• There is a lot of work in running a business, much of it is reactive. • What is a Reactive task? – reactive tasks are what you fill most of your day with. Serving customers, fulfilling orders, completing administration tasks such as paying bills, wages etc. • Reactive tasks are usually easier than proactive tasks but don’t give you any benefit in regards to long term planning or analysing your business. • What is a Proactive Task? – proactive tasks are all about setting goals, forecasting, planning and analysing your business. • Proactive tasks are harder than reactive tasks and require you to ask the big questions of your business – HOW and WHY. WHY is the business performing as it is and HOW can we do better? • Proactive tasks also require you to set goals, analayse the performance of your business and sometimes the need to face the truth of your business. • Many business owners are very busy running their businesses which is full of reactive tasks but rarely sit down to work ‘ON’ their business with proactive tasks. • Running a business can be overwhelming with many tasks and a fear is that owners will miss something. • To assist in completing tasks, consider creating a production/task roster for yourself just as you would for staff. • Create a task list of all tasks that need to be completed and then allocate a time in the week to complete each one which will ensure that no tasks are missed. • Allocating a time for each task will give you greater clarity when completing a task. Eg you may decide that invoices will only be processed and paid on a Friday afternoon. This will then allow you to concentrate on that task knowing that all other tasks have an allocated time. • Proactive tasks are just as important as reactive tasks and all business owners need to find time for them and incorporate them into their working week. • If you don’t currently complete any proactive tasks consider starting off by allocating 30mins per week to think about how your business could be run better, set goals or new areas of growth. It many not seem like a lot but it would be 30 more minutes than you did last week. By the end of the month you would have spent 2 hours thinking about how to better your business without even really thinking about it. • In the second month build on the 30 mins you did last month. As each month goes by the proactive tasks get easier. • Once all tasks have been compiled, it is up to you and the way you work to allocate a time for them, pending their complexity. Eg if you focus better in the morning, consider harder or proactive tasks at that time. This then leaves time in the afternoon for less ‘high level’ tasks such as processing invoices in MYOB. This is what I do! • Business owners will always be busy, however diarising reactive and proactive tasks is key to finding time for everything. Operational work will always flow around it.
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