What Entrepreneurs Do on a Snow Day

I never had the privilege of participating in the undergrad high jinx of my alma mater’s annual Groundhog Day celebration. (Being a commuter student on a live-in campus is serious non-fun.) I’m told the festivities consisted largely of drinking beer on a wooded lot near the campus, but these days it seems to have turned into a full-fledged, capital ‘e’ Event. I remember with fondness and a little jealousy the enjoyment I saw my academic colleagues having every year on this date as they stumbled into class wearing watch caps and muddy shoes. There was little or no discussion of Punxsutawney Phil, but something unusual had definitely happened in that ever-so-serious environment.

Even then, though, holidays were something I tended to overlook in the task list. Holiday? Snow day? Time to catch up on the pre-reading and maybe log some overtime on the night job. Heck, there was never so much snow in Texas that you couldn’t work someway if you were committed to it.

The Groundhog Holiday (or “Observance,” if you prefer) also makes me think of the wonderful movie, “Groundhog Day” with Bill Murray. Now, this one is never going onto the classics lists with “Citizen Kane” or “Gone with the Wind,” but it does convey a message of doing and redoing what matters until you get it right to which a lot of us – especially the entrepreneurs – relate.

So, what do entrepreneurs do on a snowy Groundhog Day? We re-do things!

During the last few weeks of inclement weather, the Coach and I have been making hay while the sun fails to shine.When you work for yourself, you may run short on time but you never run short on potential improvements. Providing a better and better place for accomplishments to happen is key to the environment we want for our clients as well as for ourselves. It’s this relentless, fanatical commitment to and fascination with what you do that makes the risks of owning your own business plausible and, in the end, supremely rewarding. So, rain or shine, we do and re-do what we do, always striving to produce a place for excellence to happen.

Over the last several weeks, we have been busily at work revamping the JUMProductions website. Clients have always known there was good stuff there, but if you go there, you’ll see that the look has changed a lot. More visual thanks again to our contributors and a little better layout. We’d been told we weren’t making what we actually do for people obvious enough, so we’ve re-worked it. We hope this is better.

So what about the Groundhog?

The bigger Groundhog message, for me, is that if you find yourself reworking and revising and tweaking stuff, if people who aren't of the same mindset as you wonder why you don’t just “give it a rest,” don’t argue with them, but don’t give yourself any grief over your personal desire to produce something astonishing either. You’re not alone. That burning desire for the best from ourselves can make the work a reward in itself and our achievements confirmations of time well spent. We know many people like that, and we like them a lot.

As to the site, if it’s not just right, we’ll just do it again!

(By the way, in case you missed it, this was the soft rollout of the new site.)

Productivity Tricks

I've read lots of "time management" books over the years, and there are two that stand heads above the rest: Getting Things Done by David Allen and Put More Time in Your Life by Dru Scott. Neither of them deals with the traditional strategies of writing a to-do list every day or prioritizing things as A-B-C (an approach that never seemed to work for me). I've tried time-logging, using daytimers, and so forth, but such programs never deal with the real problems around getting what all of us really want, i.e., peace and results, outcomes which are often presented as options between which we have to choose. I've never accepted that dichotomy. I've always believed that there is a way to have them both.

Dru Scott came into my life long before Allen. What I learned from her was that the real source of a lot of our productivity issues is the illusion that when we stopped being six years old, we also stopped being a six-year-old. Just because we have this bigger, stronger body doesn't mean the "inner child" (my apologies to all who had WAY too much of that in the 70's and 80's) has just gone away. That little kid keeps showing up, and he WILL have his way. So we learn to take care of the kid, to negotiate just like we do with the small six-year-olds, so that we can get some adult stuff done. It's not useful to punish that child or to make stern demands. It's not even about "discipline." It's more about finding ways to get real needs met so we can more effortlessly get stuff done.

Allen addresses the pitfalls created by unnatural systems that just don't work. Things like A-B-C prioritization SEEM to make sense, but they miss the essential way that people naturally get things done. How do you "A-B-C" 250 plus emails a day? How do you "A-B-C" the kid's recital, the boss's demands, and your love life? Life just doesn't work that way. The stress is still there. Some of Allen's genius is developing organic and natural ways of sorting things as they come in so that you can deal with them in the way you actually live your life. It requires some serious rethinking of how things work; but, when you get it, things are totally different.

When I've introduced new ways of thinking like Scott's and Allen's to people I work with it's both fun and amazing to see them change. Sometimes it's like watching someone age backwards as the stress falls away. Often they are simultaneously giddy and puzzled as they find themselves moving faster, more easily, and more enjoyably though projects and goals. More than once I've done a summary of what someone accomplished over a three month period and their jaw has dropped visibly.

That's really fun!