I finally feel like I am back and I ready to take on the world (so to speak)!! After talking to a friend, I decided that it was time to start “practising what I preach”. In the last month, my business has grown so much that I find myself just working through the work again and forgetting about my business. If I keep up this pace, I am afraid that I will quickly fall into old habits so I decided it was time to do something about it. So I thought I would share with you some of the things I did to get back to structure and back to building a thriving business.
The first thing I did was to take a really close look at my goals again and to break them down as far as I could into manageable chunks. Part of doing this was reviewing my long term goals and coming up with a plan to get there. Even more importantly I decided that I needed an “incentive”!! My incentive is to reward myself with a new software program that I have been wanting to purchase. So first I set a time line and a set of goals … then I took a picture of that software program and put it on my bulletin board. Now every time I look at that picture I am reminded of the goals that I am trying to achieve and the incentive to work harder is there!!
The second thing I did was to review my schedule and rework it to what now makes sense for my business. See this was the thing I was forgetting about … I set my schedule over a year ago and a lot of what worked then was no longer working in my business now. In doing this I realized that although setting a schedule is a good first step, the fact I hadn’t been following it was a reminder that a schedule is only good if it is followed!!! My productivity has increased immensely since I have started following this schedule again.
The last and final thing I did was to start using “to do” lists again. I quickly realized that without a good to do list, things were “falling through the cracks” and not getting done. Even more importantly, I took the time to prioritize my list and got back to my system of color coding the work … yellow highlighted items must be accomplished today, blue items come immediately after the yellow items are attended to and the pink items are things that I would like to do, but timing is not crucial. Then I assigned a number to each item within the color coding so I would know in what order they would be completed.
Just getting back to this structure has made me feel so much better about not only my business, but also about myself. I am ready to take my business to the next level and to truly set some goals to make this happen. Without having these three things in place, I truly believe that this would not be possible!!