I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a very Irish, very Catholic neighborhood. The Serenity Prayer showed up in just about every household. Whether it was a plaque on the wall or carved into a soap dish, it was a cultural mainstay of that community.

You’ve probably heard this prayer in reference to 12-step groups. It is most well-known for its opening lines: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

The way it seemed to be used when I was growing up was closer to, “Help me get through the nonsense my kids are up to, the strength to not yell at them when innocent, and the patience to think so I know the difference.”

Religious origins aside, it’s solid advice for leaders and managers, especially those who are managing staff and dealing with customers. Any time you’re working with people, there are going to be things you can’t control, random data inputs that shape your day and your environment. The key, as the prayer suggests, is to have the wisdom to tell the difference.

It does take a particular kind of wisdom to understand the factors in your business and management structure that you cannot change. By freeing yourself from wasting time and resources on these inalterable elements, you can then reinvest that energy into dealing with things that are within your purview to change.

I see this distinction clearly in a common grievance among managers — difficulty with staff retention. Managers often lament that staff are seeking higher-paying jobs elsewhere, or even that people simply “don’t want to do the work.” While both of these are possible causes of high turnover, I’ve seen this issue play out enough times that I tend to look for causes in other directions first.

Most often, how people are managed has a large impact on whether or not they stick around. Do your employees know what’s expected of them and the responsibilities of the role? In what ways are you supporting them doing their work? If you can’t find easy, satisfying answers to these questions, then it may make more sense to consider issues within your control than to assign responsibility to circumstances at large.

I don’t mean to sound naive — money matters. But even that falls within your sphere of influence, at least to some extent. For employees on the lower end of the pay spectrum, an extra 50 cents or dollar an hour can make a big difference. If you’re having trouble retaining staff on the upper end of that spectrum, pay is an unlikely reason for people to make sudden, unexpected changes.

Telling the difference between things you can and can’t change requires taking a frank inventory of your business and your own management structure. And even if you don’t have control of the problems you’re facing right now, knowing that still gives you power over your situation. Maybe you can’t do anything to fix a difficult market, but you can alter pay scales and work conditions to better meet your staff’s needs.

You can also create new circumstances that are more favorable for your business. Whether that means letting employees bring in pets, giving them more input in their schedules, or allowing part-time remote work. It’s also worth considering any negatives in your workplace. Are you unintentionally rude? Do they need more support? Are they overworked because they’re short-staffed, which makes training more difficult? We have one location where my keeping them in snacks is the key to a happy team. Costco makes this an inexpensive solution.

Taking stock of these realities requires courage and strength. But in nearly every situation, you have tools you can use to make your business a more attractive place for employees.

Of course, there are times when a situation is well and truly beyond your control. Let’s say you’re not getting enough people through the door. During an economic slump and a worldwide downward trend, it makes sense to identify the cause of your problem as something you can’t really help. If these external forces are truly causing your woes, then all you can do is hope for the serenity to navigate trying times.

Last year, we saw two hurricanes tear through our community and severely hamstring the sales of one of our stores. It was painful, of course — our new store was just starting to get its feet under it, but the community was devastated, and we lost a quarter of our sales as we dug ourselves out of that pit.

But at the end of the day, nothing we did could have stopped the hurricane or the harm that it did to our community. So all that was left was to make peace with it. When you have the understanding to identify what’s under your control and what isn’t, you can focus your efforts into areas where they can really make a difference.

The Serenity prayer may be associated with 12-step programs or various Christian traditions, but at the end of the day, the message that you need to pick your battles is something that can benefit all of us.

Lately, a lot of my time has gone toward a new training venture. In this process, I’m documenting skills that I’ve used throughout my career to help new business owners get in front of the very hard learning curve. I’m a “hands-on” manager and prone to jump in, which is often the very wrong answer.

I recently completed the first draft of these training sessions, targeted to people who are starting up a franchise location. When it was ready for feedback, I showed it to a colleague who read through it and then got back to me with the million-dollar question. “This all sounds great, but how do I do this stuff?”

The information in the workbook was good, but I realized that my advice was a lot of high-level strategy. It was missing executable tactics. The more my colleague and I worked on it, the more I refined the core ideas to tie in day-to-day implementation. The concept being someone needs to have the Big Ideas, but having them is not enough. You have to make sure they get done, and it shouldn’t be you doing most of it.

As we worked, a new through-line began to take shape: helping a new entrepreneur quantify the value of their time. I’ve written before about the value of time for an executive, but to my mind, your time becomes even more valuable in an entrepreneurial or start-up role like a franchise. And missteps are more critical.

In a larger organization those at the top have an obligation to create the big plans, and usually their time is allotted that way. You also have a lot more people and a lot more moving parts. Much of the “business” happens regardless of your input. In a small business, you are your organization’s most expensive resource and without you providing the right inputs it may stall on you.

Identifying the best uses for your time, I find it helpful to create AND DEFINE the two buckets that your productive time falls into: working in your business & working on your business.

Working in your business is the hands-on work that you do to facilitate daily business operations. It may be paying bills, engaging with customers, or stocking a shelf.

Working on your business is when you create a process, a sales plan, a new product set, sort out how to inject a lead gen platform, etc.. Your work grows your business in the long term, although it may not generate income that same day.

You may have heard the adage that an owner needs to work on their business, not in their business. Working in the business is very valuable for setting examples, teaching and a customer-feedback loop. You just need to keep it in small doses. There should be a clear limit to how much of this “doing” time you’re giving your business every week. If you are the only person in the business, you have a job by another name. For you to own an enterprise, you need to have others working.

Working on the business is what I used to get done in the office when I was an executive. I’d spend nine to ten hours there a day working on the Big Thoughts: organizational trends and plans. I would have told you all of it was focused and valuable. I was wrong.

With the pandemic and the rise in work from home, I realized that a lot of that time in the office was spent engaging with office culture and the cycles of the building rather than actually making plans and setting them into action.

If I spent ten hours a day in the office, maybe four to six hours of that was spent on deliverable work. And now, even when I have a lot in the “working on the business” bucket, I find that I’m best served by a one-to-two-hour sprint. Not only are these sessions productive, but you’d be surprised how quickly your brain gets tired when you’re focused exclusively on big ideas in front of you, as well as how much you can crank out when focused.

In my experience, one to two sprints once or twice a day will get you much more value for your time than grinding out a ten-hour day. When entrepreneurs and new business owners don’t realize this, they start to wonder why they’re consistently working 18-hour days and doing nothing but spinning their wheels. There is a failure to separate high-value concept work and the linear tasks you have to do to support the organization. Often, it is easy to get sucked into working in your business and then be too worn out to give working on your business the time it deserves.

The solution to this issue is to set aside dedicated time to working on your business so that working in your business doesn’t take over. Believe me, I know how easy it is for one quick question from an employee or customer to turn into hours on the floor.

But I also know that if I spend an hour working on marketing plans for the next month and send out instructions to the relevant parties to get plans in place in advance, we have more sales than if I go into the business, get an idea for a video on the fly, shoot it, and cross my fingers that it gets traction.

I don’t deny that it can be difficult to do. But if you’re spending all day working in your business and not getting anywhere, maybe try stepping back and giving yourself permission to spend more time with higher-level thinking. You have to Define and Defend the “on your business” time and make sure you block it in FIRST during your most productive times. When you find the right balance, you’ll be able to work in your business and enjoy it without sacrificing the forward growth that only you can generate.