Archive for Planning
Work Smarter, Save Time and Increase Productivity
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Every business owner would like to find a way to save time and increase productivity. Unfortunately, working from home often means that productivity can take a back seat to the million other things competing for our attention.
These three tips will help you work smarter, save time and increase productivity.
1. Set a schedule and stick to it.
It’s tempting to stray from a set schedule when you work from home. After all, working from home means we have the freedom to set our own hours. Unfortunately, however, this can lead to reduced productivity.
One of the best ways to increase your productivity is to set a firm schedule for work hours and stick to it. This means that work time is work time. If you were at the office, friends wouldn’t pop over for coffee and your neighbor wouldn’t call you for a chat. By setting a strict work schedule, not only will you get more done, but people will learn to respect that working from home really does mean you’re working.
2. Work in short bursts.
Research has proven that after a set time of concentrating on a task at hand, we start to lag. Our concentration lessens and we actually get less done. When you work from home, it’s easy to avoid this. Simply set your work schedule to include short bursts of time assigned to each specific project.
The time you allow for each project will depend on you personally, but you can experiment until you find what works best for you. A good rule of thumb is 45 minutes for any intensive task that requires concentration.
For example, if you have work to edit, spend 45 minutes doing that, then move on to answering your emails for another set amount of time. After that you can either go back to editing to tackle another task.
The key is to break your time up into chunks that you dedicate specifically to each individual task. Then you move on to the next task for a specific set amount of time. And don’t forget to take a short 5 or 10 minute break every few hours or so. This will help you clear your mind as well as avoid your body getting stiff from sitting for extended periods of time.
3. Get organized.
There’s a great saying: “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Being organized is an important part of being productive. By taking a little time to plan your day or the week ahead means you can dive straight into work without wondering what you’re meant to be doing.
It also helps to keep all your important papers, folders and documents easily labelled and accessible so that you don’t waste time looking for things. While planning ahead does take a little time, it will save you more time in the long run.
These three tips will help you become and remain more productive during your work day. By thinking ahead and planning your day, working in short but concentrated bursts and sticking to a strict work schedule you will get more done in less time.
Teleseminar Checklist
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Teleseminars are a great way to build trust with an audience, make sales on the spot and facilitate a two-way communication. Teleseminars can involve live video of you, on-screen demonstrations as well as presentation software like Microsoft PowerPoint.
Before hopping on a teleseminar, you need to make sure you’re prepared from both a presentation perspective and a technical perspective. Here’s a checklist to help you do that.
Make Sure Your Line Can Handle the Volume
If you have over 100 guests, make sure you talk to your teleseminar provider to see if your line can handle the volume.
The kinds of providers you need for a teleseminar with 100 people, 1,000 people and 10,000 people are very different services with different technical requirements.
Prepare the First 60 Seconds
The first 60 seconds of the teleseminar are the most important parts. This is when people will decide either to leave the teleseminar or to stay on.
In the first 60 seconds, clearly spell out what’s going to be covered and what they’ll get by listening to the call.
Practice your first 60 seconds several times before the call.
Invitation & Follow-Up Schedule
At a bare minimum, every teleseminar should have one invitation and one follow-up email before the actual call.
For more important teleseminars, you may want to create a sales process around the call where you use several emails to “sell” them on coming onto the teleseminar.
Make sure to plan out the whole process before you start promoting the teleseminar.
Get Familiar with the Software
If you haven’t used the software for the teleseminar before, get familiar with it before the call. Try running a test seminar with just yourself and a test computer beforehand.
Learn how to switch between screencasts and presentation tools as well as how to turn your webcam on and off. Learn how to mute and unmute visitors and how to take questions.
You don’t want to be trying to figure these things out while on a live call.
Test Your Recording Devices
If you want your call recorded, make sure you test that as well.
Most teleseminar services will offer some kind of recording package you can purchase. However, you’ll often want to also have your own recording going for back-up.
Prep for Most Common Questions
Before the teleseminar begins, try to predict what kind of questions people will ask you. You can do this by going through past emails your customers have sent you or by browsing related forums on the internet.
