There’s really no such thing as bandwidth for an entrepreneur. Parkinson’s Law started out as “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. This is really true in our lives- whatever you have available (space, time) is what you will seek to fill. As a business owner, there is always something you can be doing with your time. You can do more marketing, more networking, more research or more social media interaction. You can develop new programs, products or services. You can develop better systems or spend more time training employees.
There is always something to be done and you will fill as much of your day (and possibly your night) with business tasks as you can. This means that having bandwidth is really a fallacy. Every part of your day theoretically is- or can be- filled.
Instead of bandwidth- free space to fill in- think of your time in a column. The key is to move the priority items to the top, so that the not-so-important tasks can fall to the bottom (and probably never see the light of day).
This means that as an entrepreneur, you need to be able to prioritize. Stop thinking of your business horizontally where you are filling space in a continuum and start thinking vertically where you are focusing on what’s up top. Move the tasks to the top of the list that are most aligned with your goals and that will have the biggest payoff for your business. Let those small tasks- that can fill up your day- fall off the list. You will be amazed that when the non-priority things don’t get done, your business still moves forward because of your attention to the big things.
