I recently wrote a series of Time Management Help but I see so many of my friends in Internet Marketing suffering from a sense of being overwhelmed, that I feel compelled to revisit it with some hard, cold advice. I hope this helps you.
When I was right out of graduate school and in my first corporate management role I was really revved to get ahead. It seemed that my fast-paced company couldn’t go fast enough to fully benefit from what I thought I had to offer. I was constantly inserting my ideas and my recommendations and opinions into everything I could. All I could imagine was how I was being held back by this monstrous bureaucracy. After 6 months I was actively looking for another company. To me the grass was definitely greener on the other side of the hill.
Fortunately for me I had a mentor who happened to be my boss and a world class PR and Advertising pro. He watched as I restlessly struggled and pushed. It must have been humorous to him, but he saw something worth working with and helped me understand a great truth.
In one of our weekly lunches he told me the story of how he was also young and aggressive early in his career, and he had a mentor as well who saw something worthwhile that should be grown and nurtured. Certainly in his case it must have worked. So I asked him what it was that his mentor had told him decades before.
The advice was timeless he said. And just as great advice always is, you’ve got to let it sink in a bit to fully appreciate it. The advice his mentor gave him, and he was then passing on to me was simple. “Bloom where you are planted”. With all that build up I was expecting something like “don’t invest in derivatives”, or “go raise capital and start your own firm”. But “bloom where you are planted”? What was I, some kind of an Orchid?
But over time this advice rang through my racing mind and helped me settle and focus more and more. My career began moving and I was on my way up the ladder. By forgetting about the grass on the “other side of the hill” and focusing on my own patch, I was able to grow my own reputation, departments, and responsibilities into something valuable for my company.
If you are a network marketer or an online marketer this advice is absolutely good for you too. It seems that so many of us fall prey to the “grass is greener” syndrome, just as I did as a young manager. In the case of home business, this results in joining additional companies, hopping around from training to training, or system to system. It really doesn’t take long until you have more than you can manage. In many cases your businesses are all in start-up or stalled because there is not enough energy and attention to move them forward.
So it becomes a matter of focus. As I have written before, focus is the real key to success. Well, there are others, but focus is definitely on the key chain.
So “bloom where you are planted”. If you have multiple businesses and none of them are performing well, decide which one you most want to grow and focus your attention on that one. Sure people in your other companies are going to be disappointed, and some of your downline in those companies may ask you to reconsider, but focus. Work one business at a time until it is running smoothly, then add.
If you are distracted by offers for training and tools, focus. Look at your business and decide what is necessary to grow it. You may find that you already have all the training and tools you need. Decide what needs to be done in your business, make a plan, and then do it with focus, energy, and do it with massive action.
Bloom where you are planted my friends. I hope this helps you as much as it has helped me. I have to dust it off once in a while and remember myself. Best of luck!
As I’ve written before, the fact is, you cannot manage time, but you can manage yourself in time. Time management techniques are intended to help you gain focus so you can provide your attention where it is most needed in order to meet your goals. It is the dilution of your attention away from these priority activities that ruins your personal productivity and spoils your success. Before you can apply time management techniques to strengthen your focus, you must first understand the problems which weaken your focus.
Problem of “Overwhelm”. Multi-tasking is probably one of the biggest myths ever in personal productivity. It was popularized as a way of dealing with numerous stimuli simultaneously, particularly today’s rich multi-media, such as email, Tweeting, blogs, texting, phone interruptions plus others. If you feel overwhelmed by the volume of communication you are called upon to manage and respond to, if you feel like you are unable to focus on your priorities because you are constantly diverted by multi-media messages, then you need to take decisive action.
So to overcome “overwhelm” you must learn a new skill. You’ve got to get comfortable with a new situation. A sense of being overwhelmed precedes growth. Mike Koenig, the video marketing guru and co-creator of Traffic Geyser, and video marketing coach to Anthony Robbins said that the sense of being overwhelmed is a sign that the neurons in your brain are forming new connections to manage the new stimuli and problems your are encountering. In other words, the sense of being overwhelmed can be seen as a sign that help is on the way.
Problem of Distractions. Distractions are real vampires. They siphon off your energy and distract you from your tasks. It is estimated that after a distraction it takes 15 minutes to get your mind completely refocused onto a task. That’s a serious dilution of focus. Most distractions are made by other people. Someone knocks on your door wanting to talk about the game last night. If you work at home it might be a spouse or a child or a neighbor.
So how will you deal with it? Well, first you’ve got to assess it and ask yourself whether it is aligned with your purpose or goals. If it isn’t, then maybe this interruption has no place in your space and it should be stopped or eliminated. That can be difficult and touchy, but sometimes necessary. Depending upon the circumstances, maybe you can simply manage the disruption. For instance it might be fine for the kids to come into your home office in the afternoon when you’re just responding to calls and emails. But not when you are writing advertising copy or articles in the morning. The point is that you should never let distractions disrupt you from your high yield activities.
Problem of Environment. The environment in which you work is perhaps more important than most of my points in this article. The bottom line on environment is this. You cannot have a Million Dollar Thought in the middle of the kids screaming, the dog barking, and the TV rattling at the kitchen table.
Achievers actually utilize their time differently in different environments. For all but just a very few, you can’t do all of your high priority revenue producing tasks in the same environment. Maybe you can’t write copy or ads or build advertising campaigns in your home office. Because in your home office there are phone interruptions, email and Social Media distractions, kids and inboxes…just about everything but intense 100 percent peak mental and physical energy performance. Maybe you need to do your high intensity work at the dining room table early in the morning before the family gets up. Or perhaps you’d like to take your work to a nice table in an isolated corner of the local library.
