Juggling the demands

There are times that we all look at the list of things that need our attention and wonder how we are going to find the time to get everything done. Having a list of all the different things is always a good idea because then at least you can figure out what needs to get done and how urgent each of the items are.

Running a consulting business means that things on the list can change their urgency very quickly and you need to be flexible most of the time. It can be a challenge some days when you have your schedule figured out and something happens that impacts how you are going to be accomplishing things. The changes can be based on a client needing some assistance or it can be something like a power outage that can effect your schedule. The client is something that you can deal with quickly because those you know will happen at various times and that is part of being in business. The juggling the issue of the power outage can have a bigger impact at different points. The power outage means that the stuff that you were planning on working on won’t be done especially if you are needing to either connect to a client site or use the internet.

During the power outage you have a couple of decisions that you are going to have to make and they are look at your list and see what else you can be doing while waiting for the power to come back on or you can leave your office area and find a location where there is power so that you can continue to work. In a lost of cases if you are using a laptop you can continue to work if you have the battery charged. For us, we try and ensure that our computer has a charged battery so that we can work during a power outage. In a lot of ways if you can continue to work in your office and deal with the power outage it is probably a better idea. Sure, you aren’t going to be doing the work that you had planned on doing but other things can still get done. Even if you don’t have things that you can do on the computer there will be other things that you can probably do such as that filing that you haven’t done for a while.

Juggling the demands of work can be a challenge but being flexible and able to handle the different issues is very important. Sure the list of things that need to be done may not get done as quickly as you had hoped but knowing that you can change what you were working on is very important. Next time you are dealing with some sort of outage be it a power outage or internet outage look at that list and see what else can be done and you might be surprised at what you can get done.