By having an idea of what to expect before going into the seminar, you’ll be able to answer questions in a more informative, authoritative way. You’ll also be able to research any questions that you might have trouble with.
These are some of the most important things to cover before you launch a teleseminar. Make sure your line can handle the volume, check your recording equipment, test the software, prepare your first 60 seconds, have a solid invitation and follow-up system and prep your Q&A beforehand.
The Skills Every Solopreneur Needs
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If you want to succeed as a solopreneur, there are a few core skills you need to have. The majority of these skills aren’t things that are taught in business school, but skills that need to be honed in the real world. Fortunately, once you develop these skills, they can be applied to just about any venture you embark on.
These are the skills every solopreneur should have.
Leadership (Not Management)
John Bogle, founder of The Vanguard Fund, the largest mutual fund in the world, defines leadership as knowing what’s worth doing. Management is knowing how to do it.
A leader needs to be able to decide what’s important and what will actually impact the company’s bottom line. They need to be able to make moral decisions about when to go for profit and when to sacrifice profits for long-term values.
They need to be able to identify what’s really best for everyone involved, including clients, employees and shareholders, and make business decisions for the greater good.
A manager is someone who understands things like time management, project flow, tracking employee performance and such. But they aren’t necessarily the right people to steer a company.
A good solopreneur needs to be a great leader. It also helps if they’re a good manager.
Persistence and Patience
In “Good to Great,” one of the most highly acclaimed business books of the century, Jim Collins studies eleven public companies whose performance consistently beat the market average for 15 years in a row.
One of the key factors he found was persistence and patience. He likened it to a giant spinning metallic flywheel.
If you had to take this giant metallic wheel and make it spin, in the very beginning it won’t budge at all. You can put in immense amounts of effort, only to find it still not moving.
Yet once it does start moving, slow at first then getting faster and faster, it’ll build up momentum until it starts to move on its own. At that point, it would actually be harder to stop the flywheel than to push it faster.
Building a business is like that. In the beginning, you’ll be swimming upstream. But as momentum builds, it’ll get easier and easier. The trick is to have the persistence and patience to stick it through.
Team and People Focus
“Take my 20 best people and, virtually overnight, Microsoft becomes a mediocre company.” — Bill Gates
Whether it’s Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, one thing is consistently clear across the most successful companies: a relentless drive to hire the best people.
More than anything else, the success of your company is going to be based on the kind of people you hire.
Aim to hire people who are smarter and more competent than you. Don’t try to hire a team that you can lead, but a team that can lead your company and you to better results than you alone could create.
These are just a few of the key skills every solopreneur needs. These skills aren’t developed overnight, but they’re absolutely skills that anyone who’s committed can learn.
Running Your Business With an iPhone
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Don’t you just love technology? A few short years ago it really wasn’t possible to run your business from your phone. Now you can do almost anything with the help of applications for your iPhone.
Writing/Editing
There are a number of apps that let you view and edit documents directly from your smartphone. One of the most popular is called Documents to Go. It lets you view and edit documents right on your phone.
You can also find text-based writing tools like PlainText and iA Writer that are inexpensive and easy to use.
Desktop Communication
You can use the GoToMyPC app to connect to your work computer. This makes it easy to access your work files directly. No need to plan ahead. You can also use Apps like Dropbox and CloudTalk to share and store information that is accessible both from your computer and your smartphone.
Communication
With Skype you can have voice chats (and video chats if your device has a camera) with customers and contractors.
You can also use dictation applications like Dragon and QuickVoice to record your thoughts or create business content or documents.
Payment and Invoicing
PayPal offers an easy to use payment application that lets you send invoices and manage your account from your smartphone. Many banks also offer applications that let you manage your account from your phone. Intuit, the makers of Quicken and QuickBooks also have a payment processing application called GoPayment that you can use on your smartphone.
Blogging
Like to blog on the go? Check out the WordPress application that makes it easy to write, edit and publish blogs from your smartphone.
