E-Biz Booster Blog - Project Management

Discover A Free Mind Mapping Online Tool

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:19:58 -0700

MindMeister.com

A friend told me about an online mind mapping tool that helped him to organize the 1,000 ideas in his head. So let me pass on this little productivity tip to you.

Without further ado, here is the tool he recommended to me.

MindMeister.com (↑)

Mind mapping allows you to lay out your ideas and thoughts kind of visually. Related items are close together. Therefore, you don't need much space and keep the overview easily. I am not going into the details of mind mapping (sorry), but some advantages of using an online tool like the one my friend recommends.

Advantages

It's easy to rearrange items. You don't run out of space, like you would probably on a sheet of paper.
Major advantage: You can share your maps with a team easily.
Your data is accessible from anywhere.
(Check terms of service, etc. and make your own decision about the risks of outsourcing your sensitive data that way.)
MindMeister.com (↑) offers a free basic version, besides that the rates are very reasonable.

I have signed up for a free account today. I just started to check it out myself. I am not affiliated with MindMeister.

Have a nice weekend.

Yours
John W. Furst

Update: Vic Gee left a comment pointing to his extensive, great resource about various mind mapping tools. You definitely should check it out.

Thanks Vic

Copyright 2008 by John W. Furst. Some Rights Reserved. Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.5. - If you find this content on a site that is violating our copyright, please, report its URL to us. Thanks for fighting copy scrapers.

Fix Bad Habits Become More Productive

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:39:39 -0700

A couple of days ago I have written, “Your Business Needs To Grow Continuously”. Today I want to combine that important fact with a very easy to do management or personal development practice, that helps you to achieve your goal, tune out distraction as you learn to focus on what's really important.

You will see it's not about time management or life management as some call it. You still have to come up with a way to use your time efficiently. Of course you can refer back to my original series of articles about Productivity and Time Management, “Touch It - Do It - Get More Done”. I wrote a total of 4 articles on that subject and they are available combined into a single PDF report in the download area for my newsletter subscribers. Actually the PDF contains some extra content that is not released on my Blog.

Might be the right time to sign up to my newsletter, right now. (To my existing subscribers: I'll send you the download info as soon as I have finished this post.) Sorry for the little detour.

Let's get back to productivity issues. The little, but nonetheless important advice I'll give you fits almost everybody.

Managers,
Team Members,
Entrepreneurial CEOs,
For Money Bloggers,
etc.

And it can be applied to business- , job-, and personal-life equally well.

“The goal of that exercise is to get into the habit of focusing on the important tasks.”

1. Determine what kind of repetitive, atomic tasks drive your output respectively bring you closer to your goal on a daily basis.

With atomic task I mean something that cannot be broken down any further.

E.g. a cold call to a potential prospect could be such a task, or the collection of a single email address from a shopper in your store, … But not something like opening a new store, because that requires many tasks performed by many people to make it happen.

This exercise is about your life, your responsibilities, and dreams.

For example:

The more cold calls, the more appointments.
The more comment on other Blogs, the more traffic, which drives your advertising revenue.
The more submissions to more Blog Carnivals, the more back links, etc.
(no spam as a result of this exercise, please. you need to remain relevant to the carnival)
The more social bookmarking, the more traffic, etc.
The more articles, the more traffic to your web site.
The more you start conversations, the easier it becomes for you to talk to strangers.
etc.

Now commit yourself to a plan and decide how many of those activities you need to perform every single day. Excuses are not allowed. This little list has to become your bible for the next 2 weeks. Or you can make such a bible for your contractors and employees to show them what you expect.

2. Completing the tasks on that list should become your highest priority.

As I said this is not sophisticated time management here. This is a simple exercise that helps you getting into the habit of focusing on the important things.

It also will show you something else. If you are getting tired of writing 25 comments on other Blogs and would rather like to do market research instead and work on a new product. (I just take the Internet business example here). Then it's the perfect time for outsourcing such repetitive an activity.

If you stick to it, you'll be happier and more relaxed very soon, because you are pushing your business drivers forward and you certainly feel satisfaction by sticking to your plan and accomplishing your little, but important mini goals.

