Posted by Dave Lorenzo - Business Coach

Small business owners are forced to wear many hats.  There are times when six things demand your attention, you are feeling the pressure to crush your competitor and you are working your fortieth consecutive day.  This is when you need to take a “time out”. According to Luda Kopeikina at Projects at Work, three things can kill your business. 

Multitasking – In most business positions, multitasking is considered an essential skill. The problem with multitasking is that you never completely focus on anything. If you’ve ever tried to conduct a phone call and read an email at the same time, you know you will either miss comprehending parts of the conversation or parts of the email. You can’t fully concentrate on two things at once. Something always suffers.

Being competitive with others -Compete only with yourself. Push yourself to excel at your job, learn new skills, and develop new talents. The sky is the limit with what you can achieve. However, don’t compete against others. You have no control over how smart or ambitious or connected someone else is, so don’t waste your energy focusing on it. If you do, you will add unnecessary stress to your life and function at less than optimal capacity.

Working constantly– Through technology, we are better connected to our jobs now than ever before. This is both a blessing and a curse. Our work is with us all the time. Cell phones, pagers and laptops make it all too easy to work when we shouldn’t be. You need to save some mental, physical, and emotional resources to regenerate, think, and strategize for the future. A workaholic tendency prevents us from taking time to contemplate, focus our minds on critical issues, and use our full brain capacity to develop creative solutions. Our mind never gets a rest.

The paradox here is that these three qualities are often responsible for much of our success.  The key is balance.  When you find yourself going to extremes step back and take a brief break.  Remember why you started your business in the first place.  Focus on how it all began and remember that it was about your work life and being able to do things your way.  If you’ve become a slave to these three traits, then you have substituted one taskmaster (your former boss / job) for another. 

Filed under: Entrepreneurship - Start-up
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1. Great blog! I’ve added a link to your blog on Blog of the Day under the category of Business. To view the feature of your blog, please visit http://blogoftheday.org/page/111666

   Comment by dangerousdan99 — July 17, 2006 @ 21:26

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