Social Networking
There are myriad applications to manage your social networking for both Facebook and Twitter. You can post pictures, comments, and stay in touch with your friends from just about any mobile device. Check out Friendly and the iTunes Facebook app for Facebook. Check out the HootSuite application for Twitter.
Organization
Last but definitely not least are the wide number of organization and brainstorming applications that you can find to not only grow your business but also to manage it from your phone. Check out MindNode for mind mapping applications. Evernote and One Note are both fantastic note taking, clipping, and organizational tools.
And don’t forget the basics. You can access your Google accounts with Google applications which means you can check your AdSense earnings, analytics and of course you can check your email too.
Smartphone applications make owning and operating a business easier than it has ever been before. You can network, invoice, pay bills, brainstorm, publish content and launch new products – all from your phone.
Starting out? How to Ensure You Have a Mindset Geared for Success
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Guest post by: Kirstin O´Donovan – TOP Results Coaching
Whether you are just starting out or you have been an entrepreneur for a few years, wherever you are in your career, ensuring you have the right mindset is essential for your success. It is said that 80% of the reasons holding us back from being successful are inside ourselves and only 20% are on the outside – so we must always start by looking at ourselves. Don’t let yourself be your worst enemy.
So how can we ensure we have a mindset geared for success…there are a few qualities we need to work on to be geared for success.
CAUSE: EFFECT – There are only two sides of the equation that we can be on. If you are on the cause side, you accept and know that you are responsible for everything that happens to you and your company. You know that your business is a reflection of your actions and you take responsibility for your results. If you are on the effect side, you feel like a victim, you have excuses for why this doesn’t work, why you can´t succeed in that and you live by these stories. To succeed, you must always take responsibility for what happens. Decide to be in charge of your business success, and not at the mercy of what happens to you.
We also need to look at our attitude towards events. In business, we must use failure as feedback and respond positively to feedback. Our attitude determines how we look at setbacks, events, and situations. If we have a positive attitude we could look at the same situation very differently from someone who has a negative attitude. A failure in business could be very daunting for some people or it could be positive feedback to others. The feedback that they need to alter their course a little, change what they are doing to get a better result. Failure is guidance, helping us to find the best way to succeed, so cultivate the habit of using failure as feedback.
Know where your focus is – you need to focus on what you can change and do and not on what you can´t. Some of us spend a whole day, focusing on the negative, how bad the situation is and how unfair, how could this be happening, instead of moving on and changing what we can. Our focus determines our reality so keep focusing on succeeding and not on what we can´t control.
You have to be committed and persevere in what you want – don´t give up! Perseverance is the key in reaching any goal. You must focus on what you want and you must dedicate yourself to achieving it. You must be committed throughout the journey and it will pay off. Being an entrepreneur is not always easy, the journey may have setbacks, mistakes, but successful people are the ones who have the ability to overcome these, use them as feedback and keep moving forward.
Your mind must be organized, you must be very clear about where you are going, the vision you have for your business and the certainty that you will have it! If your mind is full of doubt, uncertainty and you are not clear about what you actually want or what solution you provide, this will have a very negative effect on you. You need to manage your mind and be clear about what you want, what you offer and to whom, etc – if your mind is disorganized, this will reflect directly on your outside world.
You also need to break old habits if they are not serving you or helping you to succeed. Bad habits will only hold you back and have a negative impact on your life. You must recognize your bad habits and find the strength to change them.
Lastly, you must have a high self esteem and believe in yourself and other people too. The beliefs you have about people, your abilities and business in general will determine the results you get in business. Identify your beliefs and if they are holding you back, change them! This also refers to your negative thoughts, if they don´t serve you, they only make you feel bad and bring you down. Anchor positive feelings and be your own success coach.
“Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success!” – Henry Ford
About the Author
Kirstin O´Donovan is a Personal Growth and Success Coach, helping entrepreneurs who struggle with time-management, organization and goal setting to achieve their goals, improve organization and gain control over their time. She helps entrepreneurs to alleviate stress and to be more productive, empowered and fulfilled. Find out more about Kirstin and TOP Results Coaching here.
