Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Being Your Own Employee
I thought I'd share an insight that has been dawning on me the last few days. It has addressed a weak point in my work habits. It's one that I'm sure a lot of others need to monitor themselves for.

Working from home without a boss holding you accountable gives a lot of freedom, which is good... and bad.

The shovel sellers (those who exploit those who want to run their own business by selling them business-building tools that are designed to fail and bring them back to the shovel sellers to buy more) are often quick to picture self-employment as a life of doing whatever you want whenever you want to. "Just do the things you like to do and enjoy the free time as the money rolls in."

We all know that that just ain't so.

I've found myself, though, often working as if it was. I'm not even talking about lounging around the house doing nothing for my business. I'm talking about sitting behind the computer from the time I rise until the time I go to bed and getting only a few small productive tasks accomplished.

The freedom to set one's own schedule can be an invitation to drown oneself in busy work. Preparing rather than doing. Preparing to prepare rather than doing. Preparing to prepare for future preparations rather than doing.

Et cetera.

A question I'm learning to ask myself is this: "If an employer was paying me by the hour for what I'm doing right now, would that employer be happy with the tasks I'm doing?" I feel this question applies even if we're doing work for a client at an hourly rate.

No, I'm not saying that any of us are prone to wasting our clients' money by padding our hours. But what about the non-billable time that we spend on our work -- the prospecting, the administration, the networking?

If we were getting paid for those hours, would the tasks we are doing and the way we do them please an employer? Or would an employer want us to get done, get out of the office, and not pay us for endless hours that accomplish little to nothing toward the business' goals?

I don't think I'm going out on a limb here by saying that probably everyone who reads this has some sense of not measuring up quite as well as he or she thinks they should. When we have some sort of time clock that we're looking forward to punching out from, we have the validation of knowing that someone feels we're worth whatever they're paying us for our time.

When we don't have that time clock, when we don't have that j-o-b that we're eager to get away from, our validation shifts to the work we do in our own business. And in that position, we can easily get caught between the fear that we won't measure up to those challenging tasks we need to do (that are likely the most productive), and the feeling that we need to do just a little more, spend a little more time, to justify to ourselves that we really are trying our best, even if we're not getting where we want as fast as we want.

So I'm trying more and more to "be the boss of me," and make sure that Jeff the employee knows that Jeff the employer is keeping a close eye on him -- and that Jeff the employer is making sure that Jeff the employee always has adequate guidance to make sure that he stays on productive tasks instead of busy work.
Jeff

Labels: mindset