Marketing Consulting Blog

My mother has Alzheimer’s. She’s been in a nursing facility since February of 2005, and she’s more or less bed ridden. One of the many negative effects of Alzheimer’s is rapid memory loss to the point family members’ names are forgotten and some members get forgotten altogether. Another symptom is life regression—that is where the person mentally and emotionally backtracks from their current age back to birth. The average person afflicted with Alzheimer’s has a life expectancy of roughly seven years from the time of initial diagnosis. Luckily, our family still has some time to share with mom, but the inevitable is always looming. It’s truly a gut-wrenching experience for both the patient and loved ones. If I were to guess as to where my mom is in her regression, I’d estimate her to be somewhere in the neighborhood of her early twenties to late teens. She’s 78 years old so you can imagine the transgression and what it means.

Early in my mother’s career she worked for the telephone company as a switchboard operator. Today, as we know, phone calls are connected electronically with no human intervention required. In my mom’s mind, she “works” at the nursing facility, but she’s very interested in finding another job. One of the recommendations experts give when interacting with an Alzheimer’s patient is to play along with them wherever they are in their own little world. They don’t know any better so correcting them only creates tension and frustrates both parties. My mom asked me if I thought she could go back to working for the telephone company as a switchboard operator, and I informed her that those jobs have been replaced by computers and electronic machines so she’d have to find something else for “employment.” When asking her what she thought she might be good at and enjoy, she seemed rather concerned in answering me “I have been so busy focusing on my life and doing my day-to-day stuff, I haven’t paid attention to what’s going on around me or what’s even out there.” That’s when it clicked for me.

Many of us that don’t have any debilitating diseases (yet) do the very same thing mom spoke of even though she didn’t realize she was delivering an “ah ha!” moment for me. We all get caught up in our day-to-day lives to the point we don’t look around to see what’s going on and truly pay attention. I believe many companies suffer in the analysis paralysis conundrum. When the consequences begin to seriously impact the organization, it’s often too late to make a change because the downward spiral has picked up too much momentum to reverse course. Alzheimer’s works much the same way, but there is only hope for a cure—nothing in terms of a bonafide cure yet. There is a “cure” for the business community, and it’s a very simple one—pay attention! I mean really pay attention to the world around you and readily implement changes before the “disease” hits instead of waiting and reacting. Pro-activity prevents obsolescence.

I know my mom fully understood technology advances before Alzheimer’s started to severely restrain her, but she delivered a nice reminder to me to pay attention to my surroundings in a very innocent way during our time together tonight. Thanks mom.

I engaged in an interesting activity today that shed a little light into why I've been so maxed out of late. I worked on a spreadsheet that broke down my hourly activities to quantify where the time goes and whether there are any areas I can reallocate hours elsewhere. Much of this came about because there are people in my life requesting more of my time and telling me I'm working too much. Well, I disagree with that--I need to invest more hours into the consultancy to get this thing percolating well enough to afford me the opportunity to cut back a little by hiring people to do the things I'm either not so good at or are better handled by someone whose job is to focus on that particular area. Right now, I'm not in that position so everything falls back on me--another of the beauties of starting and running your own business right?

Anyway, we ALL have a pool of 168 hours per week. Nobody gets more; nobody gets less. We're all in the same boat when it comes to time (24 hours x 7 days = 168 hours).

The average person sleeps 8 hours/day = 56 hours. I'm getting roughly 7.5 hours lately which equals 52.5 hours of sleeping per week.

The average person invests 40 hours/week into money making activities/work. I'm over that amount, coming in at 51 hours (6 days x 8.5 hours). Some weeks it's more, but that's a reasonable average to work from. The 168 hours are now down to 64.5.

Family, friends, and interpersonal relationships currently consume approximately 19 hours/week. 64.5-19=45.5 hours remaining.

The average person probably spends at least one hour per day in transit regardless of activity although that's a pretty conservative estimate. Deduct 7 hours from the remaining hours, and we're sitting at 38.5.

Factor in an amount of time it takes to get ready to go somewhere (shower, bath, changing clothes, etc.) each day which we'll swag it at 3.5 hours (0.5 hours x 7 days; women likely take twice as long, but this is a personal exercise here). 35 hours remain in our average week.

I haven't even allocated time for eating yet so let's estimate that to equal 2.5 hours/day or 17.5 hours/week. Deduct that from the 35 hours, and we're left with 17.5 hours.

I'm into health/fitness, riding bikes in particular. To derive benefits from any health related activity, it requires some time investment. During biking season, I probably ride anywhere from 10-15 hours/week, but it averages out to roughly 1.5 hours/day for five days/week during the off-season. That equates to 7.5 hours meaning we're left with 10 hours in our week.

I watch television quite a bit to catch up on sports, news, business, and entertainment. This time has been cut significantly, but I probably still watch a couple hours of TV per day five days per week for that magical total of 10 hours.

We're tapped out on the time for the week, and that doesn't allow any time for life's little unplanned twists and turns that force one to rearrange their schedule or postpone planned events. If I were to cut back in any areas in order to focus more on the business, the obvious choices are television and interpersonal relationships. Life can't be all work and no play though so the existing schedule will have to make due until things smooth out a little. When that will be is anyone's guess, but it would be awfully tough to cut back there if the ultimate plan is to succeed (and it is).

How does your week breakdown by hour? Are you focused on the things you believe you should be focused on? If not, what areas can you reallocate to make things jive more with your desires? Do you have people seemingly tugging at you from every angle? How do you handle that?

As always, share your thoughts and ideas with us.