60 How much time do you spend nurturing your business your family and yourself?

I’m reading a book called “168 hours: You have more time than you think” by Laura Vanderkam. It’s about how we all have 168 hours in a week but some people seem to get more done in that time than others. You can probably guess why I wanted to read it.

I’m not even a quarter of the way through the book yet –  I’ll let you know when I’m finished if it’s worth a read – but a story in the beginning inspired this ‘recipe for profit’.

The story is of a woman called Theresa Daytner who runs a business (with 12 employees), has a family (of, gulp, 6 kids!) and still gets to spend plenty of time hiking and doing other stuff she loves.

In the book she talks about how she chooses where she spends her time,  makes sure it’s on stuff that’s important to her –  “Nurturing her business, nurturing her family and nurturing herself” – and she ‘fixes’ it if the balance of time is wrong.

For those of us wanting to be at the helm of a fabulous small business and a happy big family I think the idea of checking in with how much time we’re spending nurturing the family and the business is a must. And of course we need to keep ourselves nurtured too – but we’re hopeless at doing it – so we’ve got to keep a firm eye on that too.

If you read this blog regularly you’ll know I’m a huge fan of keeping a time log (like a ‘food diary)and today’s recipe is no exception!

The nurturing log

Here’s what you do:

1. Get a diary with enough room to scribble notes and jot down time.
2. Draw three columns under each day and head them up “Business”, “Family”, “Self”
3. Every 6 minutes (if you want to be super accurate, or every 10/30/60 mins if that’s a bit full-on) you spend nurturing your business/family/self put a mark in the appropriate column.
4. At the end of the day tally up the amount of time you spent nurturing each area that day.
5. Pop notes in if you wish so you can remember what you were doing (“Reading to 5 year old, walking the dog).
6. Not everything you do has to fit into a column. “Doing the washing” probably isn’t nurturing your family. This is about recording the stuff that’s important, not the boring stuff you have to do. If you wish you can add a 4th column “stuff that must be done” so you can see how much time you spend on all that! And you need to decide what ‘nurturing’ means to you. For some of us cooking dinner is nurturing the family, for others of us it’s just another bloomin’ chore!
7. Keep the diary for as long as you can – at least a week, preferably a month.
8. Add up for each week the amount of time you spent nurturing your business/family self.
9. Take a look at the hours. Does it look enough? Does the balance between business, family and self look right?
10. Only you can tell whether the balance and the number of hours feels right. No-one can tell you what it should be, but what I can tell you is that you’ll know if it doesn’t feel right!

I’ve been keeping my “Nurturing” log for a couple of months now. The biggest surprise to me was how by simply keeping the log I felt I had to find the time to do a little more nurturing (of family and self). ……I couldn’t bear looking at the almost empty columns!

The ‘Nurturing’ log works – not only does it tell you where you’re (not) spending  your time so you can fix it, it also gets you changing the way you spend your time from Day 1.

Are you going to start keeping the nurturing log?

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