I work from a home office and when I tell people this the first thing they say is along the line of: “Wow that must be hard, I would never be able to work from home as I would not be able to keep on track” or “wow you must get a lot of laundry and housework done.” the next question is how I do it. I generally reply that I am appointment driven so I never have to worry about paperwork piling up and no that does not mean I do housework all day.

I am a subject matter expert in the SAP Business One (SAP B1) market and focus on a product called Versago. Versago is a portal platform that enables a business to support key processes and interactions between employees, customers, suppliers, or other partners while staying in lock step with SAP Business One (see link at bottom to learn more).

My job requires me to create and deliver solutions to business issues. These solutions are sometimes very specific. Having a good handle on the requirements and desired outcome requires creative thinking, understanding the industry and the technology stack available. All of this requires me to be current and adaptive. Below is a summary of what I create and deliver and how I realized what my job actually is and how to focus work activities.

Create

  • materials for marketing
  • solutions for a customer or prospect
  • topics and materials for presentations
  • materials for demonstrations
  • topics and materials for webinar topics.

Deliver

  • demonstrations
  • webinars
  • training
  • videos
  • presentations
  • understanding of prospect issues (discovery)

Focus

What does the above have to do with how I focus my week, the topic of this blog? Historically, all of my focus was on delivery but I need create the time to build good content. The realization of separating the two has allowed me to focus delivering good content and building more knowledge on trends and needs of businesses. This has led to to a realization that my creative activities are where I need to focus. This means more reading, writing and researching.

Recently I listened to a Tim Ferriss podcast (link at the bottom) where he interviewed Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and other great books. The podcast got into how Jim manages his time. He tracks his time into 3 categories: creating, teaching and other. His objective is 50% creative, 30% teaching and 20% other and had some interesting KPI’s and tools to track.

I tried to implement what Jim does and it did not fit for me but the concept did. The concept of thinking about what you do and how much time you should spend on each really helped me focus. After doing this I realized that my job is to create and deliver not just deliver.

What I track

I write in my planner on the blank side at the beginning of each week the following:

  • Reading – books, white papers, magazines, etc
  • Writing – blog topics, marketing materials
  • Researching – emerging topics, companies, industries, competitive products, travel, etc
  • Creating – solutions, PowerPoint slides, videos, etc

As mentioned, my reply to people on how I manage my time was I am appointment driven. You may have noticed that deliver and exercise (see link at bottom on how I manage exercise) are missing from the above focus. This is because deliver and exercise activities are always in my Outlook calendar and the above bullets are the focus I need to have to deliver my calendar horizon.

Deliver activities on my calendar should fill 30 to 50% of my week this is my personal KPI. Surprisingly, when my delivery calendar falls below 30% of my time I can feel my creating starts to drift. At these points, I reach out to sales and marketing to discuss how we can fill in my delivery time. The flip-side is when my delivery goes above 70% I can feel the pressure as I know I need the creative runway to build delivery. There also times where create is almost 100% because I am building up to a big deliver week like a trade show, conference or summit.

My techniques for tracking the above are always evolving and I am interested in how you focus your week and track progress. Please comment below or contact me if you would like to share how you focus and track.

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