It has been an embarrassingly long time since I posted anything to this blog – mainly because I’ve been too busy running my business to have time to write reflectively. A new year is a good prompt to finally do some reflection, and now that Glen Shuraig has been up and running for more than two years, it seems like a good moment to take stock.
Today’s reflections are about managing time. I was well warned by friends who had gone down this road before me that the newly self-employed tend to say yes to everything that comes along and become overloaded. They said that after a year or two it would settle down, and I would become more confident that there would be other work in future, and clearer about the sort of work that I really want to do so I could be more selective. That was all great to hear, but of course, secretly, there was the horrible little voice in my head saying ‘but what if I am different and I’m just not good enough to get enough work?’
It turns out, of course, that the advice was right: there is, in fact, plenty of work available, I did take on too much, and I am now clearer on the sort of work I want to do. I really enjoy helping people with change management, corporate governance and programme/project assurance. I also really enjoy that this is a very broad set of topics and that I have been lucky enough to get a real mixture of interesting work. All of that is very positive but I’m still struggling to keep the workload manageable – not because I am afraid of there being no future work, but because I’m still really bad at turning down work that sounds interesting (a version of FOMO?). I’m not sure what I can do about this but it’s definitely something to work on. If I manage to crack it, I can perhaps write my best-selling self-help book and retire.
So far, so unsurprising, but I have found myself surprised by just how often clients’ timetables will change and the scale of those changes. This turns out to be an even bigger factor in managing my own workload than being bad at saying ‘no’. Several projects have been held up for months at a time due to delays with getting access to information, sickness absences, procurement delays and all the other ways in which life undermines the best plans. I can entirely understand that the delays were (mostly) unavoidable, but the end result is that having planned for work to fit into the time available, suddenly multiple deadlines are in the same week. Should this have been a surprise to me? Perhaps not, but I hadn’t thought through how much negotiation would be required about shifting timetables and my capacity.
Working for mostly public sector or publicly-funded clients seems so far to lead to a financial year rhythm to the work. There is pressure to complete projects by the end of March, and then there can be a little hiatus while people work out what is required and what help they can afford over the new financial year. Two full years is not enough experience to be sure of this: April and May were relatively quiet in 2020, although those were peak pandemic lockdown months so not typical; they were quiet months again in 2021. I suspect they will be quiet again this year. Not a bad time of year to be able to take more time away from work, so perfectly manageable if that does turn out to be the pattern.
More reflections to follow: next time, what it’s like to be on the other side of public procurement.
