Set limits to the hours you work

We’ve arrived at tip fourteen in the one hundred tips to help you as you start your consulting business.

Tips eleven to twenty are all about personal effectiveness and getting organised. This is an area where I do a lot of work and about which I have written a great deal, so I hope you’re finding these tips valuable.

Today’s tip is about the hours you work.

Working long hours

When you’re in business you have long, long lists of things you know need doing. When you’re new to being in business you have limited resource, and so you decide you must do a much as you can yourself.

The result is that you work long hours.

There’s nothing wrong with putting in extra hours – sometimes – but if your business model is built around a need to have you working long hours every day, and weekends too, then that model is unsustainable.

Therefore, it’s important, from the start of your life in business, to set limits to the hours you work.

You can’t do it all

However hard you work, you won’t get everything done. It’s true. It’s often annoying, but it’s reality. Your list of tasks you know you should be working on is always there.

Working longer and longer won’t help you to tick off all the tasks on your list. Therefore, don’t try to get everything done. As well as using your time wisely also set limits to the time you work.

Think about the three very important points below as you decide just how long you are going to work each day and each week.

There are limits to what you can do

Even if you carry on working for twelve hours, or fourteen hours, or more in a day, you’ll have to accept that somewhere along the line your productivity will tail off. When that happens you’ll be more prone to making mistakes. There will come a point when common sense dictates that you should stop working.

Sometimes there isn’t a great deal of common sense around. Do you have enough to know when you’re not really achieving what you want to achieve?

If you do, you’ll stop work and take a break at that time.

If you don’t, you’ll carry on and on and on. . .

You work better at certain times

There are times of the day when you work more effectively than others. There are circumstances in which you get more done. It’s far better to be aware of these times and these situations and to do your most important work at those times than to commit to working long hours.

If you do your best work early in the morning, work then. If you need to produce high quality copy for your blog or to write an incisive report for your best customer, choose the time to work on it when you will do a good job.

This is far better than struggling on to finish the report and 2 am in the morning and then having to make extensive revisions the next day, when you’re tired because you stayed up late.

So, use your time productively.

You have a life outside your business

People who don’t run businesses often find business people rather boring to talk to. That’s because they never seem to switch off. They never seem to talk about anything but their business.

Running a business can be all encompassing. It can take over your life, if you let it.

Even when you’re new to being in business, remember you are not your business and you have an existence beyond your business. Enjoy that other part of your life. You’ll work better and more productively as a result.

Stop talking about your business.

Stop thinking about your business.

In other words, get a life – outside your business.

What to do now?

How easy do you find it to limit the time you spend working on all those tasks you have on your list of things to do? Let me know in the comments, if you have a strategy that works for you.

Please pass the word about this series of tips to people you know you are starting a consulting business. We’ve a long way to go before we get to tip one hundred.