Fighting the Daily Fire

I just took a long weekend and it was amazing, just what the doctor ordered. I read a great book, got outside of my comfort zone and relaxed. I took Friday off. This morning I have over 100 emails in my inbox from the weekend. I had been wondering why I felt so tense and this is the reason. I estimate I actually needed to receive c.20 of those emails and the rest were irrelevant or could have been dealt with by a phone call/use of initiative.

This brings me to a bigger issue. It is very difficult to balance the time one spends working on the business dealing with 'right now' concerns with the time spent working on forward planning and making sure the business actually moves in the direction I want it to go. I read an excellent book on the plane this weekend called, "Millionaire Upgrade" by Richard Parkes Cordock which despite its abysmal title and inherent cheesiness nonetheless had some good key points to make. For example, like the importance of setting big goals and plans to achieve them.

I used to be very good at this. I remember my grandmother laughing when I said I wanted to go to Cambridge University when I was about 11 and me sitting down and trying to figure out how I was going to get there. So this week, I'm going to work hard to balance the immediate fire-fighting with the big picture.