Posts Tagged ‘time management’

Running a business from home automatically invites several types of distractions. Aside from the normal distractions of running a household, you may also have a full time job that you must go to prior to working your business. If you want to have a successful business, you’ll need to create sacred time for your business.

Time that you treat as the most important and valuable in your day or week. This is time you don’t juggle around for anything but emergencies. Read the rest of this entry »

Stress prevents you to be from performing at your peak. Tackling stress is essential to ensuring the success and well-being of both you and your business. Learning to say no and to form a mental sanctuary are just 2 ways to get your stress under control. So let’s get down to the business of de-stressology and improve peak performance. Read the rest of this entry »

When you work for yourself it’s very easy to get involved in Time Sucking Gremlins. I bet you can already guess some of what I’m about to say. You’re probably thinking I’ve heard this all before, but if you haven’t put it into practice it does bear repeating, because your time is the one commodity that you can’t get more of.

It’s so easy to get sucked into games like Farmville some make call it “networking”, but if you find yourself so engrossed in games you lose all track of time I’d call it a time vampire. It’s kinda like being in an office spending too much time at the proverbial water cooler gossiping when you really should be completing a project.

But before I give you any tips let me warn you, if you try to juggle 100 things a day you probably juggling 100 things badly and even more importantly you’re actually doing is juggling your life badly.

If you really want to make things happen, you’ve got to have an emotionally compelling reason that drives you. Without a compelling reason it’s a lot more difficult to keep focused on track and productive. Many people find it easy to confuse activity with productivity. Activity without focus is not likely to end in accomplishment.

Productivity turns into profit. Given enough time and consistency, it turns into even larger profits.

Here are your top 5 time management tips. Read the rest of this entry »

Most people who start a business online already work “9 to 5″ at another job. If you’re one of the people who have another job while you’re starting your business take heart, you can do this! The fact is, being hungry is a key ingredient to your success. If you’re hungry to get out of the rat race and leave the grind behind, you will work that much harder to create a business that allows you to do, just that.

Do the right things first — Treat your business like a business. Get a business licenses if it’s required in your state or city and don’t try to reinvent the wheel. There are certain business methods that work on the Internet that people who have gone before you have already succeeded at (after they did all the wrong things first). Additionally, it is important to be ethical and do your job first, then your business. You’ll feel better about yourself, and you won’t jeopardize your job. Read the rest of this entry »

I am often asked, “Linda how do you create a products or launch a service without getting overwhelmed and going a bit crazy?”  Well creating a product or service for your business is a pretty simple process.  But like any process knowing the steps is what makes the launch successful.

Done right, your products can help you meet and possibly even exceed your business goals.  Information products are an excellent business tactic to connect with and help more clients.

The one thing I hear quite often is that, “I’m in a service business and I don’t want to make a product, that’s not what my business model is about.”  Here’s the deal… you are one person and no matter how you look at it, your most precious resource… time is limited.  And I believe if you have the passion to help others then it’s important to help as many people as you can.  Let’s face it there’s only so many hours in a day, and so many people you can help one-on-one.  So what better way to help more clients then to provide information to give them what they want?   Read the rest of this entry »

Do you feel like there is just not enough time in the day to attract enough clients? Time management isn’t a seminar you attend or a book you read. Time management is a process that must be engaged every day to be effective. Some of the most frustrated, disorganized people in any office are the ones with the most time management books on their shelves.