You'll also see that you don't miss the activities that used to become excuses in the past.

If you like this post, please, do some social bookmarking for it.
I wish you a very nice weekend.

Yours
John W. Furst

Performance Boost Under Pressure

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 21:43:33 -0700

Face Yourself!

It seems that people respect their boss and they do whatever they demand — more or less — in exchange for their salary. That's how this boss-employee relationship works. What can you learn from this for your own business?

Even if you have changed the sides in the meantime and become your own boss, either as owner of your company or manager of a department, you will remember the days, when you worked late or on weekends to meet the deadlines given to you by your superiors. All of a sudden everything became less important: your plans for Friday night, the date with your new acquaintance, the movie premier, etc.

You absolutely needed to finish your assignment, because your boss would not accept any excuse and even could fire you. Even, if your assignment appears to be ridiculous to you.
Your boss is your boss.

I will cut a long story short (… and save your time).

Many tips on personal-development and self-improvement Blogs tell you how to avoid distractions of all kinds to focus on your tasks and goals. Eliminating distractions is an important goal for any aspiring Internet marketer or home business owners in general. Your Internet business in in danger, if you do not learn to control your environment effectively. I gave you some tips in my series of posts about getting more done.

However, this is only one part of the equation. Even without any distractions it is possible that you don't get anything (important) done.

The cure for this is actually quite easy, even though it sounds a bit strange.

“Simply be your own boss, if you are your own boss.”

Do you respect yourself or do you accept each and every excuse for not hitting the target?
Your daily task(s) should produce measurable results each and every day.
Your day is not over unless the target is hit.
Be mean to yourself and don't accept any excuses from yourself.
Imagine you are watched (by a third party boss) and pretend that he or she will check your results at the end of the day.
If there is a fault in your procedures, you should revise those as your boss (in the world of employment) should recognize such a situation and give his employees better tools.
You will see that your habits will change within a short period of time (less than a month) and that you do not need to be schizoid for the rest of your life. It just helps to shorten the process from being used to receive order to being responsible and accountable.

Does this sound too drastically?
What do you think?
Leave your comments and let us know.

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: Thanks to The Next 45 Years for featuring this post in the Personal Development Carnival - Issue 28.

My Answers To Your Questions

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 15:40:41 -0700

Reflecting on Tenerife

Certainly I was taking some time to write this post after I have asked my readers to submit a question for me to answer. 4 questions qualified. In the meantime I have sent an even more detailed answer to those folks, who dared to ask a question.

Now it's time to share my answers in public. I don't want to carry that as liability into the next year. But since I am lazy at the end of the year, while my assistant enjoys a nice skiing vacation in Switzerland, I only will answer 2 of those questions today. I will deal with the other 2 topics in future posts in January.

1. You have hosted some blog carnivals on your blog. Do you recommend that?

Yes, and no.

It appears to me that hosting a carnival gets you more traffic, while using the same amount of time for writing and submitting your articles to other carnivals will get you more back links, which leads to more residual traffic in long term. What do you prefer?

I found the response from the folks whose articles get used in a carnival is less than it could be. Not many digg, sphinn, stumble, or bookmark your post with the carnival edition. That seems to be the reality.

Unless you see hosting or organizing a carnival as part of your content strategy, and you are willing to put some effort to work, you probably should just stick with submitting.

However, if everybody only submits, there won't be good carnivals left soon. Then it might pay off more to organize or host a carnival, again. I noticed that many recent carnivals are basically just link lists. If you don't have any problems with that, Blogcarnival.com (↑) makes it really easy to publish such a “list”. You only have to press the InstaCarnival button and copy the HTML code as is to your Blog. Finished.

It's up to you, how far you want to go. I will host other editions on my Blog throughout 2008, but I will have an assistant doing the actual work.

2. In “Sad Story About The Million Dollar Secret” you wrote “You cannot leverage consulting, unless …”. What's the unless part of it. You never wrote that following post.

Good observation, I never wrote that post here. I only wrote parts of the answer in my time management series of articles Touch It - Do It - Get More Done! and in some comments on other Blogs, and I believe in one of my newsletter editions. Anyway, the answer is very simple.

