Thursdays are impossible

CONNECT’S green finance expert ROBIN CURRIE, below, discovers why his friend’s Thursdays are so important that he keeps them clear in his diary

I HAVE been trying to make an appointment to see my old friend Paul. We were juggling with diaries and I suggested a particular Thursday. He shook his head and said, ‘Thursdays are impossible’ in much the same way you’d say ‘water is wet’ and we moved on.

But when it became clear that we were struggling to find an alternative, he wrote it into his diary without a murmur. When I said how much I appreciated him taking time out of his busy schedule he had the grace to look a little uncomfortable. Then he confessed.

As a highly-successful self-employed consultant, he has virtually no time to himself. He has therefore developed the habit of automatically using that phrase and has found that no-one ever questions it. As a result, he now has a whole day a week where he can do what he wants, rather than being hemmed in with meetings. The work he would have done in five days he says he easily gets done in four.

I’m neither as busy or successful as Paul, but I am also self-employed. One thing I know is that self-employed people don’t usually take time off work. They don’t call in sick. They don’t retire. And they don’t normally allow space for their own development.

As a result, many of us are jaded, tired and stuck. Or we’re chasing our own tails looking for more, better and different versions of what we already do.

What Paul does is to take time out and look at his life, his work and his reasons for doing what he does. But this isn’t a day of leisure, although it does involve things that he enjoys. He likes to pick his daughter up from school, and he’ll try and fit in a game of tennis if the weather’s nice. Otherwise, it’s about reviewing where he is, where he wants to be, why he wants to be there and what he has to do to make it happen.

If this sounds like a chore, ask yourself why someone this successful and who remains seriously ambitious would take time and read a book, think about the future and play with their children. It’s because when he’s relaxed, he’s effective. The everyday stresses of running his business are put on hold, but it’s still a working day and he concentrates on developing his business by not doing any. Instead he stretches and relaxes and allows the creative juices to flow.

Bernard Shaw used to say that he was successful because he set aside time each week to actually think. He added that he was about the only person he knew who ever did any serious thinking at all. Mind you, modesty wasn’t his major attribute, any more than it’s Paul’s.

Now I suspect that many self-employed people experience the same longeurs that I do. These are the times when I’m sitting in the office twiddling my thumbs and waiting for the phone to ring. If I was Paul – or indeed Bernard Shaw - I’d probably have organised my life so that all the boring bits come in succession and I could make use of them to do something else. Of course, if I was either of them, having time on my hands wouldn’t be the issue, but you get the idea.

It’s rather a challenging notion, the idea that I’m in charge of my time and consequently my own life. When there’s nothing happening, rather than hang around looking at the ceiling, I could be getting on with something I had scheduled for the day-after-tomorrow. And if there’s nothing scheduled, I could invent something. Alternatively I could save up the time to do something I wanted, such as going to pottery classes, learning macramé or dusting the bookcase. Or even more radically, I could kick back, close my eyes and think about what I actually want from my life, what I want to achieve, what I want to contribute. And I could do it on a regular basis.

More to the point, I’m self-employed, so there are no restraints on what I do with my time. But for some reason I seem to choose to use it fretting that I’m not getting enough business - and then not doing very much about it.

So from now on, it isn’t that Thursdays are going to be impossible for me, but if you may walk into my office and find me with my feet on the desk, eyes closed and with something soothing playing on the CD, please don’t assume that I’m just taking it easy. I’m creating the future.



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Robin Currie is an Independent Financial Adviser specialising in ethical investment.
He can be contacted for advice or discussion on 01392 411360 or e-mailed on Robin@newmoney.demon.co.uk.
Advice is given subject to the provisions of the Financial Services Act.