Article by Jane Tweedy, Business Advisor, Western Sydney Business Centre
Finally people are back from holiday, the kids are back at school, and the real work can begin for 2018!
Hopefully by now you’ve set yourself some robust goals and identified or reviewed your business mission, vision and values, and completed an updated SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats).
Once the customer orders start rolling in, and we’re back at our networking groups, time can seem to quickly contract. A way to deal with this is to review our productivity. Whilst mentioning networking, assess what groups you’re in (online and offline) and make sure they still achieve your desired purpose of relationship building, referrals, comradery, profile building, education …
Are you always busy? Do you see wearing being busy as a badge of honour? Don’t, unless it’s a productive busy allowing you to achieve your IMPORTANT tasks and working towards YOUR goals, and not just tending to tasks that are urgent for others.
Assess work when it comes in – typically by phone, message and email. For a starter turning off notifications from email, Facebook etc can quickly improve productivity (note Messenger works independently of Facebook for notifications so you can still get those if linked to an online website chat). If you’re going to reduce frequency of checking messages it is best to warn people, or they will move to someone else.
Work should be allocated as follows:
- Do it now – urgent and important
- Diary it – important but not urgent
- Delegate it – urgent (to someone else) but not important to you – offload if you can!
- Dump it – neither urgent or important – unnecessary timewasters! Note that downtime and fun are not unnecessary – they actually fall into point 2 or even 1!
Ideally we don’t want to double handle emails or leave them sitting in the inbox to action. By following the above we move to a task list. Tasks can be managed through your calendar system, or via an app like Trello, Google Keep or Evernote.
Plan ahead
For the day, the week, the month and year.
Eat the frog! This mantra was made famous by a Brian Tracy book of the same name. Schedule your hardest task first in the day – your day can only go up from there!
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