You need to teach and train others to do your type of consulting in a similar fashion. Those folks will have to be employed or contracted by you. Then you will have the time to work on your business, expand it, and make it more independent from you.

One example:

If you are often hired as consultant for doing project management, then you need to start building a real business, a company around it. You'll need other people doing the work in the future that you are still doing by yourself right now. It's moving from being a freelancer towards being a business owner.

Yours
John W. Furst

Attention Age Doctrine Part 2 - Important Lesson Learned

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:09:06 -0700

Rich Schefren

You probably already have seen, that I promote Rich Schefren's latest milestone type of report — The Attention Age Doctrine Part 2 — very prominently on this Blog. I even have shot a brief video.

The core message of the report for many businesses is

“You are no longer in control of your branding, positioning and marketing.”

Wouldn't you believe someone, who had made enough money to retire at age 25, but has so much drive that he just moves on and since then helped his coaching clients to make some hundred millions of dollars additional income.

“Don't ask any further questions?
Just download the free report and read it.”
(It won't be available forever!)

So what are the lessons that I have learned from this?

I had 2.7 times more visitors on my Blog than usually on Sundays. I am already curious for todays figures. All because I decided last minute, that I will participate in Rich's 66 seconds promotion video contest. So why did I get more traffic yesterday? Because I took action to participate in an event (the contest) that has a lot of attention. It is that simple.

Do you remember my post about one key factor for success: The Speed of Implementation. If not, go back and read it. It is one of my top posts.

Even though the video contest had a sharp deadline only 36 hours after it had been announced, my situation was worse. I did not “pay attention” until 2 hours before the submission deadline. That's when I decided to do it.

All of a sudden I had hundreds of ideas, but no time to put them on screen. Furthermore I never made a promo video like this. But I wanted to participate, I wanted to see, how it effects my Blog. So I focused on the essentials and kept everything to the bare minimum.

Writing a script, the text.
Filming myself speaking
Trying different setups, quickly.

I just didn't like any of the intermediate results. But I kept going. The clock was ticking. Finally I realized, I have to make the video some kind of funny to cope with all those no-time, no-budget, no-preparation, no-outsourcing type of issues in this Saturday night mini project. Originally I wanted to get into the informational or compelling category, but … no music, no third party material to be edited into the video, …

I kept rolling, registered for those sites, and submitted the video 6 minutes before the contest submission deadline.

What do you think? Is the video funny or just plain stupid?
About Rich Schefren's Doctrine (John's Video)
Please, leave a comment here on the Blog.
Do you have anything else to say about the doctrine, Rich, or myself?
Say it, in the comments.

Do you see what was driving me?

It was not perfectionism. And excuses like there is not enough time or how could I win and compete against everybody else, … could not stop me. Today I have seen videos from my competitors in this contest that blew me away. I am also relieved, because — at least in my opinion — my video is not the worst one.

I was driven by the determination to enter this competition. Nothing stopped me. I used what I had available, which was not much at this time as far as my Internet video skills and tools are concerned, but I am proud that I did it.

I have proven to myself that I am an action taker and that I am capable of getting to speed quickly. That is what counts. It is much more important for me than this particular contest. Of course, if I won, it would boost my business tenfold or more, But I am confident that I'll be able to boost my business anyway.

Yours
John W. Furst

Key Success Factor Number One: Speed Of Implementation

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:33:02 -0700

Ready - Fire - Aim

I warn you at the beginning. This will be a short article. Why? Because everybody of us has work to do. No matter in what position you are. So I will quickly give one of my popular “generic - this helps everyone in every situation” rules. It's not limited to business. All you need is the drive for “getting results”.

Here's the tip:

“Implement your ideas as quickly as you can!”

Are you

A business owner (home based, small or large, …)
A manager (first level, middle or top management)
A freelancer
Or simply an employee

Even if you are a student or if you are unemployed, you should get out something from this lesson.

