Get Set For Success in 2013
Welcome to the first post of 2013.
I hope that you all had a good Christmas and New Year holiday and are ready to make a real difference to your life this year.
Sadly, this wasn’t a good time for me and my family. My sister in law was taken ill early in December and passed away on Boxing day. She was a fun-loving, outgoing, party person that lived life to the full. It was her wish that her passing should be marked with a celebration of her life with people wearing bright colors rather than everyone being in black and we respected those wishes.
Naturally, despite her wishes it is still a very sad occasion and I have taken the last month away from my business supporting my wife and family. I do feel now though that I can get started again and continue to help you with making a difference for yourselves this year.
It’s at times like this that we realize how fragile life can be and how little control we have over some things. For me it just reinforces the need to build our own financial stability through our own business that we can control.
This came home to me earlier last year when my good friend Martin Avis’ wife was taken ill requiring his input on an almost daily basis for the bulk of the year. Because he had a long-term stable business he was able to take as much time off as he needed without affecting his income at all. In fact, he told me that his revenue actually went up during that period prompting him to take a close look at what he had been spending his time on before that hadn’t apparently generated business.
We all spend time doing things that don’t actually contribute to our bottom line, don’t put money in our pocket. It’s really important to plan effectively when running your own business if you want to be successful. Someone once said that failing to plan is planning to fail by default and I believe that.
This is the time of year when we tend to look at the year ahead as a blank sheet of paper. We have a whole new year before us that we can have some influence over. The coming year will turn out one way or another based on our actions.
Some people will get fired up, run with their ideas, make things happen and end the year in a very different place from where they started. Others will continue during the coming year exactly as they ended the last one and be in the same place or worse off come next January.
Which road will you choose to take? Will you dwell on the things that you dislike about your life now or will you make a decision to focus on where you want to be in 12 months time? I firmly believe that we become what we think about so focusing your attention on what you dislike about your life now will only get you more of what you don’t want.
Plan for success
Do you know what you spend your time doing? How long do you take reading email? How often do you get distracted by an ad on a site and before you know it you’ve forgotten what you were supposed to be doing?
I’ve certainly been guilty of losing my focus in the past and still can if I’m not careful. I’ve mentioned that I’ve used time management tools to keep me on track and found them to be very useful. The one thing that all of them lacked though was the ability to set a timer on my activities.
Welly Mulia, someone that I rate very highly for the quality of the tools he creates, realized that being able to time your activities was key to time management so towards the end of last year he released his new planning tool to a few beta testers and I was one of them.
It’s called My Action Generator and I started using it myself before I needed to take some time off. Now with the new year underway it’s a key part of running my business again. Like everything that Welly builds, My Action Generator is very simple to use but very effective.
It works by using three simple steps;
1. Write down all the things you want to get done for the day. Everything from writing, creating content or planning your next project to answering your email and balancing your checkbook.
2. Assign a specific time to each task or group of tasks. Anything from 15 minutes to 2 hours. Chunks of 30 minutes or less work best.
3. Select a task, start a timer and focus on nothing but accomplishing that task. So you don’t answer the phone, get up for a drink, check out Facebook etc. etc. You remain focused on the task at hand.
The great thing about the software is that it has its own built-in timer so you can monitor your progress on screen as you go.
All you need to make it work for you is;
1. A list of tasks (there won’t be any shortage of those).
2. Time to get them done (however much time you have to devote to your business).
3. The ability to press a few keys on your computer.
That’s it. Install the software, create your task list and start making real progress towards where you want to be at the end of this year.
Give yourself a New Year treat and get My Action Generator. Make it the heart that drives your business in 2013 and you’ll get set for success in 2013.
Get it here,
http://www.trevor-greenfield.com/actiongenerator
Until next time,
Take some action,
Remember – Nothing Happens Until We Take Action
Trevor
http://www.trevor-greenfield.com/actiongenerator
Next time I’ll continue my series on getting started.
