Mary Cravets

Seven Strategies to Manage Business Stress

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1. Find ways to make other people smile. I read a novel recently, and a character said, “Winning makes you feel great. Helping someone else win makes you feel great, longer.” Helping others gets you out of your own stress.

2. Create standards. Standards put priorities into practical application on a daily basis. In other words, they let you design your life. For instance, my standards include a definition of an ideal client, a minimum number of yoga classes per week and a maximum number of caffeinated beverages per day. Your list may also include specific business activity, such as a number of phone calls to clients or prospecting activity daily.

3. Address “nags” promptly. If there are things in your life that are nagging at you, such as bad news you have to break, or even just purchases waiting to be exchanged, take care of them. These little nagging tasks are incredibly draining and reduce your ability to deal with normal stresses.

4. Create systems. Creating systems – written step-by-step processes – reduces stress in two ways. First, it allows you to complete tasks without spending as much mental energy figuring it out each time.  And second, when it’s time to delegate the task, you spend less time explaining it to your assistant. This ties in directly to the next strategy.

5. Delegate. My guideline for delegation is simple: if it doesn’t require your personality or expertise, do everything you can to delegate it. Delegated your data entry and bookkeeping, and see if you don’t feel 20 pounds lighter! For most of us, delegating does not come naturally*, but it is absolutely worth it!

6. Go easy on yourself. Every single person I know, including me, is harder on themselves than on any other person in their lives. Accomplishments we’d congratulate others for, we judge as not good enough in ourselves. Really take a look at self-judgment, and give yourself a pat on the back for all of the great things you do.

7. Let it out, carefully. Don’t keep everything inside, but be selective who you confide in. Go to people who you know will sympathize, but who will also encourage you to move beyond the stress, and into solutions.

*Teaching delegation strategies is one of my areas of expertise. Please get in touch if you’d like some help.

I Didn’t Want to Write This

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On Tuesday I scheduled myself to write an article for my ezine, and found myself struggling. Now it’s Thursday morning, and it just hit me that my struggle to write provided me with perfect topics for this week’s article.

As I mentioned, on Tuesday I was scheduled to write this article. It was the first item on my list, but all I could do was sit there and stare at my computer. Nothing was coming to me. I started fiddling around with email, looking at old articles, going on Facebook… and before I knew it, the day was almost gone. I hadn’t written an article, and because I was stuck on the idea that it MUST be done first, little else on my list was accomplished either. Added to the mix were my feelings of failure and frustration, and I had a recipe for an all-around bummer of a day.

The lesson? Keep your priorities in order, but if something isn’t working, move on, rather than losing your momentum.

The process of article writing has been a great teacher. As you know, I am forever getting writing ideas from the day-to-day happenings in my life (see current article). One thing I’ve learned the hard way is that when the mood to write strikes, I MUST drop everything and write. This habit developed out of sheer frustration from being too strict of a time manager. Here’s what I mean. I’d be working on a task and suddenly come up with a great idea for an article. In the past, I’d stick to my guns and keep working on the task at hand, trusting that I’d remember the idea and write the article later. But that never happened. Many “aha” moments of inspiration were lost forever.

The lesson? If you’re in the middle of something, and suddenly find yourself motivated to do a task that you generally find challenging – take advantage of the moment and do it!

Now it’s 7:15am on Thursday and I’m finally in the process of writing this week’s article. The ezine goes out at 10:30am, and I was just thinking, “Well, I’m not inspired to write, so maybe I’ll work on something else for a little while.” That’s valid, right? Because I’m not INSPIRED. But the fact is that this ezine is an integral part of my business plan, and is due to go out shortly. So I’m muscling my way through it, hoping I’m coming up with a few useful tidbits for you.

The lesson? You can’t be inspired all the time, so sometimes it’s time to push through and do what MUST be done.

Do you find some of these lessons contradictory? Yep – welcome to life! This is the challenge: knowing when to use each lesson. Am I inspired to write or avoiding my accounting? Am I appropriately muscling through an article or am I pushing too hard and coming up with garbage? Am I moving on to keep my momentum or dodging a necessary task?

