Enough Hours in the Day

I spent a few days at the WordPress WordCamp US last week, surrounded by people who know an astonishing amount about, well, an astonishing amount of very specific things. I came home with pages of notes. There are things I want to try, things I want to learn more about, and more than a few things I can pretty much guarantee I will never become an expert in. There simply aren’t enough hours in my day, and besides, who am I kidding? Those were some incredibly smart people!

But really, somewhere in all of that, I started to wonder: who told us we have to know everything ourselves?

Running a small business seems to come with an ever-expanding list of things we’re expected to master. There are taxes and bookkeeping. Websites and SEO. Social media and email marketing. Accessibility and cybersecurity. AI has added an entirely new collection of tools and questions to the mix. And, oh wait, there’s the actual work we started the business to do.

When I started my business, doing as much as I could myself made sense. Honestly, in a lot of ways, I had to. If something needed to be done, I learned how to do it. If something wasn’t working, I figured it out. That willingness to keep learning and keep figuring things out is a big part of how I got here.

I’m just no longer sure I have to keep doing everything that way. Because that ability to figure things out can be a bit of a double-edged sword. Give me enough time, a good search, a video or two, and increasingly, a conversation with AI, and there’s a pretty good chance I’ll get there eventually. And maybe that’s the actual problem.

If I can do something myself, “I’ll just do it” feels like the obvious answer. It’s only $4.58; I’ll find the discrepancy in my books. The website needs a quick update; I’ll take care of it. Surely I can find a better way to organize my calendar and to-do list. And, for the love, if I could just clear out these emails…

None of those decisions is necessarily wrong. Sometimes doing something myself really is the best use of my time. Sometimes learning how something works today will save me hours later. Sometimes I need to understand something well enough to make good decisions about it. And sometimes I’m just curious and want to know. That’s allowed too.

But being able to do something and being the person who should spend the time doing it aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Maybe I don’t need to become an expert. Maybe I need enough understanding to know what questions to ask. Maybe someone else can do in ten minutes what will take me an hour to figure out. And sometimes I already know perfectly well how to do the thing. I just don’t need to be the person doing it this time.

That’s the distinction I’m trying to get better at making.

Not “Can I figure this out?” I probably can.

The better question may be whether figuring it out myself is actually the best plan for my business. Because every hour I spend doing one thing is an hour I’m not spending somewhere else, including on the work that actually needs me.

There are only so many hours in the day. I’d like to get a little better at deciding where mine should go.