The siren call of the fire drill

FiredrillYesterday was a rats nest.  I woke up with a million plans of how productive I would be and how much I would get done from my long term to do list. (Including a detailed ecommerce back to basics blog post to go here.) The reality of course didn’t go that way…

I have been chasing down a technical issue that I continued to try to resolve.  That resulted in multiple hours on the phone with Apple tech support. I spoke with some very nice technicians who were very apologetic about my wasted time but that doesn’t pay the bills. Before I realized it, the day ended.

Back in my days working for other, this what I called fire drill chasing.  Instead of moving forward in strategic and meaningful ways, I spent the day chasing fire drills. Did my business end up in a better place at the end of the day than where it started at the beginning?  Heavens no!  Did I lose valuable time that I really needed to use to respond to real opportunities?  Absolutely!

it isn’t like I could just ignore the tech issue.  It wasn’t going away by being ignored.  So… how do you fix the broken (the proverbial fire in your small business) without giving yourself over to the fire drill that kills the day?

The answer I see today with 20/20 hindsight is that I didn’t think strategically about how and when to take care of the fix.  When did I start on this rats nest project?  First thing in the morning, when the day was young and all possibility.  The tone for the day was set and the dye was cast.

Next time around the rats nest projects get the mid afternoon low blood sugar treatment.  Need a break from the heavy hitting strategic thinking stuff?  GREAT, now you can call Apple technical support to try and get the $%#’ing mac mini server fixed.  I just wonder how many more times I will need to relearn that lesson.

Next week, I promise a back to basic blog post.

~e