I’d love to hear how you deal with these kind of conflicts, either in this blog or in a short session with me. I’m happy to give you 15 minutes of my time to sort out the contradictions. Just contact me!

Batch Instead of Distract

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Recently I spoke to the Ventura Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners about Virtual Assistants, and the topic of “batching” tasks for efficiency came up. I found this article I wrote in September of 2009 back when I was still doing Virtual Assistance work myself.

Last week I had a very rude awakening. I woke up early, got right to work and put in a solid 4 hours before lunch. I then added up the hours I’d billed for actual client work and they totaled just one and a half hours!

WHAT?!? I worked all morning and could bill for less than half of my time? How did that happen?

The answer is distractions. I’ve written about this before, with phone calls and emails being the biggest culprits. But after this recent experience, I realized that I needed to upgrade my skills and start “batching” my tasks.

Batching means grouping together similar tasks and doing them all at once, but on a less frequent basis. For instance, instead of checking email constantly, check it just twice a day. Or instead of paying each bill as it arrives, put them aside and pay them twice a month.

  • What is the true value of batching?
    There is an unavoidable mental lag time that happens when you shift your attention back and forth between different tasks. According to experts*, the cost of distractions is over 25% of your time (in my case, it was over 50%!). When distracted, you may require up to 45 minutes to resume the major task that was interrupted.

I encourage you to make the effort to implement batching in at least one area of your work. Where else can you get a 25% return on your investment?

* The Cost of Not Paying Attention: How Interruptions Impact Knowledge Worker Productivity, Jonathan B. Spira and Joshua B. Feintuch, quoted in The 4-Hour Work Week, Timothy Ferriss

Values in the Small Decisions

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One of the best books I every read was Stephanie Frank’s The Accidental Millionaire. For me, the most impactful part of the book was an exercise that helped me determine my values in life. I won’t try to explain it here, because I won’t do it justice. Suffice it to say that “values” in this context means “what is most important to me in my life”, rather than “virtues”.

What this exercise did for me is set up a kind of internal compass, so that when I’m making decisions in my life, both personal and professional, all I have to do is look at my top three values and see which decision is in alignment with my values. Mine happen to be:

  • Freedom and travel
  • Impact on others
  • Experiencing new things

Why do I bring this up? Because over the past few years, I’ve found this tool invaluable when navigating big decisions. But recently, I’ve noticed some of the small decisions I make on a daily basis are not in alignment with my values.

This occurred to me on a recent Saturday when I was out hiking in Sedona with my husband. We found a beautiful secluded spot by Oak Creek and dangled our feet in the water, basked in the sun, and enjoyed the view. In a word – idyllic.

When we got back to the car, the first thing I did was check my email. A few messages came in, my adrenaline spiked, and the peace I’d just experienced was diminished in an instant. That one small act was TOTALLY out of alignment with my #1 value of freedom – I mean, it was Saturday, for goodness sake! Was someone going to have a coaching emergency, and send me an email about it? How on earth would this add to my freedom?

An absentminded minute, that’s all it was, but these small moments add up to form a lifetime, don’t they?

I’m committing to being more vigilant about how I spend my time. In fact, I’ll work on changing how I think from “spending” to “investing”.  I challenge you to do the same – and feel free to share your experience!

Am I Slacking?

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My company is growing and in order to continue the growth, I have to spend some time on business development. To make sure I follow through, I committed one day a week (Wednesday) to focus on business development, client relations and marketing.

Recently, still a little woozy from my fast-paced vacation, it wasn’t until Tuesday night that I realized that I needed to create my newsletter. Now I had a dilemma – do I spend Wednesday creating articles for my newsletter (forgoing my business development day), or do I stay committed to my new plan?

I got a little creative, pulled information from great resources for my newsletter and found a way to stay committed to my new plan without losing the consistency of the newsletter.

Because of this choice, on Wednesday I was able to create an organizational chart, job descriptions and post a “help wanted” ad on Craigslist. Plus, I did some research into project management software and made an inquiry with a consultant to help me with implementation. All in all, a very satisfying list of business development activities!

The moral of the story? There will always be competing priorities in a business, and in life. A combination of creativity and delegation is my solution this week!