Keeping promises when you work for yourself

 

Keeping promises when you work for yourself

Keeping your own promises is hard. It’s often difficult enough to keep a promise to others and we’re all guilty of that – saying we will do something in a timely way and then either forgetting or pushing our commitment back behind other more pressing, to us, tasks.

Part of the problem is that we don’t accurately forecast our workload or our time burden, so we hastily say yes to things, give timelines we think other people want to hear, and make commitments we end up being unable to keep.

We are all busy - and make commitments we end up 

being unable to keep

We are all busy. Life tends to slip out of our grasp and rush us ahead without considering the lists we have made and the things we have said ‘yes’ to.

I am a list maker. I love making lists. The only problem with lists, is that they keep on growing. I have tried taking the three or the five most important ‘must dos’ and putting them on a separate list of their own, so I can work through them efficiently. I have written jobs up on whiteboards, pieces of paper, in notebooks, on my computer desktop – where, by the way, they get covered with all the open windows, so I don’t see them or get reminded. I have tried setting alarms, sending myself timed emails and more, but I still overcommit.

So there it is, it’s not about making promises, it’s about overcommitting – and we all know how that goes. Our inability to say ‘no’ or to provide realistic timeframes for things to be actioned is the culprit. So what’s the solution?

We only have so many hours in a day, so we’ll start with that. If you are working for yourself, as this is more difficult to manipulate when you have an employer to account to… consider how many hours you would like to work each day and how many days of each week.

The reason we need to start with our available hours is that it is important to structure in time for ourselves. We can’t work seven days a week for 12 hours a day. It’s not sustainable, even though sometimes it is necessary. We are trying to plan our ideal working week first, so we need to factor in break time, me time, recreation time, family time. You also need to remember to add in the time you take for routine activities that are not work related, but which still need to be managed.

... it is important to structure in time for ourselves.

So, for example, you have decided to have a working day which runs from 10am to 3pm and for four days a week – it would be my ideal, but right now I’m not able to reduce my hours. Anyway, this works out to be four hours a day after breaks or 16 hours a week.

You should know how long certain client or customer work takes you to do, so average out how much time you would usually spend on this type of work each day or each week – under the scenario above, this could average three hours a day of dedicated client work – 12 hours a week. Is this enough? If you are working for clients for more than this, then you need to revise your working day. There is, in any, case not much wiggle room in this working week to take on extra promises for yourself or others.

It's just an example, but you need to be realistic about your available time and what you can manage in that time. The old adage of asking a busy person to do things is actually really unfair – a busy person will have to set other things aside, or work longer hours, in order to do these extra things and before they know it they’ll be walking towards burnout.

The first trick of not overcommitting yourself, is to not overcommit. Sounds easy, but it’s not. Mostly, as humans, we are people pleasers, we are also sometimes likely to overestimate our time and abilities. Trying to fit everything in is fine if you think you can do it, but we hardly ever calculate the impact of events which are out of our control – an urgent client request, illness, an unexpected visitor, family needs, power outages and so on.

Plan your day, add in some additional time for contingencies and then revaluate what extra tasks you can add in and complete. If you can’t see yourself realistically getting something done for yourself or a client, then you need to either push it back, if it’s a task for yourself, or, if it is for a client, let them know what your time frame is and when you can realistically get their work done – if they are unhappy with this you need to make a second decision – push something else out of the way or refer them to someone else.

Overcommitting, overpromising, and not delivering leads to stress and anxiety, and we are already in a world which produces these feelings in us. Don’t overburden yourself with things you can’t manage to do, or don’t want to do, or haven’t got the time for.

Assess and reassess your available time. Set your working hours and days, so you can have a semblance of a normal life and learn how to say ‘No’ or ‘Later’.

Five tips to avoid overcommitment

1.       1.    Work out your available time and how much you have ‘free’.

2.       2.    Plan your day and your week

3.       3.    Learn to say ‘no’ or ‘later’.

4.       4.    Delegate – if there is work someone else can do for you, then pass it along.

5.       5.    Take a breath and think before you say ‘yes’ to something new – can you fit it in, do you have the         time and/or the energy, what’s the deadline?