Small Business Plate Spinning
Blog. Bookkeeping. Marketing. Client Communications. Billable Hours. Holiday Festivities. Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Filing. Coffees. Meet-ups. Self Care.
As a small business owner, I often feel a bit like a vaudevillian plate spinner. If you don’t remember the act, take a peek at it a comic send-up of it here: Erich Brenn Plate Spinning on the Ed Sullivan Show (sorry there’s an ad that precedes the clip.)
If each of those plates represents one of the things I have to do to keep my business afloat, I feel like I have about 5 more plates than is humanly possible to keep going. I’m always neglecting some part of my business- except my clients. (No wonder it’s easier to coach someone else on getting their blog post done, than to write on myself!)
For a long time I fretted about the plates that kept crashing to the ground and breaking. But now I have a new philosophy: my job is not to keep all of the plates spinning at once, my job is to prioritize the urgent needs and rotate the plates through so that all of them get attention to over time, and that none of them get neglected.
Working on two levels
Not to go all Stephen Covey on you, but I keep two lists. One list is everything I should be doing to accomplish my long-term strategic business goals. And the second list is the things I have to get done today. It’s easy to get distracted by Twitter and never get a blog post done. And bookkeeping only needs to happen once a month, but then it’s a pretty big chunk of time I need to set aside for it. I make sure I do one small task that advances my long-term business goals every day.
Making time for social media
The most common question I get about social media is where do I find the time to do it? Isn’t it just one more plate to try to keep up in the air? In truth, social media doesn’t take that much time when you prioritize what you want to accomplish with it. Sure relationship building takes a lot more time than broadcasting a new blog post, but you don’t have to do it every day. And certainly planning a Twitter event or promotion takes significantly more time than a quick 140 character hello.
If I view my day’s tasks as an ever rotating list of core responsibilities, I’m better able to keep more “plates” actively spinning and keep my strategic objectives moving forward. It’s better to get one thing accomplished every day, than to have five half completed projects come crashing down. Sometimes that means I have time for active social media engagement, and sometimes that means I’m just making a quick tweet and going on to other projects.
How does social media factor into your strategic business objectives? And what do you do to keep your plates from crashing?