hustling. As a result, you never build a robust system of tracking notes from sales calls. So when a client comes back after six months, you don’t have any notes on who they were, what they wanted, or any of that. Let’s say your team doesn’t operate effectively without you holding their hand all day, answering questions for them, and making decisions for them. You might imagine that five years from now something’s going to change, and it won’t be like that anymore. But the thing that business owners don’t realize is that they are the ones who have to change. If you stop babysitting your team, they start having to figure things out. It’s going to be tough, and in the short term they’ll mess some things up. But in the long term, you’ll begin the process of building a business that knows how to do those things without you babysitting it—without you being the firefighter or tackling everything yourself. It’s actually surprisingly common that a business owner’s apparent productivity is one of the big things holding the company back. If you want to grow, you have to let go. That’s the only way your business can build the muscles it needs to survive into the future and become a different kind of business—one that works better and more effectively, and isn’t completely dependent on you. Being methodical isn’t about being slow; it’s about deciding how your business needs to run and then actually doing that. If you decide you’re going to have the kind of business where you take notes after every sales call so you can refer back to them later, then you do that every time. Whatever doesn’t fit that can just wait. It has to wait. It has to learn how to wait. Ask yourself: What’s going to be the thing you look back on and are glad you did? That’s the thing you need to do today. It’s probably not going to be pushing off important initiatives in your business just to respond to a text message, answer an email, take a phone call, or address somebody’s question right away.