How To Justify Time Spent On Personal Development For Your Business

I heard someone say recently that ‘time is not a renewable resource’, and how true is that? We are all so conscious of our time that we, consciously or unconsciously, agonise about how we can spend it most effectively. I personally find it difficult to justify having a shower some days, let alone taking time out of day to day work just to work on learning and developing myself. Even though I know it’s important, it’s still so hard to justify spending time developing yourself or your business.

And important it is. More or less every course or workshop I’ve taken over the last year have had a direct effect on my bottom line – in fact, without some of them I’d never have been able to set up the business in the first place. Yet still that little voice needles at me that there is so much more to do than spend a day learning.Here are a few things I’ve put in place recently to start overcoming that voice and structure learning and development as an integral part of my business, helping me to shift my mindset to being able to justify and ultimately improve my business.

Set a budget

I have written about this in terms of investing in yourself before, but in this first quarter of the year I have found it to be so much of a relief to have a budget set aside for my personal development. It simply takes the money out of any decision; you have a small pot put away that’s just for use for development, it’s mentally accounted for so I can book on to courses guilt free.I had a similar annual training budget at a previous job, which meant that I never had to justify a conference or course I wanted to go on to my boss. Now that I am my boss, I have that same relationship – the money is mentally spent so it’s not even something I have to question.Once you take money out of the equation it’s one less thing to worry about, and one less excuse to make. Now we just need to get on to overcoming the time issue.

Structure time in your weekly routine

Similarly to setting a financial budget for your development, set yourself a time budget too. However you currently structure your weeks and months, add in time that is specifically for your personal development. When you have that time allocated it becomes much harder to put it off and swap it out for something else. If you’re as much as a slave to the to do list as me, having it written in black and white is as good as set in stone, and I won’t rest until it’s ticked off.

It’s up to you how you decide to structure this time. Perhaps you set aside one afternoon a week, or a day every fortnight where you focus on everything except the day to day running of your business. For me, I’ve stopped planning in activities on a Friday – the morning I use for catching up on things I hadn’t got to earlier in the week, and the afternoon is to be the CEO of my business, to do and learn the things that will drive the business forwards.The good thing about this is that our time-sensitivity will drive us to fill this time, whether that’s with paid opportunities like courses or coaching, or just reading books or blogs or listening to podcasts. The most important thing, however, is that this time should be spent productively, in a focused way. This is what we’ll look at next.

Identify areas you want to improve

The trouble with having a big blank space in your calendar is that it presents you with more questions than answers. There are too many possibilities of things you could learn, all those things you want to improve in your business, that you risk skimming over the surface and not using this time in a productive way. Or worse, giving over your development time to client work or another job.

So the first thing to do is to make a list of all the things you want to improve. And break these down: just writing ‘marketing’ is still too broad - is it SEO you need to look at, setting up a newsletter, finally getting to grips with a blog? Make sure you have a list of really small, specific topics that you can tackle in bitesize chunks.

Once you have your list, divide it up into priority sections. What are the areas that are really affecting the business negatively, what is holding you back from growing? What are the things that are just a level up? And what areas are the things that make you most excited, that you enjoy the most?

When planning your development time, take these priorities into account. And I don’t just mean doing all the high priority items first – you need to add some joy into the mix early for you to continue to be motivated to stick to your development time. So perhaps SEO is a high priority, but the idea of it makes you feel ill and you’d much rather learn how to take better pictures. Tackle these simultaneously so that you’re getting something important done, but also enjoying your development time too.

Focus on what you want to achieve

In order to make your development time as effective as possible, you need to have objectives to achieve. It’s not enough to learn about something, you need it to result in something positive for the business. What good is a theoretical knowledge of content marketing if you don’t apply it to your business in a practical way?

So when planning your development time, and what area you’re going to focus on, consciously plan in the result you want to see too. It is unlikely that you’ll achieve it in one afternoon, but setting the intention that you want to, for example, increase the value of your email newsletter, will ensure that you structure your learning with that objective at its heart (you can read more about this in my post about doing goal-focused work).

If you’re planning on taking a course or workshop, look for ones that promise actionable exercises and tasks rather than just theoretical knowledge. When I was creating Campfire this was something I was particularly conscious of – I wanted to make sure that the course was pushing people to do the work while they were studying and come out the end of it with a functioning content strategy.