Ask yourself, how many times in your life you had a “great idea” or a “great opportunity”, but you didn't really follow through. Instead you switched yourself into “research mode”. Or in “waiting mode” and never switched to “taking action”. Later you simply dropped the idea. Another, “what would have been, if this had worked …” story is born. Think a little:

What is research, reading, waiting, … worth?

It's worth exactly 0.00 in any currency.
Unless you put it to work.

The sooner you act, the sooner you put your idea into action, the sooner you'll get results. Positive and sometimes negative ones. The important part is you get solid results that help you stir your business ship into the right direction.

“Thinking about it”, “doing research”, “reading”, “waiting” will not give you the answers you need to boost your business with success stories.

Albert Einstein (↑) came up with ground breaking theories about the physical structure of time and space from “pure thinking”, but that's physics and math. The law of physics don't change and Einstein was a believer that everything can be calculated, if the input variables are known well enough. Bad for Einstein, but quantum physics proved him wrong. The “future” is not predetermined due to Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (↑).

Doing marketing and business is for sure more unpredictable than physics. Stop thinking whether something will work or not. You have to do the “experiment”. You have to take a shot. That's the only way to find out.

You can further improve your chances for success, when you mimic and learn from people or businesses, that are already where you want to go. No reason to re-invent the wheel of marketing and business.

Follow success proven path!

But still, you have to act! Do it now, don't wait. Get into the habit of acting and implement your ideas fast. A recent university study in the US has revealed again:

The number 1 key factor of successful business people is:

“Speed of Implementation”

Especially on the Internet, since it has become so cheap to test different ideas.
Get real world feedback. Get it fast, do it now!

Before you say, there is something missing:

You don't have the skills to implement it?
Find someone who has.
You don't have the money?
Well, you are already running a business, aren't you? You already have some basis to work on. I found that many quick ideas are actually about improving something that you are already doing. Little improvements will add up to some respectable results.
You don't have the time?
Start reading my Touch It - Get It Done series of articles about effective time management.

No more excuses, please. Do yourself a favor.

Let me conclude with a personal story from the Corporate World at a time, when I was Product Marketing Manager for a leading Mobile Telephone Operator. One of our staff had an idea for a subscription based MMS — Multi Media Messaging Service (↑), e.g. those little pictures or videos you can send and receive with GMS cellphones (↑). This technology was brand new and only a few early adopters had the latest handsets. We knew it will be difficult to get a “little, cute product” like this approved quickly.

The review and approval process for new products was geared towards voice products which impact millions of customers and move tens of millions of dollars with small changes.

What did we do? We outsourced the development and operations, including payment processing and got started within a week. Viral marketing did the rest. In the next marketing meeting our department showed results:

We didn't have an approved product, but we had paying customers.
Do you think the product was rejected? It was not, even the CEO subscribed to the service later.

Results are selling themselves. Get results, quickly.

Your
John W. Furst

P.S.: Some will ask about details of this study. Sorry, I saw it in a video today, but didn't keep the reference. I rather jumped to have this post written. Break your bad habits and start now. Is it really important, who conducted this study?

You could waste your time and search for it on the Internet or
You could apply this simple rule and find out that it works. What bad could happen? Even if you have the idea to jump out of the window, it will work, you 'll have jumped out of the window by now.

5 Tips and More from Chris Garrett

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 23:43:36 -0700

Chris Garrett

About a week ago I wrote “How To Add A Different Perspective To Your Blog” (↑). I mentioned Chris Garrett (↑) — a professional Blogger, who currently offers to write guest posts on the Blogs of and for his readers. Today, Chris announced the first posts that he wrote. Here they are, and believe me, they are a great “read”.

Here are the direct links to those posts: Each one will open in a new browser window:

Each of these posts demonstrate what skilled writer Chris Garrett is. The posts are condensed to the essence, contain valuable, to the point information and are fun to read at the same time. Chris Garrett is a blogging and internet marketing consultant. Read more about him on Chris Blog.

I hope Chris will continue his “5 Tips” series of posts. Since I suggest that click through and read these posts, I let you go here. I will stay tuned, definitely.

John W. Furst

Touch It - Do It - Get It Done - Part 4

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 16:55:00 -0700

Today I am releasing the final issue — Part 4 — of my series of articles about time management.

