The 9 Categories of Time for Entrepreneurs

If you’ve ever tried to get me on Tuesday mornings, your email or voicemail is going to sit for awhile. Tuesday mornings is Dad time. Of course, evenings, weekends, mornings before work, and odd breaks during the day are all Dad time, too. It comes from working at home.

But Tuesday mornings are dedicated Dad time, when I take my boys out to breakfast and a park, or to the zoo, or some other adventure.

One thing that entrepreneurs often do badly is figure out how much money they really need. First there’s the squeak-by number which doesn’t include taxes, savings, or vacations. Then they get more realistic and include some of these other things, but it’s still hard to face up to how much you really need to be comfortable, especially if you’re still thinking in 1980 prices.

It’s similar with time. We rarely asses the true needs of our life. Usually we think:

• Work
• Family
• Sleep

Get a little more sophisticated and you might add in:

• Friends
• Health/exercise

If I’m going to be honest, though, there are even more categories I need to add to fully show up in this life:

• All of the above
• Financial life management, including bills
• Spiritual practice time
• Learning and education time
• Caring for the home, including gardening and home improvement projects

And then one last one:

• Civic involvement

I’ve managed, somehow, to have time at least semi-regularly for all of the above (woo-hoo, I recently received my Masters of Divinity!), except for that last one.

The trouble is that civic involvement directly affects the ecosystem of all of our other time. It determines whether our local government is responsive to our needs. Does the school system work well? Do our neighborhoods get the funding and support they deserve, or does the budget all go to downtown business interests?

You see, downtown business interests hire people to do the civic involvement because they know it’s worth it to them. It’s called “lobbying.”

However, when you and I do it, it’s called “democracy.”

At Heart of Business we strive for a sane work life, with plenty of time off. This is for health and sanity reasons, but also for political reasons. Taking a look at the nine categories time can be slotted up into (and no doubt you came up with another one or three), it means at least this:

We can’t afford, in fact never could afford, a workaholic culture. Although there is no such thing as “balance,” and our time commitments to different categories expand and contract depending on the season, we definitely cannot sustain, individually or as a culture, having our commitment to civic involvement edged out.

Civic involvement, like environmentalism, is ultimately about self-preservation. Both are about taking time to care for the ecosystem that we are dependent on in order to thrive. In years gone by I dedicated a lot of my time to activism. The last few years, not so much. This is something I want to see shift in significant ways over the next two to three years.

For me, and for all of us, this requires having businesses that operate at a sustainable level, not ones that take 50+ hours of our precious life each week. I like the 30 hours as full time work. Even better I like The 7 Day Weekend.

Imagine the world we’d create if we all had enough time for ourselves, our families and our communities, too.

I’m curious to hear how you allocate your time. What do you spend time with, and what categories would you like to give more time to?

With love and appreciation,

Mark

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The Heart-Centered Copywriting Intensive