It's about time ... but different
Clare Evans
Time Management & Productivity for Small Business Owners, Solopreneurs and busy team leaders. Coach | Speaker | Author. Gain clarity and focus, reduce stress and overwhelm. Make better use of your time at work, in life.
I see the challenge about time and Time Management coming up in podcasts, webinars and articles on a regular basis.
On topics and about anything and everything. From small to medium to large businesses. From financial to legal, marketing to design, education and creativity, product or service delivery and now farming!
Last week I was interviewed for?The Pasture Pod. A podcast aimed at the farming community, created by a farmer.
Not my usual audience but farming is a topic I’m fascinated by and always interested in learning more about. Avidly watching shows like?This Farming Life. They really do have it tough!
So linking with the theme of time management, I was happy to say yes. I listened to the other podcasts in the?Pasture Pod?series?“It’s About Time”?to hear what issues and challenges were being discussed.
Surprisingly, they're not that different from those my more usual audience, people like you, are facing.?But with the added complexity and unpredictability of animals, nature and the weather thrown in to the mix, making it even more challenging to ‘manage’ their time.
Many farmers work long hours, 19 hour days, 90 hour weeks!
While most of us aren’t up lambing and calving at all hours or bring in the harvest and battling the weather, there are people in a variety of businesses and industries who work 80-100 hours a week.
And I’ve worked with quite a few of them. Long working hours is a reason many people will give for wanting to make a change and getting in touch.
Few of us are rarely able to take time off because someone needs to be there to feed and care for the animals every day.
However, we can be guilty of not taking time off because we're 'too busy'. Whether it's just taking breaks during the day or taking a longer weekend or an actual holiday away from work.
Long working hours are a key symptom of an imbalance that needs tackling if you want to create good time habits.
It's about time ... but different
As I listened to the community on?It's About Time?share their trials and tribulations, their ideas and strategies, many of their challenges were familiar ... and so are the solutions:
Knowing what you want
… your long-term goals and aspirations.
Something farmers don’t often get time to think about time, in those few hours when they're not sleeping or eating.
But it’s worth spending even a small amount of time, when you can, to step back and think ‘why am I doing this’ or what do I really want?
What motivates you to get out of bed every day and do what you do??Or hit the snooze button and grab a few minutes more.
Don’t stop after the first 'why'. Keep asking ‘why’ until you get to the real, underlying reason, you do what you do. The answers can be surprising and often easier to resolve than you might think.
Too busy being busy
… or as one person on the podcast said 'being a busy fool'.
There’s a never-ending list of jobs that need to be done. Not just daily but seasonally. No sooner have you got to the end or ticked one off the list, it’s time to start again or two more have been added for each one you tick off.
Start with where you are and make small, consistent changes.
What small changes can you do NOW to make a difference next week, next month, next year?
?
Prevention is better than cure.
Rather than fixing something when it’s broken, whether that’s a piece of machinery or a process, what can you do to prevent it from needing to be ‘fixed’ at a later date?
领英推荐
Good structure and routines help prevent future problems.
I often hear this with comments like ...
(Tax returns anyone?)
?
Simplify
Mechanisation and technology has enabled farming to speed up the process of many manual tasks over the last few decades. But it can still be very resource and time intensive.
What efficiencies can you introduce to the way you work?
In farming terms, buying new machinery and stock to improve yields. Cutting out the middleman. Dealing with the consumer directly.?The number of farm shops that have sprung up and other ways farms have found to diversify and reduce their costs and complexity.
Good time skills are a key factor in the success of any business, however big or small.
How?you use your time and more importantly the choices you make with the time you have, is important and critical to your success.
We can always make more money but you can never make more time.?Treat your time as a precious resource that needs to be valued.
I think most farmers would be more than grateful for an extra hour in their day but what about you?
?
If you had an extra hour in your day, how would you spend it?
Let me know in the comments or click --> ?If I had an extra hour, I would ...
Find Out More:
Listen to the full?Pasture Pod?interview -->?here. And it's worth listening to the others in the series.
Read previous related blog posts on time management and productivity.
Are you quiet quitting or do you want to??(blog post)
Time Is Important - Use It Wisely?(blog post)
Build Better Time Habits?(online course)
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Discuss your challenges and issues, find solutions, create an action plan.?Click the link below and let's find a time that works for you.