In a recent survey of Professional Home Stagers conducted in the Summer of 2008, business owners were asked a lengthy series of questions surrounding their business practices. Most Home Staging firms are very small micro businesses most often with three or fewer people and a goodly number of one person shops.
As such they fit my definition of a Micro Business is that the person in charge needs to rely on Me, My or I for almost all their activities. And while seemingly facetious, it’s a very real situation for perhaps hundreds of thousands of very small entrepreneurs.
In the survey’s many essay questions, a common refrain revolved around the difficulty in finding time to do all the things required. Not only were these people responsible for the bulk if not all the production work, they needed to do the marketing, the procurement, the accounting, and a myriad of other tasks.
That doesn’t mention the need to maintain family relationships, find some personal time and engage in other social activities. It is difficult to apportion a lot of time to these non work roles when struggling to keep a business alive or to grow it.
Within the analysis of the survey results a section of respondents were identified as being the “Top Dogs.” These were the Home Stagers who made the most money and did the most home stagings. Of this Group of Top Dogs, only one was able to get by on less than a 40 hour week and most reported spending from 50 to 60 hours a week and more.
This is the dirty little secret of most home based businesses. While time flexibility and freedom are often the motivation for seeking self employment, the fact is many if not most work micro business people work incredibly long hours. There is just too much to do.
And thus time management is a critical topic for the micro business person to study up on in their spare time. Despite the catch 22 aspects, the need for time management is as self evident as the term time management is a misnomer. Time clearly cannot be managed. Instead we need to manage what we do with our time.
And that’s were the idea of Creative Procrastination comes into play.
For most of our lives we’ve been taught to fight procrastination. Instead we need to learn how to champion it. For most of us, we are simply trying to do too much. We need to learn to selectively and creatively procrastinate on some of our tasks to permit ourselves time to deal with the items that are most important.
Within larger organizations the rallying cry is to delegate. And that would be our answer too, but as micro businesses we sometimes have no one to whom to delegate. Instead we need to come up with other tactics to cope with our day to day tasks and the demands upon us.