The Importance of Quiet Alone Time for Entrepreneurs

It’s been almost a year since I’ve left the corporate rat race.

One huge benefit of not having a regular full time job is the ability to have the flexibility in your work schedule to create quiet alone time.  As an entrepreneur I think it is absolutely essential to make time in your schedule for this.  However, I know most entrepreneurs are much too busy to create such time.  What a shame.

Some of my best and most profitable and enjoyable ideas have come from quiet contemplation when I’ve disciplined myself to just spend quiet time alone.  I’ve actually built a habit of doing this quite regularly now, where I’ll either just be alone with a journal and a pen, or I’ll just relax and meditate.

Because I still do some consulting work and have many contacts in the corporate business world, I regularly connect back to the corporate world through friendly conversations, lunch meetings etc.  The one thing that I constantly see with people who are still engaged in the rat race is that they are always in such a hurry and always so busy accomplishing nothing of real importance.

It’s like they’re in a constant state of rush and adrenaline.  If they’re not doing twenty different things at once, taking calls, text messaging, putting out fires all day long they feel like nothing is being done.  At the end of any such workday though ask any of them “So what did you accomplish today towards your most important goals in life?” and they’ll stare at you with a blank look on their face like you just asked them an advanced calculus question.

The crazy thing is that this kind of aimless busyness infects most entrepreneurs who don’t even work for anyone else.  Even when they are their own boss, so many entrepreneurs take on the same corporate rat race time schedule where any minute not spent doing something is considered wasted time.

Robb Sutton just wrote an article on this topic titled Sometimes You Need to Just Unplug – Wicked Productivity, where he talks about how productive he became when he was forced to slow down after his MacBook Pro fell 5 feet and landed on the stone tile in his kitchen, killing his hard drive and rendering Robb temporarily unplugged from the digital world.

Robb grabbed a pen and a yellow pad of paper and all of a sudden he was flooded with blog post ideas, plans for the future, development for clothing lines and other ideas that just kept flowing for him.

After just one hour of quiet unplugged time he had 6 full pages of ideas!

What I believe Robb experienced was a quiet moment in time when the inspired ideas that were probably in his head for months were finally given a chance to be heard.  We all have access to this inspired flow of amazing ideas and answers to some of the most difficult challenges we face in life, but we’re all so busy being busy that we don’t ever make time for quiet contemplation.

I am just as guilty of this as anyone else, but in the last year I have become  lot more aware of my energy levels and my ability to be productive when I make time for what I call quiet alone time.  Now, when I say quiet alone time I am not talking about sitting on the couch watching TV, listening to the radio, talking on the phone, texting, Twittering, reading blogs, or even sleeping.  What I’m talking about is unplugging yourself from all those types of things and just spending some time with yourself.

Sometimes I like to just sit there and think.  Other times I’ll sit and write in my journals or meditate, and other times I’ll lie down on the couch and work on visualizing things.

For any entrepreneur currently not making such quiet alone time a priority in their lives, you’re severely hurting your business.  Face it, you’ll never not be “busy”.  There’s always more work to do in your business than you’ll ever be able to catch up with.  As an entrepreneur you’ll make more work for yourself even if you did ever catch up.  So the only way you’ll ever have time for this is if you make it.

That means something else is going to have to take a back seat.  If that means not answering your email for an extra hour or not calling someone back, so be it.

Nothing is more important than your state of being at any given time.  No amount of action can compensate for an improper state of being or thinking.

Try setting some alone time aside for just a few hours a week to start, and you’ll be amazed at how much more productive you’ll find yourself.

Who knows, you might just have that amazing idea you’ve been waiting for all your life.

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