Confronting. That is how I felt waking up one sunny Monday morning in an inner west suburb of Sydney.
On the surface of it, this was just like any other Monday morning. The Sydney traffic was doing its very best to slowly steer those game enough to drive into insanity. Railway stations and bus stops were full of people either seemingly in the process of waking up or recounting stories of their weekends. Cafes were buzzing with activity as commuters sought their pick-me-ups ahead of a another work week ahead. And me? Well, I had nowhere to go.
You see, after juggling the demands of full-time work with my startup, shared office space platform Hotdesk.com.au, for almost a year, I found myself in the very privileged situation of being in command of a generous sum of funding and the liberty of focusing purely on Hotdesk for at least a year. I had often preached to anybody who’d listen that if I had the time and the capital I would take the business to grand heights but the time constraints of working at a global investment bank and budgetary challenges of bootstrapping made it all too difficult.
Well, now I had not only the time but also the capital to play with, and it left me feeling like a stunned wide-eyed deer staring into the headlights of an incoming truck – the truck in this case being external pressures of social and professional judgment. While we like to think of family and friends as ever supportive, thoughts of failure and the subsequent loss of respect come bubbling to the surface. We fear not being attractive to the opposite sex. We fear becoming financially insecure. We fear the lack of consistent income. We fear becoming less employable and lastly, and perhaps the most tangible and legitimate fear of the lot, we fear not being able to repay those who have put their hard earned cash on the line, exercising a vote of confidence and belief in our abilities to commercialise an early-stage venture.
We ask questions of ourselves when we see others making their daily commute to a place of gainful employment. Are we just being lazy chasing these entrepreneurial dreams? Is it because we don’t want to ‘work work’. Is it because we have an issue with authority? Are we just dreamers?
Indeed, while having the opportunity to run your own show for a year is a gift and one I wouldn’t change for anything, the weight that comes with it is exponentially heavier and it takes a certain kind of person to embrace the opportunity head on and awaken every day with newfound vigour and energy.
In my case, maintaining some sort of routine synonymous with how I had approached my working week up until that Monday morning was something I knew I had to do. Waking up at 5:30am to hit the gym would not only set structure to my day but would get the cognitive juices flowing, putting me in a good mental space to hit the ground running in the office.
Next up, commuting to a place of work was just as important. While working from home sounds nice and may have many merits, it is often not the most productive of locations for a number of reasons. It is not associated with work time but rather with leisure and rest time so getting ‘into the zone’ doesn’t come naturally and requires a lot of discipline. Second, the process of commuting to a ‘place of work’ gets many people shifting focus and finally, taking up residence in a shared coworking space, where other likeminded entrepreneurs are gathered, provides the perfect environment to not only get some work done, but to network, collaborate and share the journey.
I found that while my days previously consisted of nine or so hours on my day job followed by four or so on Hotdesk in the evening, I was now doing just as many hours scattered throughout the day, only with one difference – it didn’t feel like work. While I was liberated from being tied to my desk for a predetermined stretch of hours, I was spending more time at it, but it was by choice and it was being fuelled by passion for what I was doing. Unlike most full-time gigs which are based on the supposition that all people are exactly the same and are most productive and effective between the hours of 9am and 5pm, I could take off and go for a run or a walk or anything I desired if I wasn’t ‘feeling it’ and could come back to it later when I was inspired, not when the clock dictated I was good to go.
I am an advocate of Timothy Ferris’s theory on ‘work for work’s sake’ and that we often fill our work day with monotonous, non value-adding tasks in order to feel like we’re working. There is no greater waste of time, which, in our very short lives, is precious.
On effective use of time, it is incredibly important to have some sort of plan of attack to not only your day but also your week and month. What are you looking to achieve? What will help you get there? A list of not only tasks to complete but a well prioritised list based on a sound forecast return on investment is critical. Don’t sweat the small ‘work for work’s sake’ stuff and focus on the important stuff, the stuff that is often the hardest. Find out when you’re best at hitting the hard yards, eliminate interruptions and allocate a few hours of focus towards it. For many, this will be first thing in the morning. Diving into the easy stuff first may put you at risk of getting into a lazy zone which can be difficult to come out of so try to get into a habit of doing the hard stuff first.
While the initial feeling of confrontation was still with me by the Wednesday, the culmination of each day brought with it slightly more sense of control. I was going to bed satisfied and was kicking more and more goals each day now that I had the time to execute on the strategies I had up until this point recorded in spreadsheets ‘to do’ when time and money permitted.
Now in my second week I am under no misconception that I am all over this new way of working. I have a lot to learn about managing my new day to day effectively and balancing it with my social life and relationships outside of the business, but one thing I’ve come to appreciate already is that startup life is about the journey, the moment you focus too heavily on the destination is the moment you draw ever close to throwing in the towel for lack of immediate results.
Embrace the ride, the ups and downs and taking something away from every moment. Chances are, the personal and professional development that comes with building and running a business will not only get you more respect from your peers, make you more attractive to the opposite gender and increase your employability, but for those lucky and hardworking enough, it just may deliver rewards to repay not only your investors but yourself in spades.
STEVEGLAVESKI.COM 