Here’s the bottom line, it’s not that these books were ineffective. Rather in their frantic workday, these people “didn’t have time” to read the time management books! In the interest of keeping it simple, these tips could set you on the way to getting serious about time management as you see the value unfold:

1. Get a day planner and use it faithfully. No more sticky notes with reminders and appointments scattered around your desk, car and refrigerator at home. Keep all appointments and reminder in just one place, your day planner.
2. Create a daily “to do” list. If you do this on your computer, you can easily move around items as you prioritize the day. If on paper, you can code the items with numbers or letters for: Urgent, Need to Do Today, Can Do This Week.
3. Read your To-Do list first thing in the morning. Don’t touch newspaper, open email or answer the phone until you see the road map for your day.
4. Review your To-Do list at mid-day and end of day to see what was accomplished and what remains to be completed.
5. At the end of the day, transfer the items remaining to tomorrow’s or Monday’s list. If possible, remove any items that are not significant.
6. Delegate as much as possible to an assistant, colleague or associate. If you work independently, consider hiring a Virtual Assistant for a few hours per week. The price is right and there’s no obligation as with hiring an employee. This is particularly effective if you travel or spend much time outside the office.
7. Attend only the meetings that are absolutely necessary to do your job. Avoid any meetings that you can. Unless a meeting is run well with an agenda, there is usually wasted time chatting.
8. Close your door when you are focusing on a task or put up a sign on your cubicle asking people to stop by later when you are finished with this work.
9. Let voice mail answer your phone while you are focusing on an important task.
10. Say “no” as often as possible when you have reached your work limits. That means saying no to overtime or taking work home. When you are mentally or physically exhausted you don’t do your best work and you need to say so.

It’s easy to stay on track with time management once you commit to changing your daily habits. Just put the above tips into action and you should see more free time throughout your day.

It feels like there is never enough time.  Creating time abundance is a habit.  Free Your Mind of Time Scarcity.

• What are some thoughts/ clichés of time scarcity?
• There’s not enough time in the day.
• So much to do, so little time.
• There’s not enough time to get everything done.
• Behind the 8 ball.
• Time flies.
• I just don’t have enough time. I can’t get it all done.

What we think about we create. If we think about our business and growing it, the chances are it will grow. Of course we put our energy into growing it too. What we focus on is what we notice.

The first thing you need to understand is why it’s so hard to change old habits.  There have been studies done by countless experts and institutions, including NASA.  You may even have heard that it takes 3-6 weeks, or 66 days, or 21 days, for a new habit to “stick”… and, according to NASA, if you break that habit even once, you have to start all over again.

However, NASA’s study applied to highly-motivated, Alpha-personality astronauts; and what they were trying to change related to a specific, bizarre physical phenomenon related to gravity and eyesight.

More recently, the McGovern Institute at M. I. T. did a simple study using that simple old standby model, rats in a maze.  What they were attempting to measure, however, was nothing less than how neurons act in changing firing patterns in the basal ganglia, after patterns (habits) are broken.  This area of the brain is key to establishing habits, because the basal ganglia is where pleasure-creating dopamine is release, and the neocortex reinforces the input.

M.I.T. had the rats traverse the maze for a chocolate “treat” at its end. All during the time the rats fumbled their way through the maze, their neurons were constantly firing as they assimilated new data.  When they removed the chocolate treats, the rats lost interest, and old firing patterns returned.  However, when the chocolates were reinstated, the “new” neuron-firing pattern quickly kick-started again, and the “habit” returned even more strongly.

In other words, if you’ve tried, given up and said: “Well, that’s it for me. I guess I’m just not meant to manage my time that way…”, you can take hope: Because one thing studies like these show is, it sometimes takes several tries to change a habit… and each time, it becomes a little easier – the firing patterns are established.  (What usually messes people up is negative self-talk, a peculiarly human phenomenon – to which rats are, of course, not prone.)
I guess what I’m trying to say is… don’t accept that you’re “doomed” to give up, if you try something once and slip out of the habit.  You see, changing a habit isn’t a one-step thing. It takes:

• Self-analysis – you need to actually make time to think about what you’re doing, if it’s working, and what you’re getting out of the habit
• Substitution – substituting a new behavior for the old – and figuring out what new substitution will work best
• Trial and Error – seeing where your new behavior doesn’t work (and where you fall out of it, every time)

You see, changing any habit – even Time Abundance ones – is a process, not a single, one-time occurrence. And the sooner you allow yourself to trust that process (and your ability to adapt), the easier it gets!