Never Enough Hours in the Day

Posted On: 2012-11-16

So you've taken a break to read today's column ... just a short one because right now you're absolutely flat out with so many things to do there just isn't enough hours in the day?

Well I have to say that I understand where you're coming from and so does my partner Steve. Every morning Steve skims through a few of the social networks looking for interesting stuff to read through the day. When he finds a link that looks interesting he opens it in a new tab and then goes back to it through the day and deletes the tab once he's read it.

It sounds like a great way to keep up to date with the news and stay current with all the latest ideas and suggestions for everything from marketing to web design along with search engine optimisation and even photography. And it is a great way to keep up with the latest in all those areas that are important to us but today Steve discovered that he had 118 tabs open in Firefox and some of them have been open for a week or more.

We've been so busy that Steve hasn't had a chance to go back and read those articles through the day. So if you're finding it hard to keep up with all the latest developments and still get all the work done that you need to do just to put food on your table then you're not alone and I'd love to be able to offer you a solution ... but I can't.

Of course I've talked for years about working smarter rather than harder and if you're not automating as many processes as you can then you really are wasting your valuable time. I can remember not all that long ago suggesting that anyone who was using WordPress as the basis for a standard website was lazy but guess who hasn't written a single line of HTML in the last six months and now churns out standard websites using WordPress and the myriad of plugins that are now available for that content management system?

But then there are things that you just can't automate. I love using ZenCart for all the online shops that we're building for clients and for ourselves and there are a lot of things that program can handle without a lot of input from us ... but there's also a heck of a lot of stuff that has to be done in ZenCart by one person sitting in front of a computer monitor for hours ... and that's even before you start adding the products.

So what do you do? Do you hire somebody to do the grunt work you can't automate and that takes up so much of your time? That's one solution but it's certainly not the perfect solution because when someone is working for you, at best you're only getting 80% effort from them ... and even less if you're paying them minimum wage. And then you'll find that most people you hire aren't going to be as accurate with their work as you are ... and some are going to be downright cheats and using them will damage your business rather than improve it.

Up until recently here in my business we had two graphic designers that we used ... one had been with us for a few years now while the other only started with us about 12 months ago. A couple of weeks ago I was searching through one of the stock photo sites looking for a particular image that I needed for a customer's website and much to my surprise I came across a logo ... not just any logo ... but one that we had paid one of our graphic designers a lot of money to produce for a client's website.

And then a few days later ... while searching for another photo ... I came across a second logo ... and this one was just like the first. It seems that our long-standing graphic designer had decided that he would take the easy route when it came to designing something that was supposed to be exclusive and simply grab it from the stock photo site ... not once but twice.

I guess he hoped that we would never see them tucked away among thousands and thousands of images but his hopes were in vain because I found both of them. Needless to say he is not getting any more work from us.

So what do we do to overcome the problem of too many things to do and too little time? I wish I knew and if you ever discover the solution be sure to let me know