Last week I have spent some time on explaining how to create a “to do list” with six important tasks each day. Now we need to create a schedule for our day and fit everything together smoothly.

An important aspect is setting your priorities straight and if done right, you are able to get the “most” out of your time. What is the “most” for you? Money, better health, less stress, growing your business fast, or working less?

In Part 4 I am putting all loose ends together, do a recap of all steps, and tell you, what I am personally using to keep myself organized.

Since this article has 9 pages, I don't publish it on the blog. I have created a PDF document that my newsletter subscriber can download.

If you enjoyed reading the first 3 parts of this series, you definitely will not want to miss the last issue.

If you are already subscribed to my email newsletter, you will receive download instructions shortly.

If not, Sign Up Now!

Get this report now.

Update: Part 4 of this series is finally available again for my newsletter subscribers, as of March 07, 2008

Yours
John

Touch It - Do It - Get It Done - Part 3

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:44:12 -0700

Time Planner (Click to enlarge)

Another week is almost over. I hope you can look back and say to yourself, “That was a good, a productive week, and I even had enough time for my family and friends.” So far we have learned that a stronger focus does help you being more productive, which in turn helps you being able to spend more time with fun things.

Now a question,

“Do you already have an outline for a plan of actions for the upcoming week?”

Today's lecture deals with that, “Priorities and Planning”.

Priorities for your tasks should be derived from the impact areas that I have talked about last week.

A short reminder: You should assign a time slot of one (1) hour each week to assess the status of each of your impact areas and define actions for further improvement during the following week. In a large corporation you will go into meetings with your team, in a small home office situation you analyze your stats by yourself.

The advantage about focusing on impact areas is that you are less likely to miss something.

For example, you might get totally focused on acquiring more clients, or implementing a new service, but forget about improving the customer service side of your business. This might bring you more clients in short term, but they will not stay long enough with you, or even worse “older” clients quit on you, because your service sucks. At the end you will even loose money, because you focused on one impact area only.

Getting new customers is more critical for new businesses and a new product, but keeping them, and building a relationship with them is — in the long run — probably more important.

Always balance your efforts and the efforts of your team(s). Bottom line is that all impact areas are important. That's why they are called impact areas. They can positively or negatively affect your income and profitability.

A lot has been written that Internet business specially requires daily monitoring and adaption. Aren't weekly status assessments in contradiction to that? Not at all. You discuss the “big picture” in those meetings on a more “strategic level”.

In those weekly meetings (with your team, your virtual team, or just yourself) you decide how to take advantage of daily stats in the daily operational routines and how to adjust. Those adjustments will then become a daily procedure for your team members or yourself depending on the size of your business organization. You also define, at what level of stat movement you as CEO, manager, or yourself will have to be involved.

This is a daily routine of improving a single impact area, like for example opt-in or conversion rates of a Web page. After a couple of weeks you might decide in one of the weekly meetings that it is not necessary anymore trying to improve specific parameters on a daily basis. Then this project might be in “set it and forget it” status, while your manpower concentrates on newer projects.

I don't imply that you could not have implemented an automatic alert by email, if the stats move off the chart suddenly. Hey, it's the Internet, let computers do your job where it is applicable. That was only one example, how a certain issue related to Internet business could be handled. It is up to you.

From weekly meetings to daily tasks

The majority of tasks will already be assigned during the weekly meeting. Managers will delegate some of them to their line and keep the rest of it on their personal “to do” lists.

Lists are great for handling responsibilities. Lists make sure that nothing gets left out. Lists certainly contribute much to productivity,

“Do it, check it off, done.”

Surprisingly many people I know are using lists the wrong way. They are managed by their lists as opposed to managing their time by using a list.

A note on the side: Microsoft Outlook^®, Palm Pilot, BlackBerry, … will not improve your time management, if you do not have the skills. I assert, they even make it worse, because

You more easily loose the big picture.

You see your schedule and your to does only through a small virtual window. The tasks stay in the background, you do not incorporate them as much in your thinking as you would, when you write a new daily list on a piece of plain old paper for example.
You are prone to become even more reactive, and have less control over your time.

