Manage Your Value, Manage Your Time

Like many of us I use Facebook to communicate with friends and clients. I use it to follow my daughter’s adventures as she travels in Europe and Israel. And yes, I use it to browse and see what people are up to. It’s amazing how much time you can spend on Facebook, isn’t it?

I went on Facebook this morning and saw a post from a friend of mine with a picture of a dress. Her post said something about how her family spent their entire dinner talking about the dress. I didn’t think much of it. Then a minute later I saw another picture of the dress and then more.

I got into the car to head to the gym. The radio was on. The DJ starts talking about “the dress debate”.

I got home from the gym. More posts about “the dress”.

I googled “white gold dress debate”, it returned 12,900,000 results.

And finally, I saw a post that said, “I am officially hiding all posts with the dress. Because really? Who cares?”

So now I’m writing about “the dress” because that post was exactly on target. Who cares? Or really more to the point… don’t you have better things to be doing with your time?

Everyday I speak with clients and they say things like “I didn’t have time to finish the project, I did the first four steps. I’ll finish the last part next week.” Clients say, “I know I need to go to networking events and make sales calls, but I can't find the time.”

You are your most valuable commodity. How do you manage your time? How do you manage your own value?

We are constantly faced with distractions. Sometimes the distraction is as silly as “the dress”, other times it’s an idea about a new project or program. Sometimes it’s a client or a friend asking a favor.

Whatever the distraction you ask yourself the question, “What’s best for me and my business right now?” What do I need to do to protect my own value? What do I need to do to protect myself so that I can do what is most important to me?