What Are You Building Now That Pays You in the Spring?

The last quarter of the year has a particular pull to it. There are deals that must close, clients who want to be in before Christmas, and a calendar that fills up without anyone deciding that it should.

All of that is real work, and all of it pays this year. The question that tends to get squeezed out is the other one. What are you doing this quarter that has no effect whatsoever until February?

Two kinds of activity, and why one disappears

Almost everything in your week falls into one of two categories. There is work that produces income in the next ninety days, and there is work that produces income in the ninety days after that. The first is urgent and visible. The second is neither, which is why it is the first thing to go when a week gets tight.

Look back at your last fortnight and work out roughly what proportion sat in each category. Not to feel bad about the answer, simply to know it. Most agents guess wrong, and they guess wrong in the same direction.

This is not an argument that one kind of work matters more than the other. Both are necessary, and a quarter spent entirely on next spring would leave you with nothing closing this winter. It is a question of proportion, and proportion is a decision. If you have not made it deliberately, your calendar has been making it for you.

The spring market is built in the autumn

A conversation in October with someone who is thinking about next year is not a wasted conversation. It is the one that produces a listing in March. The difficulty is that nothing about it feels productive at the time, and there is usually no entry anywhere in your systems that records it as progress.

So it is worth asking what your business currently counts. If the only things you measure are closings and appointments, you have built a measurement system that quietly penalises every piece of long horizon work you do.

The question of capacity

There is a practical limit here, and it matters most if you work alone. A quarter of long term building work cannot simply be added on top of a full week. Something has to come out to make room for it.

That is the harder conversation, and it usually arrives at one of two places. Either something you currently do yourself will be done by somebody else, or something you currently do will stop. Which of those is realistic for you before January, and what is the actual task you have in mind?

What would have to be true

A useful way to test a plan is to work out what would have to be true for it to survive. If your intention is to spend two hours a week between now and Christmas on work that pays in the spring, what would have to be true about your Mondays? About the people who are used to getting an immediate answer from you? About your own tolerance for a week that feels less busy than usual?

If none of those things are true today, then the intention is not yet a plan, and naming that now is considerably cheaper than discovering it in November.

A question to sit with this week

Open your diary for the coming fortnight and find the work that has no effect at all on your income before February. How many hours is it? And if the honest answer is none, what does that tell you about what your February is likely to look like?

Where to take this next

If you want to look at your own quarter with someone who will ask rather than tell, you can book a discovery call.