Preparing for a Rainy – and Snowy – Day

I am the queen of the Plan B. I have a Plan B for everything so that I am never caught off guard. No time to get home before the gym? Spare set of gym clothes in the trunk. Longer than planned wait before an appointment? A book of short stories in my computer bag. And my number one, and usually foolproof, method for not wasting time as a small business owner is to plan, plan and then plan again. When I know what I want to achieve for the day, week, month, etc., that is half the battle of making it happen. Having a plan as formal as a business plan that is drawn from a mission statement or as informal as a list of six things on a sticky-note stuck to your computer monitor, can make all the difference in your daily success at achieving goals. But after yesterday I think I need to start working on my Plan F, the Flexibility Plan.

Yesterday was the perfect example of the need for having multiple plans of action, especially when you work for yourself. I spend lots of time in my home office but always try to balance that with time spent in my community. I had a lot of things to work on yesterday, and all of them involved chores outside of my home office. Aside from my usual Post Office runs, I had a couple of local meetings and some important errands I needed to get done. Unfortunately, Northern Massachusetts was slammed with a big sloppy snowstorm that lasted all day and well into the night and made driving difficult and dangerous. The weather advisory was not to drive unless absolutely necessary. One Post Office run was necessary but everything else could be put on hold for another day. No problem! Being the queen of the Plan B, of course I had plenty to do – actually a list of things I needed to do - in my home office on my eBay ProStore. The store needed to be pruned a bit. I needed to add new inventory, and work on its automatic sync with my eBay inventory. I also needed to upload some new photos and add some razzle-dazzle to my item descriptions. But I found that I could not access my ProStore; not only couldn’t I get into the administration page but neither could I access the store live online. My day was starting to go downhill.

Calls to ProStore’s support line only made it worse as I waited on hold. (Does anybody else hate that muzac? I would much prefer silence.) Finally, I got through to a person who told me that severe storms in San Jose had resulted in a power outage and that the entire ProStore site was down. He had no idea when the power would be restored or when or if I would get notification when it was restored. Wow, I was getting it from both coasts. It’s not like I didn’t have dozens of other things to get done, but I felt myself stymied and frustrated by the weather and the lack of being able to follow through with my plans for the day. I couldn’t think outside of the box and my lack of flexibility made it even harder to be creative with the situation I found myself in.  I am a hard worker, highly self-motivated and task oriented, but I was at a loss.

There was plenty of work I had to do on my online business and would have been able to do, even given the bi-coastal weather situation, but I found myself updating my Netflix queue, while trying again and again to get into my ProStore administration section. From there it was easy to use the Watch Instantly feature to enjoy a couple of episodes of the Colin Firth version of Pride and Prejudice (can’t get enough of it!), while playing a few games of Free Cell. It was fascinating to watch myself waste so much time on the job and a little disheartening to know I was the only one being hurt. If goofing off at work is stealing from the company, I was robbing myself! Worse, I wasn’t doing anything even remotely business-related. I wasn’t reading or responding to blogs, scanning industry-related news or even looking for a good deal on a hotel for the upcoming American International Toy Fair in New York City. There is no way I could construe my time as work-related. So much guilt led me directly to IMDB to find out in what other films I would be able to see the charming Mr. Firth and to check the FaceBook status of all of my friends, hoping to see that they were slacking off as well.  They weren’t.

Eventually I got my act together, tore myself away from Regency era England, made some phone calls I had been putting off and began to update some of my eBay and Amazon listings. Just as I got into the swing of things, I got an email letting me know that the ProStores sites were back up and I could get back to work. How I regretted the time I had whiled away!

As small business owners, most of us are accountable only to ourselves or to a handful of others and it could be easy to slack off.  I just took some time – legitimate work! -  to research this epidemic and found a few helpful websites:

• Kristine Geimure offers these great time management skills.
• This response on Entrepreneur Forums offers some great ideas on how to stay motivated as an entrepreneur. And some ideas specifically for  young entrepreneurs.
• Web Worker Daily lists staying adaptable and open-minded  among its 9 Traits of a Successful Entrepreneur.

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