One of the first items on the project plan was 'draft business plan'. At the time I estimated this would take three months, and I considered that a conservative estimate, at least for a first draft. Well, that was in January, and it's now September and I reckon I'm only about half way through. I think there are probably three main reasons why I'm so slow:
1. I'm slow. Like my mum said once 'ah Benny, you've always been slow, right from when you were little. Even when you were hurrying you were always slower than everyone else.'
2. I don't really do 'drafts'. I had this idea that I'd be able to basically just do a stream of consciousness draft of whatever was in my head, and then we'd be able to use that as a basic plan and refine it as we went. But that's not really in my nature. I can't help thinking over each and every sentence to make sure it really says what I want it to say, and that means it might take me an hour just to write a single paragraph. That also makes it quite a draining process, so often I don't have the energy to do much more than an hour at a time.
(In the same way, I'm hopeless at skim reading. I just don't take anything in. Everything I read, I need to do it slowly and deliberately. People send me large policy documents at work all the time - sometimes several in a day - and for the most part all I do is throw them on an already teetering pile of stuff I plan to read 'one day'. It's a bit of a handicap.)
3. Life. Trying to do this in my spare time has really hammered home for me the fact that it takes almost 100% of my time just to take care of the basic 'background' stuff I need to do as part of normal life. Sleeping and being at work take up the bulk of my of time - there are 168 hours in a week and I calculate about 101 hours of that is spent sleeping and working (not at the same time... For the most part). That still leaves 67 hours, which seems like a lot, but really it isn't - especially when you take into account points 1 and 2 above. I need to squeeze a lot into that 67 hours - house stuff like shopping and cleaning, exercise, eating (though a fair amount of that is done at work), seeing friends and family, fighting with the Internet or the coffee machine or whatever hallmark of modern civilisation has packed it in this week. And then of course there's reading, an activity I love but at which, as we've already established, it takes me a long time to achieve much, as well as watching a few hours of TV (more in footy season). Tally that all up and I'm left with just a few hours each week to do wine bar stuff, including the business plan.
The most frustrating thing about this is work - as in the actual job that I'm paid to do. I now in a sense have two jobs, one paid and one unpaid, and unfortunately the amount of time I want to spend on each is inversely proportional to the amount of time I actually spend. I find myself growing resentful of work - especially when I'm stuck there late or have to work on the weekends, which has happened a bit recently - because I feel like it's stealing time from me. Time that I NEED, dammit!
This is a dilemma faced, I'm sure, by almost everyone wanting to start their own business. You need to keep doing paid work so you can keep saving money towards your business, but doing that means you have to spend less time than you'd like on actually getting your business off the ground. At the same time, you have this sense of disconnection from your day job, because what you really want to do is elsewhere. At some point you need to resolve that dilemma by basically jumping out of the plane and hoping your parachute works - hopefully that's not too strained a metaphor. But we're nowhere near that point yet.
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