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We hear about how people tend to treat the urgent as important, as an emergency. Business coaches preach prioritization and boundaries, saying “no” or “yes, but …” or “yes, later …” But what about when we get really good at ignoring maintenance in favor of deadlines?
Freelancers have a different relationship to urgent than office workers — deadlines, solo work mean fewer email issues (at least for me), interruptions are more likely to be household tasks or mail delivery than coworkers popping in to chat. We also have more responsibility toward our business infrastructure, as we’re reception, accounting, IT, marketing, and human resources all rolled into one. Not maintaining our infrastructure can have annoying results in the short term and catastrophic ones in the long term.
Putting things off seems like good sense when you’re stressed about an upcoming deadline. After all, you have a few days or even a week clear on your calendar between projects that you’ll use to take care of all the things you let pile up. What happens to me is a new project comes in and eats up that blank space, or I’m so wiped out from the deadline that I don’t do anything for three days.
So what do we do when we want to say, “I’m too busy”?
My favorite general plan is to figure out a specific time of day to do these routine tasks, and stick to it, even if I’m on a tight deadline. I do administrative work in the afternoons — invoices, checking PI’s LinkedIn account, archiving completed files. It serves as a break during a low-energy time, and having a set time (2:30 pm) makes taking care of these tasks automatic, even when on a deadline.
But say you’re in the midst of a deadline, and all kinds of unrelated tasks are piling up and they’re stressing you out. You don’t already have a routine in place, and you’re in a triage situation now. How you do decide what to deal with anyway, and when you really are too busy?
Questions to ask yourself
- Will this save me time later?
- How long will this really take? You can get better at estimating this if you track your time regularly.
- What will happen if I ignore it? Your kids may have to get dressed from the laundry baskets — not really a problem.
- How many times has this issue come up? Does it happen every time you open a file, and you ignore it every time, only to regret it the next time? Updating software, for example, or an annoying preference setting or template that gets automatically loaded.
What you can do about it
- Schedule a specific time in the near future to handle it, and honor that schedule. Write it down, make an appointment in your calendar, whatever you need to do.
- Stop what you’re doing and do it now. Make a note of what you were doing so you interrupt your work minimally.
- Ignore it again, but make a note of it so you don’t forget to do it later.
- Set aside time to tackle nagging tasks. Batch tasks for certain things you often ignore.
Things we often ignore
Email. We read it, then don’t respond for days. Sometimes this works; the person on the other end solves their problem on their own. Sometimes, though, the person on the other end finds someone else to solve their problem, which costs us business. Maybe that’s ok, maybe that’s a disappointment — you have to decide that for yourself. Consider creating a file of boilerplate email responses you can use for common requests, or to let someone know you’ve gotten their message and will respond at XYZ time (or to contact you again).
Non-urgent financial stuff, like organizing receipts. Important things, but not on the same level as invoicing or paying bills. This is the sort of thing it’s good to set up a standard process for, to keep it from piling up.
Learning new software skills. I keep meaning to learn a handful of useful patterns in CINDEX, my indexing software, for common things I search for (two capitalized letters at the beginning of a word, the wrong kind of punctuation, etc).
Learning new business skills.
What kinds of things do you put off? Are you a “do it now” or “do it later” kind of person?
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