Posted on December 14, 2009 in Starting a Business, Management, Work Life

How to create daily success

Author: Allison Babb
Allison Babb is an author, speaker and Small Business Coach to solo entrepreneurs. Allison publishes the "Solopreneur Success" weekly Ezine on how to create a steady stream of clients for your small business at: www.GreatSmallBusinessAdvice.com

photo by Helico

One of the biggest challenges I see when I coach an entrepreneur is how they manage their time daily. I can give them all the success strategies in the world, but they won't work if the business owner doesn't make the time to put them into action.

If you own a home based business or even if you're starting a home based business, one critical part of success is how you flow through the day.

Our days turn into weeks and our weeks turn into months and we look back and wonder why we're still struggling or why we can't reach our goals. So let's start where it all begins - setting up your day for success which will then create successful weeks, and successful months

Decide on your top 3

It is critical to first decide what your top 3 actions are for the day. Thanks to Tim Ferris (author of The 4-hour Work Week), my to-do list for the day is now on a bright yellow post-it note on my monitor. At most, I'll write 5 absolute priorities for the day. These are my "no-excuses, come hell or high water, must-do" actions.

I still have a to-do list that's a mile long, by the way, and you may as well. Just mentally reframe that to "the list I keep to get things out of my head." We all need that but don't feel obligated to get 42 things done today. It'll never happen and you feel perpetually defeated if you try. Focus on your top 3-5. Anything you get done beyond that is icing on the success cake.

Make them profit-producing

The #1 thing I must do each day is marketing my business or something directly tied to attracting clients or making sales. Some marketing action is always on the list. So take a look at that list of 3-5 things. Is it a list of minutia and administrative tasks or are they profit-producing tasks. Do the profit-producing tasks first - how to market your business, how to get clients, and how to sell your services.

You can get to the other stuff later in the day. Trust me on this one - when you focus on profit-producing tasks and the cash starts coming in, you'll have money to start delegating administrative tasks. It's a beautiful thing when that happens.

Shut off your email

My most productive hours are the first hours of the day. If I dare to hit "check mail" I can forget about having a successful day because I remain perpetually distracted. And that goes for checking social media too, by the way. Twitter, Facebook and Linked-in are too distracting and I must stay focused on my top 3-5 cash-producing actions before I start clicking around on the internet.

So try shutting off your email in your most productive hours of the day - yes, close the application entirely and not just minimize it. And for social media, plan when in the day you'll go there and also how long you'll stay.

Shut off your phone

Don't panic, you're not shutting it off forever, but think about this for a minute. You're the boss and you get to decide when you answer your phone. I can't remember ever having a single business phone call that couldn't wait a couple hours for me to get to it. Some of us need to get just a little more ruthless with how we structure our day for success. Plan a time during the day when you will return all phone calls. Trust me, most of those calls can wait. Don't let the phone control your day.

For clients, try batch-scheduling them. I have most of my client calls on a specific day of the week. That's my "coaching day." You can batch other things as well. Mondays and Fridays are virtually free of phone or other appointments for me because that's when I focus heavily on marketing, projects and planning.

Carve out your golden no-excuses hour

This is a golden secret. Let's go back to that list of 3-5 top priorities for a minute. If you're trying to multi-task hour after hour, it will still be a challenge to get your top priorities done. When those 3-5 profit-producing tasks are identified, remove all distractions, shut of email, unplug the phone, lock the door to keep the kids out, plop yourself down and focus on nothing but that one thing for that one full hour (or 2 hours even). Keep a timer on hand if you have to.

Sometimes, taking your laptop into a different part of the house or to Starbucks or the library is the way to have that "no excuses" hour. And if you have young kids, your no-excuses hours may need to be at night or at the crack of dawn before the kids get up.

Even if you don't get to do your golden no-excuses hour every day, I'd strongly recommend you do this at least two or three times a week. But don't cop out here, daily is preferred. And remember, stay focused on profit-producing tasks during that time and pre-plan what you're going to do. Just try it - you'll be amazed how much you will accomplish and how much extra cash it produces.

Recognize that it's YOU-management

My clients often ask me for time management strategies. But in reality, they're not looking for time-management techniques. Time is constant. It's fixed. It never changes. You cannot manage time. The only thing you can manage is YOU. So take a look at you and what you're doing each day. Decide to shift into implementing actions that manage you so that your days, weeks, and months are creating the success you want.

Allison Babb is an author, speaker and Small Business Coach to solo entrepreneurs. Allison publishes the "Solopreneur Success" weekly Ezine on how to create a steady stream of clients for your small business at: www.GreatSmallBusinessAdvice.com