Too busy to do anything
Are you so busy that you don’t have time to do anything else or attract new opportunities that might help you grow your business? This is what we felt a few months back when we caught ourselves getting extremely busy and deep into the day to day nitty-gritty. We were almost turning mechanical - working on new features, releasing them, answering support queries, helping customers etc. We knew that we needed to free up time to think about where we are headed, what are “really” the features that customers want and how are we going to deliver it to them by still being highly competitive. We had to make room for our team to think about new opportunities and ideas. Isn’t this what business is about? More than fire-fighting and details, isn’t it about dreaming, thinking and envisioning where you want to be say a year or five years from now?
You need to be a sponge that absorbs new things, a glass that is not filled right to the top and you need to create that little bit of spare time in the day where you probably are not caught up in the details. This is where we think creativity is born. New ideas takes place. Innovation happens. Ultimately, you make yourself more relevant!
November 9th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Are you too busy to do anything? http://tinyurl.com/yh2756e
November 9th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Good point Sahil! I guess while running a business you have to keep balancing “mechanical execution” with “thinking new opportunities”. You have to constantly watch if you are titling too much on one side and make the correction
November 11th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
This was refreshing. Lately I have also felt the same way when a certain part of work was tying me down (but not too much to call myself busy enough to be handicapped). But ya, it’s always worth a thought that whatever I am doing, is it going to sustain for a really long time for me to keep doing it with complete disregard for other opportunities?
I can see the flipside of the things you mention, in some of the well placed Indian IT companies. They seem to be too pre-occupied with their bread-and-butter business of application development and maintenance. Being an IT analyst, it makes me wonder how long do they think this is going to last, since they arent really spending much on R&D, as compared to their smaller counterparts who have very aggressive R&D budgets.
Thanks for the thought.