Upside Downturn

You might have a day like I had yesterday at some point: the kids were being rude, both morning meetings were cancelled at the 11th hour, the lunch meeting was cancelled by text (20 minutes after it was due to start and just as the food I had ordered while waiting turned up at my table) plus it rained (on the day I had decided to walk). The meetings were all efforts to attract more business and I could have been doing something far more useful with my time than wondering round in the rain feeling despondent.

I wanted to make something positive of the day so I put everything I had to do to one side and completed the following exercises:

1. I re-assessed the value of those clients/people I had meetings with and not only made a decision on whether to bother setting another date for them but also assessed their potential future value to my company and produced a strategy for dealing with them based on that.

2. While changing out of my wet clothes I went through the list of things I could have done while I was out and about and made sure I put a system in place to remember things that I had always left to chance in the past.

3. I spent the rest of the day on one of the projects that sits on the sidelines of my work (like this site).

I have a list of these projects and they make up the sort of things that aren’t part of your everyday work but aren’t purely personal projects – they occupy a sort of middle ground of stuff you’d love to achieve but that are also useful professionally. This could be anything from learning PHP to getting yourself a digital camera so you don’t have to farm out work next time a client asks you to take pictures of their office for the website. All useful things on a professional level but also satisfying as achievements in themselves.

Tweet This Post

andy Brands, planning, strategy, whinging