Working on your business instead of inside your business

Michael Gerber has a great book where he coined that phrase.

In the early days of bookstrapping, you’re touching every moving cog and focusing on your energy on setting the course for the journey.

But once that journey is underway, you need to learn to pull yourself away from every task. It’s hard to delegate, but in order to stay focused on the direction, you have to give up some of the control.

If you’re only dealing with tasks when it gets too late to avoid them, you’ll constantly be carrying about the weight that slows down the momentum of turning the flywheel. This of course is the dichotomy between firefighting and letting fires burn out sometimes and you have to know what areas could cause true damage.

I learnt a good habit from Jim Collins where he writes down every task he does in a day in 15 minute blocks. I did this for a full 7 week cycle and with each task I assigned a task type such as finance, team, production, design, tech, fix, admin etc.

You’d be surprised in the number of directions your pulled in a day.

You need to highlight the areas of key importance for you. The rest, if important, you’ll need to eventually hire for. And the bonus of having the tasks tagged and archived is that when you come to writing a job description, you’ll know what the role will entail as you’ve been doing it; they’ll just do it better than you and allow you to work on your business instead of inside it.