Not only that you might loose the “big picture”, the program starts telling you what to do after a while. All those little entries you made, that are out of sight already come usually back on the due date, with a nice little alarm. In most cases those alerts come to late anyway. Of course those gadgets can be very helpful, when being used the right way.

Let's go back to ordinary lists.

Most people have 15, 25, 30, and more “to do” items on their lists. They will additionally write down deadlines, name of the project, and any other useful information. In the morning they check their calendar for meetings, appointments, scheduled telephone calls, etc. and in between the pick tasks that are due soon and fit in the time slot. Then a meeting, then a telephone conference call, then the next task to pick.

Do you recognize that pattern? Those people are reacting to their list, checking, what's next all day long. When choosing what to do in between meetings, you are more likely not thinking about

Your impact area(s)
Priorities
the big picture

You might pick the short, the easy, or simply the next item on the list, but not necessarily the most important one first. Late in the afternoon those “managed-by-the-list-managers” find out, that there is one more thing that has to be completed today. So they work late.

Take advantage of a short list

You may or may not have a single long list. If not, you may have separate lists for separate projects. However, when planning your day, pick six (6) most important tasks from your long list, your project oriented lists, and your calendar and write them down on a single list of the day. Those are the tasks you commit yourself to complete this day no matter what.

From my experience six items is what you can accomplish in a single day, when focusing properly. Sometimes it might be more, sometimes it might be less items. I am talking about tasks like,

Drafting a sales letter
Weekly Conference Call with your team
Registering your Web site with a new social bookmarking platform
Checking and improving an AdWords Campaign
Meeting your accountant, talk about tax benefits
etc.

Think results oriented, though. The reason for any task is the desire for improving some result. Always focus on the result.

Exercise: You could and should jump start right now. As an exercise write down your 6 items list for tomorrow.

__________________
__________________
__________________
__________________
__________________
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Using this methodology has three great benefits.

You “scan” the long list, and others. You have them in the background, but you actually choose a few items that you will be dealing today. You don't have to worry about those other things on the long list, you can concentrate and focus on those 6 items alone.
You are actually planning your day in advanced (we will talk about priorities, later). You are not reacting to a “due date notice” from your BlackBerry.
At the end of your working day you have a list that has all six (6) items marked off as “completed”. Isn't that a good feeling? It is.

Start planning your day ahead by choosing the six most important tasks tomorrow and you will go home from work with much more satisfaction in the evening.

Summary

Focus on tasks that improve your impact area(s). That's the highest priority
Derive your daily tasks from the weekly meeting(s) and the daily routine(s).
Plan your day in the evening before or in the morning. Pick six (6) tasks and stick with them until they are completed.

Originally I had planned to write more about prioritizing in this issue of the series of posts about time management, but while writing I felt that it is really worth to stress on the benefits of a single, daily, short list. It is really a productivity booster. Try it out.

In the next and last issue I will write in more detail about prioritizing tasks, planning the day, and simple tools for becoming and staying more organized. I have also decided that I will make this next issue only available to my newsletter subscribers.

If you have not signed up to my email announcement list before, please, do so now. You don't want to miss this next issue on October 5^th.

Have a great weekend
John W. Furst

Continue reading Part 4.

The author John W. Furst had to learn effective time management while he was literally living on two continents simultaneously in the 90s, or when he managed that his six month compulsory military service would not interrupt his full time university studies. In the meantime he and his family have settled down on the Canary Islands and left hectic life behind them.

Touch It - Do It - Get It Done - Part 2

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:38:44 -0700

Last week I introduced the “Touch It - Do It” concept. It basically requires that you stay focused and complete a task, once you have started working on it. No more task switching! It always takes ( = wastes ) some time to get tuned in for the current task in front of you. Don't switch it. Start and complete it. Then the next one, and the next one, etc.

But how to deal with all the interruptions during the day?

The phone rings, a co-worker comes into my office, …
If it happens that you work in your home office, your kids or your wife may come in, … How are you dealing with it or how should you deal with this?