For me I like to clear my desk and focus on the high intensity things first in the morning. When I’m making videos I like to get out of the office and into a room away from the phone and computer. I like to use the office for more administrative tasks like uploading blog posts and articles, making calls and managing Social Media. And I like to get away when I read for self-improvement. So I use three separate environments. You can experiment with this yourself. The point is that if you try to squeeze all these various levels of activities into one environment, it will dilute your effort and your success.
Time Management Solutions – Getting Your Focus Back. Okay, now it’s time for some practical solutions to improving your productivity. Here they are:
Journaling. Just like a personal trainer logs your daily exercise results for later evaluation of strengths and weaknesses, you should log your activities throughout a week and evaluate them on Friday to see what you’ve really been doing with your time, particularly whether how often and how much time you’ve spent on multi-media and how much on priority tasks.
Blocking Time. Set specific blocks of time aside on your schedule to deal with specific issues. For instance if you are most productive in the mornings, set up one-hour blocks in your morning schedule strictly for your creative and goal-driven tasks. Schedule blocks during the less productive times of the day for managing multi-media, accepting walk-in questions/disruptions, and handling mundane administrative or operations tasks.
Setting Appointments. Just like you set appointments to meet with people to exchange information, set an appointment for you to handle your email, Social Media, texts, and phone messages.
Batching. Batching is when you move multiple tasks to a time slot. Follow the above recommendation to set an appointment to manage your multiple media, but consider carving out two days that you handle only priority tasks. Trust me, the world isn’t going to end if you don’t respond to multi-media on Tuesdays and Thursdays, rather you batch the inquiries and handle them only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Then on Tuesdays and Thursdays you are free of multi-media altogether.
Goal and Cycle. At the start of each task do two things. First decide what you intend to do before you move to a different task. Then set a finish time. So now you have a goal (what you will accomplish) and a cycle (the start time and finish time). This is very powerful.
Drilling. The fact is, if you’re going to use goal and cycle technique above, you may as well drill yourself to work faster and faster. Studies have shown that people who work fast are sharper thinkers. And if you’re an entrepreneur, that’s exactly what you need.
50 – 10 Technique. I’ve written about a breakthrough technique called the 50 – 10 Technique, where you schedule one-hour blocks of time, use the goal and cycle technique above to determine what you’re going to accomplish, and use a timer to work 50 minutes, then take 10 minutes to walk, rehydrate, get your mind refreshed before returning. This technique keeps you fresh and more productive all day long, preventing exhaustion by the end of the day. If you do nothing else, adopt the 50 – Ten Technique.
There is nothing magical about time management techniques, unless of course by using them you come to realize that the biggest impediment to your ability to focus on your high-yield, goal-driven activities is YOU. Then you can understand the true nature of being overwhelmed and learn to manage it. You can learn to spot distractions in your life and remove them or control them, and you can learn to use the right environment for the right task. If any of the concepts and techniques I have presented in this article help you, then I am honored. Good luck and go focus!
Time management help is often a topic of interest for network marketers and entrepreneurs. I’d like to dispel a commonly held myth about time management; you cannot manage time. It is simply impossible. Time is an artificial dimension based on sequence and interval; nobody can manage a dimension. Ah, but you CAN manage YOURSELF in the dimension of time! You see, there is a big difference in mindset between someone who thinks they’re going to manage time and someone who realistically expects to manage themselves. Clearly the end results are going to be different. I’d also like to make another quick point. Instead of just calling it managing yourself in time, let’s call it what it really is, ‘managing your focus’. Because in reality time management techniques are really designed to help you focus your attention where it is needed most so you can accomplish what you need to accomplish to meet your goals.
Focus is implied in my personal formula for success. You see, I think of success as a proverbial three-legged stool. As you know a three-legged stool must have all three of its legs or it fall over. In my formula for success the three allegorical stool legs are: 1) maintaining peak mental & physical energy and knowledge, 2) Working only on priority activities associated with your goals and purpose, and 3) taking massive action on those activities. A tremendous amount of focus is going to be required to bring 100 percent in each of these categories.
You must focus on peak energy and on goals and purpose in order to bring massive focus in the form of action. Achievers are people who can focus. Achievers are magnetically attractive people; magically other people are attracted to those who have keen focus on a purpose. In fact we call them by names like “visionary”, “leaders”, “winners”, and “captains of industry”, just to name a few. The successes of achievers have been almost always supported by their ability to focus physical and mental energy, purpose-driven priorities, and their follow-through with massive action. This is what achievers do day-in and day-out. This is why it is important for you to manage your ability to focus, and this is exactly what good time management techniques can help you accomplish.
Now, what about you? Are you in peak physical condition? Do you have apex physical energy to call upon in order to endure long-haul and short-term challenge? Do you have the mental energy and knowledge to call upon during this effort? And have you identified your purpose or mission in life and with your business? Have you established a vision of where you want to go in achieving that purpose, and have you set clear, achievable goals that challenge you and keep you driven toward action and success? These are the raw materials that need to be in place before you fine-tune your focus into life-changing and business-changing action toward success.
If you are like most people, you answered “no” to most of these questions. But don’t be discouraged. This is your starting point, not your finish line. These are things you can work to improve. In fact these can become important self-development goals and business planning goals for you in the near future. I wish you well in your journey to success. Good luck!
