Time Management Strategies

Every one of us only have 24 hours in a day to work with. Hence, time management strategies allow you to accomplish more within a few hours, instead of having to extend your work on a single task for days. Here are a few strategies that you can apply to achieve that:

1.) List Down Your Activities

It need not be overemphasized that you have to learn how to prioritize your work. Meaning, you must set aside the less important tasks so you can focus on the more urgent ones. When you learn how to do this effectively, you can easily accomplish whatever it is you need to do within a shorter time. Make it a habit to write down a list of things to do. If you want to be really specific, break down all that you have to do within a day and in the order that you want them to get done.

As you list down your set of tasks to do, you have to identify which ones are long or short-term projects. Hence, you will be able to determine how much time you can allot for them within a day. A short-term task might be accomplished within, say a couple of hours. Meanwhile, for long-term tasks, you can try allotting 1 or 2 hours each day until when you intend to finish them. Hence, breaking down tasks would make it more efficient for you as you won't find it too strenuous.

2.) Allocating Time

Once you have your list, you now have to decide on how much time to allocate for each task or project you have set out to do for the day. Some tasks eat up a lot of time, so you have to be aware which are those. So as not to end up wasting so much time on one task, you have to provide time limits on each task so you can easily move on to the next.

When you do tasks in smaller chunks, it becomes a lot easier for you. Hence, you have eased yourself of the pressure. Instead, you can just focus on what you need to finish.

3.) Know What You Want To Accomplish

Your “to-do” list will serve as source of information for what your daily goals are. Hence, you can consult it to know what you have to do once you're through with one task.

There are a few questions that you can ask yourself: How much time are you willing to render for doing leisure activities? Are you willing to cut on the leisure time and appropriate more of them into your work so it can be more productive? Once you know what your goals are, you can use that as a motivation in order to finish the list that you have made.

4.) Don’t Make Your List Of Actions Too Long

When making your list, productivity is always on top of your mind. However, you should not try to make your list too long. Most people have this tendency but that is a common misconception. Doing more work at one time is not always equal to being productive.

Start off with a short list of the most important things you have to accomplish. That way, you can easily prioritize them. When you have already completed those on top of the list, you can always add a new set of activities.

When you try to put too many activities on your list, it may become too overwhelming for you. You could easily end up having to do several unfinished tasks at once. But that is not advisable. If you can or if it is within the time limits you have indicated for a certain task, try to complete it first before moving on to work on another one.
 

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Mind Over Marketing Matter

Does mental energy have anything to do with marketing? Do you believe in mind over matter? We have all heard about people healing their illnesses miraculously by a mere thought or the elderly saying that staying young is all about one’s state of mind. But what about business transactions – in specific your marketing campaign?

Yeah, so what about that perfectly run campaign – I mean one that started with marketing surveys that found the right “button” that your specific target market would respond to. One where the very best copywriters and graphic designers worked their magic and the campaign hit the target market repeatedly and consistently. Those marketing actions seem to call for a good return on investment, right?

Sure, it does, but there can be variables that determine another outcome that doesn’t have anything to do with the nuts and bolts of the campaign. Huh? What am I talking about? Am I talking about YOU and YOUR outlook of either being positive or negative? Yes, I am.

One’s mental outlook can have a huge effect on one’s marketing campaign – or their business for that matter. Many times in business I have spoken to entrepreneurs who have fixed ideas about what will work and what won’t. They just know something will bomb – and guess what? It does. And then I talk to other business owners who have no preconceived considerations about whether a proven technique will work, and bingo – they meet success!

I will give you an example. We had a client – actually it was a friend of an employee and this employee was trying to help him expand his business. He had so many problems! He didn’t have enough patients coming in the door to bring him the income he needed and complained that the insurance companies were to blame. After all, it was the nasty insurance companies that were penalizing him by drastically cutting his fees, but at the same time sending tons of patients to him. And he didn’t have enough private-paying patients coming in to warrant dropping the insurance program. What was he to do? “Market,” I said!

Long story short – we tried to help him. But the guy had soooo many considerations about why his practice would not fix or grow. He wasn’t sure if he even wanted to practice anymore! And to my employee’s dismay, no matter what we did to help this guy, it never worked. What did we do? Well, for one I designed his campaign, my VP Marketing wrote and designed the look and feel of it and we marketed to an upscale target market that was the exact demographics of the people that bought the most from him. Shoot – we even gave him the friends and family discount. And the more we helped him, the more abysmal the results were and the more ‘right’ he was. Tweaking and polishing the campaign wouldn’t even budge the results. He was one of these guys that shrugs his shoulders, shakes his head and claims he’s done everything he’s been told with a sad ‘I told you so’ face on. I generally run from these types. But since it was a close friend of my employee’s I really sunk my teeth into it and it was amazing the resistance I’d get from this doctor. And that resistance and outlook in general causes him all sorts of trouble in his personal life come to find out.

Do you see yourself in that doctor somewhere? Well, ask yourself – do you want your business to grow? He didn’t. And if you don’t want it to grow, why not? List out the reasons why you wouldn’t want it to expand and really take a look at them. Do they even make sense when you examine them? It may be little considerations that you don’t want to make more money because you’d have to pay more in taxes or child support. Or, you worry about being able to control a larger number of staff. Or you think that being bigger would make it harder for you to spend more time with your family.

I have had all those considerations and more. Believe me when I say that owning your own business and moving it through its growing pains is not a walk in the park. It takes guts and many times you feel there is no glory – but there is. All those considerations you have about not being able to grow your business have answers if you look for them. But you’ve got to have the right attitude. Positive wins over negative. Every time.

I started with nothing and no capital investments if any kind to grow my business – and I did it with no formal education either. How did I do it? I learned something valuable along the way that made all the difference in the world to me in being able to really believe I could grow my business and then really being able to do it. I found the Hubbard Management System which is a business methodology that teaches entrepreneurs and executives how to solve those hard-to-solve problems that seem insurmountable.

There’s this one exercise that I was taught that really worked. I will tell you how to do it and you can see for yourself if it works for you. Ready? Here’s goes:

• Write down any and everything where you feel you are not operating from a point of control of in your business – in other words, where do you feel more affected by things than you are able to rationally control them?

• Now look at each of those points, one after the other, and start writing down where you can be in control of those things.

• Somewhere along the way your viewpoint will broaden, you will start figuring things out and start gaining control over your business.

Try it. It works – for the main reason it gets you to start being in control of your own mental outlook and starts getting you to be cause over your own difficulties rather then the effect of them. And that is what entrepreneurship is all about, right? Being in charge and overcoming obstacles to live that American dream – or whatever dream you want to live.

So next time your marketing campaign is not working and you have tried everything you can imagine, i.e., surveying your target market, tweaking the design, editing the copy, handling your employees so they aren’t chasing off business, etc. ad infinitum) - don’t be afraid to get a bit introspective and look at what your own viewpoints may be doing that is causing the failed results. And as an aside, watch out for naysayers who bring a negative attitude into your fold – they can have a “less than positive” impact on your results as well and make you feel like things are doomed or even worse, impossible. But then again, you can do something about them too!!!!

For every door that shuts, another one opens. You just have to look for it!

Joy Gendusa founded PostcardMania (www.PostcardMania.com) in 1998. By 2005 the company did $12+ million in sales, employed 100+ people and made Inc. Magazine’s prestigious Inc 500 List as one of the 500 fastest growing companies in the nation. To learn more about her Power Marketing Mania Bootcamp and the recorded DVD set from it, visit www.PowerMarketingMania.com