When you are reading articles from successful business people, artists, managers you quickly see that they value their time highly and don't allow interruptions. They have certain time slots during the day, when they don't pick up the phone and have the door to their office closed.

Some may have 1 hour, some even 4 or 5 hours depending on the kind of work they do. They only deal with the most important tasks of their business. This is not limited to business it could also be the daily training for an athlete, or practicing for a musician.

The secrets of not getting interrupted are:

You set the rules, and you change and train your environment to respect your time and don't disturb you.
Your business has to be organized in a way that it runs like a clock without having everybody interrupting each other all the time. This is not limited to you, of course. No matter if you are the CEO of a large corporation or the owner of a smaller, probably home based, business. You will increase “production” by enforcing good time management and work habits. It will take some time till it sticks, but you have to start with yourself and make your staff follow your good example.
You have to switch from “Reactive mode to Responsive mode”. Read this article that I have written about that topic two days ago. It will give you additional ideas about the significance of being in control versus being controlled by others.
In the home office situation, you even have to train your family to respect your time. Just explain that you have more time for your love ones at the end of the day, if they stop pounding at your door all day long. This is not rude at all. Let's say your business fails, because you don't get enough done. What would be the outcome? You have to get a job, have to drive to work and back, which takes additional time. The result is even less time for your family. Make them understand that, when your door is closed, you are “not at home”.
If you are just starting your own business at night time, while you still have your day job, you might think about re-investing some of the first money that rolls in to do some fun things with your family (spouse, ...). That way you can show them, how they benefit from your growing business. It is a bribe, but one that usually works. Your environment is part of your success or failure. You have to deal with it the right way.

Now, we understand why it is important to concentrate on each task at the time and how to change yourself and your environment to help you follow it through.

Next I need to line out how to select the tasks and how to plan your day. But before I get into this, I will introduce the concept of “impact areas”.

An impact area is any part of your business that affects the profits somehow. In a larger corporation those might be identifiable according to the departments (if set up properly), but even a home based business has some distinct impact areas.

Some examples: sales, marketing, product development, customer service, accounts receivables , purchasing, traffic generation, SEO, … When you manage to improve one impact area, your profits will go up. That should be the deal.

How to improve an impact area?

You start out by assigning a one hour time slot each week (on a regular schedule) to have a meeting with all relevant team members or managers of that particular impact area. You set up those meetings for each of your impact areas. The goal of the meetings is to check on the status, discuss problems, come up with possible means for improvement and most importantly to assign tasks that have to be performed during the following week in order to improve that specific impact area.

Keep notes — meeting minutes — about the assignments and status. This will be a great guide in your next weekly meeting and allows to inspect the progress.

No matter in what position you are, you get already some tasks assigned during this “virtual or real” meetings.

Home based business: You will assign the tasks to yourself and stick with it during the week, like you would do it for your boss. Without this focus on impact areas you might perform important tasks (e.g. social bookmarking for a bloggers, …) not as consistently as you should.
Large Corporation: Being the CEO or manager of a department you will have most tasks delegated. You can turn to other things, while you know that the important areas of your business or department are being constantly improved. A major advantage of such meetings is that everybody in the impact area is informed and becomes part of the improvement process. Also decisions are made quickly during the meeting, because all involved persons are on the spot.
Virtual business: Just the same thing, but the meeting might me via a teleconference call.

If you see the areas of your business from this angle, you will distribute your energy more evenly and address all aspects of growing your company to the next level. Impact areas already can give you some hints about what is important for you to do, first. But how can you integrate the knowledge about impact areas into your daily schedule?

I will answer that question in the next issue of this series of articles on Friday, September 28. The subject will be “Priorities and Planning”. Stay tuned, don't miss it. Subscribe to my announcement email newsletter or RSS feed.

Have a great weekend
John W. Furst

Continure reading Part 3.

The author John W. Furst has 15+ years of business experience in various management positions in small, and large companies in different industries both in the USA and in Europe. He has settled down on the Canary Islands to be an Entrepreneur and leave the hectic corporate world behind. Want to learn about lead generation?

Touch It - Do It - Get More Done

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 18:47:55 -0700

How many times do you think did the following happen to you?

