Each year we start the year thinking about our goals, our job, our health, all the ‘new’ routines and commitments we make to make this our best year yet… but two weeks into January all our planning and resolution goes out the window!
You can make this your best year ever by applying some of these simple ideas…
- Invest in yourself. I recently read – people who spend a thousand dollars or more each year on their personal development will increase their business by 20 percent. Read more books, attend Chamber of Commerce or industry workshops, attend a networking event, hire a coach, listen to podcasts in your car, do online courses or take a college course. Keep your brain active.
- Make time. Eliminate time-robbers from your day – make a list of all the things you do that rob you of your time, such as watching too much TV, running errands inefficiently, checking and responding to your email too often, making long phone calls, waiting in traffic and even other people. Focus on controlling your time and organizing your day efficiently by getting rid of the things in your life that are not a high priority.
- Unplug. Schedule one tech-free night each week. Switch off the TV, the iPad and the smart phone and instead listen to your favorite music, play a board or card game, read a book, enjoy a quiet meal by candle light, go on a date in one of your local restaurants, meet a friend for coffee or soak in a bath. Start being aware of your online usage and start to limit your media time. It’s important to renew, refresh and unplug from all of the technology once in a while.
- Find a business coach. The fact is, we are most productive when being held accountable and being taught by someone who has achieved what we want for ourselves. Identify the person you believe would be a suitable coach or mentor and reach out to them. Ask around to find out what other people’s opinion of your chosen coach are and find out all you can about their achievements, beliefs, values and way of operating. This will give you insight into them before you approach them about mentoring or coaching you.
- Schedule social time. Social media has become the #1 way to keep in touch with friends and build your business; however it can also be a huge time-waster. To keep your social time productive, schedule 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the afternoon to check your social networks and create new posts and status updates. Compartmentalizing your social time in this way will eliminate being sucked into the social networking vacuum and wasting precious time.
- Maximize your email signature. Use your email program to create an email signature block that will automatically attach to all of your outgoing messages; it’s a little like an email letterhead. It saves you the effort of including your contact information every time and brings a professional touch to your communications. You might simply include your name, business name, contact details and website or you might also include a sentence or two about your irresistible free offer (if you don’t have a free offer, contact me right away!).
- Set up systems. When saving files on your hard drive, decide how you will allocate your space to make it easiest to locate your files: for example, rather than mixing all your files together under one big Documents folder, you might decide to organize your files in separate folders for easy retrieval. For example, I have all of my business files under one big folder called BIZ. Within the BIZ folder, I have separate folders for prospects, clients, marketing information, webinars and teleseminars (organized by year), folders for each of my products/books, articles, eNewsletters by date, etc. This makes it so much easier to find the things I’m looking for when I need them.