Gear and Process

As my volume of tennis and biking has risen, I have become ever more a gearhead, something I've resisted through the years. I have been pushing my body harder, so it needs more support to keep rising to the task. Things I've upgraded or need to include: wristbands, socks, shirts, shorts, shoes, helmet, beverages, snacks, racket grip, and so on. There are more things I can do. Much of this is to alleviate and/or manage against the risk of physical pain, acute injury, or cramping, or to facilitate faster recovery.

There is a similar transition in my work. As the size of my business has risen, I need to continually get better at time management so as to not have my time and energy sucked down into stupid little chores like manually entering stuff into systems, doing simple analysis, tracking down records of conversations across multiple platforms (email, text, notebooks, CRM, spreadsheets). If I maintain a more or less standard process, I can do more. More importantly, it frees me up to focus on higher-value add tasks like staying abreast of what's going on in the various worlds (markets, tax, insurance, estate planning, etc) by reading and talking to counterparts, and then talking to clients and prospects about things that will benefit them.

What we need in the business is a new employee who can take on both doing and improving how we do some of the lower-level stuff so I can focus more on the higher. Working on it.