You think about something like getting more traffic to your Web site, or finally writing an article. Then you start doing it, but next you bail out at the first opportunity. You stop and do something else. You dig even deeper into the next task just to create an excuse and gain confidence that you are doing the right thing.

Most likely this next task is more enjoyable and less important at the same time. You get it done, but you don't achieve as much, when you repeatedly put off more important tasks.

The more often you put off the “first” task, the more difficult it will become next time and instead of working on it, you probably start to look for another “less important” task right away.

Does this sound familiar to you?

If this happens in your job, you probably have your boss fiercely showing you the right track. If this is the situation in your home-office-style business, then you are in trouble. Nobody will help you to get on the right track. Well, what about your family and friends? Don't count on them for helping you out. They are actually the best candidates for convincing you to let go, and make you spend your time not building your business. You are definitely on your own. You need to learn and discipline yourself to use your time more efficiently.

Good time management rules are actually kind of universal. They apply to a wide spectrum of circumstances. You might be a prospective home business owner, who wants to make some extra cash on the Internet. You might already have a small or medium size company or you might be a manager, who is responsible for the results of some department. In this case it is your co-workers, who are certainly doing a better job distracting you, than help you stay focused and get your stuff done.

All this said, I just post two simple rules for the beginning.

Touch It Once
Important Tasks First

Let me explain.

You might have already read a couple of blog posts, Web sites, books that are proposing the best time management system ever. But did you follow? Did it stick? No, certainly not, if you answered my second question, “Does this sound familiar to you?”, with “Yes”.

You read about setting priorities, delegating things, creating a plan, lists, folders for weekly, monthly, …

It will take a little bit more of writing (from me) and reading (from you) and actually doing it, to come up with effective tools and habits (!) that help you to spend your time more efficiently. For todays introduction into my time management series of articles I decided to choose two no-brainers that you can start to incorporate into your life immediately, without thinking to much about it.

Touch It Once

It is quite self explaining, isn't it. When you start something follow through. Don't let little hurdles move you off track and put it back on your pile of things to-do. You already probably spent 5, 10, 15 minutes on it. At the next try, you will need that time again just to get to the same point where you are right now. That argument should sell itself.

Another example, don't start something, when you know that it will take more time that you have right now. It is probably an email with some important (but not urgent) information that needs to be reviewed carefully. Don't even open it, instead “plan” a proper time slot for it and make sure that you will not be disturbed. Do it next morning, because important tasks go first. If it is not so important, it should not take much of your time anyway and you could have done it right away non stop.

Little side track on emails: Get your Email subjects to the point and train your employees and business partners to do the same. It will help everybody to make a better judgment about what to expect in an email. I see a lot of email correspondence (many replies, forwards, ...) that carries the same subject, while the topic is changing over time. Well, I change topics, if applicable and I write rather two or three emails instead of putting too much into one email. It certainly makes life easier.

Just from following the “touch it, do it” rule you should start getting more focused and get more things done in an easier way.

Have a great weekend
John W. Furst

Continue reading Part2

Update on 2007-09-16:
The next issue of this article series about time management will be online on Friday, Sep. 21st, 2007. Don't miss it, subscribe to my RSS feed via Feedburner or get on my Newsletter/Blog Announcement List.

P.S.: What a coincidence. Michel Fortin — direct response copywriter, author, speaker and consultant — wrote on his blog today, “Get More Done Faster With These 6 Tips (↑)”. Good time management is indeed a hot topic. You may want to read the full story, which comes with a handy example from his copywriting business. Let me summarize his tips.

Procrastination and laziness are your worst enemies, fight them and take action. Little steps at a time are better than no steps.
Break larger projects down into little pieces with deadlines of their own. That makes it more controllable and gives some extra rewards, when you meet the mini-deadlines.
Write it down. It's important to be able to see, where you are in the process and what is ahead of you.

A written plan actually helps to increase your focus on the current task. You don't need to worry about the rest. It will all work out. It's laid out nicely.

The full article: Get More Done Faster With These 6 Tips (↑) by Michel Fortin.