When you own and operate your own business, you are in charge of just about everything. Many home – based professionals just do not have the resources to outsource tasks like advertising, filing, billing, and the like. Of course, you are also in charge of producing the product or service that your business provides. Home – based professionals and other entrepreneurs often find it difficult to balance these two distinct groups of activities, the ones that can be categorized as “working on your business” and the others, which can be categorized as “working at your business”.
There is definitely a difference between the two types of work. Working at your business produces the products and services that your customers want and need. It is important to produce those things, but without also working on your business by doing things like creating invoices and sending out bills, you will not get paid for the work that you worked so hard to produce. Likewise, without making time for answering phone calls and emails, advertising, bookkeeping, and other “working on your business” items, there may come a time when you run out of work to do because you have not attracted enough new business or repeat projects from current customers.
There is no magic formula for how much time to spend working on each group of tasks. Some work takes a lot of time to produce, and some does not. Some “working on your business” tasks are time consuming, while others take only a few minutes. The important thing to remember is that you must attend to both areas. If you keep that in mind as you plan out your daily and weekly work schedules and you make sure that you have planned to do some of each type of work, then you are well on your way to maintaining a balance between working on your business and working at your business.
Photo by PatriciaEGreen2 on Morguefile.com.