Making Time for Business Development #1
I have an image in my mind of a dinner plate heaped revoltingly full of all kinds of food. There’s pickled herring and taco chips, a combination my mother actually served to guests once. There’s spaghetti in marinara sauce with anchovies, an egg roll, cherry pie, creamed spinach, oysters and chocolate sauce. There’s blue berry yogurt, cheese whiz, acorn squash, pork loin and peanut brittle. Avocado, crab cake, pigs-in-blankets and plum pudding. I am seated, staring at this mess, and a waiter is standing beside me with a serving dish filled with bananas, steak tartar, juju bees, liver pâté and a green substance that they used to serve in school, and which I still can’t identify, all smothered in redeye gravy. The waiter is saying, “Would you like some more, sir?”
This image comes to me, whenever someone says that he can’t do any business development, because his plate is too full, already. How I loath the full-plate metaphor!
So, I will make you a deal. From time to time I will provide you with ideas for addressing the time problem. Of course, none of them will solve it; it’s the kind of thing you can only chip away at. But, if you use them, they will help. In return, you will eliminate the full-plate metaphor from your repertoire or, at least not use it in my presence. Deal?
My first suggestion came from a consultant whose career streaked upwards to a partnership in his firm. “At the beginning of every year,” he told me, “I look at what I am spending my time on. I try to identify things that I won’t be doing by the end of the year and that will free up about ten per cent of my time, which I can then apply to a higher and better use. I then work at unloading those things. Some of them take a few months and some of them the better part of the year. But I get rid of them.” That’s how he made time for business development.
Think for a few minutes on this simple idea. This is the kind of thing that successful careers are built on. It is such good advice that it’s worth unloading two or three full plates from your vocabulary.
