Weekends and running your own business

For a lot of people that run their own businesses weekends are those times when you try and catch up with all the odd tasks that were left from the rest of the week.

A weekend can also be used to work on some client items that can only be done during off hours and that is so true in the IT industry. There are a lot of different items that are part of IT that cannot be done during the normal business day so a lot of those things are planned for the weekend. So many companies don’t want their servers or email being taken off line during the normal business day.

For a lot of IT business owners there are times that the weekend will actually be a day or two during the week to make up for the weekend work that is needed to be performed. There are also times when taking a day during the week to do some of the weekend items means that there are other items that can be done quicker on the weekend due to fewer distractions from vendor emails that seem to come in steadily during the week.

There are a lot of business owners that actually do shift their weekends so that they can be available to their clients on the weekends without impacting their own time. For us there are times when our weekend will be split between one day of the weekend and one day during the week. It really depends on what we are working on and what the demands of our time are. The chance to sit and get some of the writing done without the vendor emails hitting me does help and it also means that it normally takes less time to get the same amount of work done.

Having the flexibility to shift some of your weekend tasks also means that when you are doing some of your own running around there are fewer people out doing the same things. There are times when we will take a Wednesday to do our running around and then work on the weekend and it is so different doing the errands in the middle of the week especially if you can avoid rush hour traffic.

Business owners have to be able to be flexible in their own plans because a weekend is no longer a set two days of the week. A weekend can be two days whenever there is time for it and you have to understand that and enjoy the time that you can find and grab. So, next time your email is going to be down on a weekend or your hear about server work or an upgrade that is being done just think that the person that is doing it isn’t off during the weekend like you are.