As a Small Business Owner, it’s easy to find yourself working long hours, doing everything you can, winding up with a few hours at the end of the day to eat and fall in a heap… only to get up the next day and do it again!  It doesn’t have to be that way.

If you view every work hour that passes as being an hour that could have brought you money, are you using that time in the best possible way?  And are you using leverage and strategies to bring you the most amount of income?

Here are some things you can do to ensure you structure your day for maximum effectiveness:

• Have set times each day for breaks and meals
• Ensure you take regular breaks to clear your head and stretch your body!
• Use an organised system for storing files and managing daily files and papers
• Start your day by reviewing a list of things you need to accomplish for the day, and prioritise them.
• Identify all the items in your list that you know DE-MOTIVATE you, ones that you DISLIKE doing!
• See what items you can outsource to others, so you can keep your motivation and energy levels high.

Secret Steps to Diary Management

I’ve got two secret steps to many successful people’s diary and time management:

1. Identify all the tasks or actions in your daily list that will actually make you money – and put those at the top of the list. These are the no. 1 priority items each and every day!
2. Write your daily task list at the END of the workday for the following day, and leave it on your desk. It will enable you to walk in and start working on item no. 1 without delay.

When you start looking at your daily list in terms of what will make you money and ‘everything else’ – you’ll find your focus will be clearer and you’ll have far more energy for the rest of the day.

Remember to outsource or delegate those things that slow you down or de-motivate you. You’ll feel a load off your shoulders.

By following these simple and effective strategies, you’ll be utilising your time more wisely – and you’ll plug the gaps on any money leaks from wasteful activities. Not only that, when you focus on income-earning activities more, you’ll find yourself with a more profitable bottom line.

My argument was that to become financially free via the traditional methods (not winning lotto or getting an inheritance), you need to work really hard.  His response was “it’s not about working hard – it’s about working smart”.

Upon reflection, I realised that it comes down to interpretation. Perhaps ‘hard work’ need not be difficult – I see it as persevering to achieve an outcome, and doing what it takes to reach it.

So let’s explore whether working hard is enough to make your business successful these days.

Well, are you currently letting your business run you? Are you reacting to clients, staff and suppliers instead of being proactive… do you often find yourself in a state of disorganised chaos?

OR… Are you in control of your processes, functions, and have systems in place to manage things in a calm and consistent manner?

People who run around busily each day without a clear goal or purpose are creating a lot of noise and flying papers, but they aren’t getting anywhere.

While those who link their daily activities to their strategic goals are creating less waste and inefficiencies, are finished sooner, and could be defined as working ‘smart’.

What Does it Take to Get Ahead?

The key to working smarter is to be really clear about what direction you are heading in.

-       What are your business goals and objectives?
-       What are the timeframes you want to achieve these within?

THEN, look at your daily activities and ask:

-       Are these activities linked directly to my strategic goals?
-       Or am I doing lots of ‘stuff’ without really achieving anything?

You’ll realise fairly quickly from your business results what the answers are.  You’ll also know from your internal sense of achievement.

The key to working smarter (and not harder) is to align your daily tasks and activities with your larger strategic goals. Then to use systems, technology and processes to make it more efficient and take the load off you.

That’s where a highly automated Email Marketing and CRM system comes into it, just like Infusionsoft.

First, think about why it’s so hard to get moving.  Are these tasks or items that are your least favourite things to do?  Or are they things that you’re putting off for some other reason?

As humans we tend to move away from pain, towards pleasure…

We all have days that we would rather sit on the back porch in the sun with a magazine and cup of hot coffee (or similar) at our side.  But the reality of our life is that the bills still keep coming in, clients need our assistance, prospective clients need to be found, and we have to take action to create a nest egg for our future.  So the choice is: do nothing and sit on the porch, or get into action and make some money.

Obviously, doing nothing WON’T pay the bills!  So how do you push past those internal barriers of resistance to the activities that you really don’t like doing?

An Action Plan to Create Money

First:

• Identify what it is that you like doing and what you don’t.
• Identify what you’re good at and what you’re not.
• Identify the things that actually bring money into your business, and the things that don’t (for example they’re just admin tasks).

Then:

Consider how long it takes you to complete the things you’re not good at and don’t like doing, and what that time is worth in $ terms.  Is it worth outsourcing?  Someone else might be able to do it far quicker, and you can make better use of your time too.

When you’re in ‘work hours’ – always do the things that bring you money FIRST.  Leave the non-revenue stuff for the times when it’s not suitable to be sourcing clients or doing marketing.

And finally, remember your goals… look at any Goals list that you wrote on January 1st. Bigger goals are always much easier to get motivated for, so keep your Big Hairy Audicious Goal in mind as you set to work on those smaller tasks.

We all have motivation slumps – but if you re-examine your daily tasks, you’ll be able to manage them so much better.

Efficient means you can get a lot done in a small amount of time… yet proper time management for the benefit of the business’s bottom line is another thing!

Today I met with a successful business coach who has a few different income streams.  He was talking about how he’d spent all morning on his copy for a new landing page he’s created to promote an upcoming event.  However the time he spent ‘locked away’ writing was in business hours, when he could have been making money calling and meeting with businesses!

One of his business services requires him to meet personally with his clients fairly regularly, and he isn’t able to do that during the middle of the day – when they are busy with the lunchtime retail trade.  He failed to see that this time in the middle of the day could be spent making money on another income stream, OR on those activities that need to be done AFTER all the client interaction has been done.  So I pointed this out to him – and he was very grateful for the tip.

Sometimes we’re too close to our own work that we can’t see how to improve it!

The important thing is to have a clearly identified plan of all the business activities to be done – and when those activities should be done in your workday. You will find that following a written schedule allows you to get the most amount of revenue in the door.

So think about all the things you spent time on in the last three business days and ask yourself:  were you making the best use of your time for your bottom line?

Tip:  Use your computer’s widgets to set up a sticky note reminder for yourself: “Am I Getting Paid for This?”

I don’t like to admit it – but it happened to me recently. A few days ago one of my websites failed – for no apparent reason. It also affected my emails attached to that domain name and caused me to lose about 3 days worth of emails, perhaps very important emails. After spending an hour on the phone to my web hosting company, I learnt that ‘someone’ had changed my name servers. It was a manual error, but we have no idea who did it – and as a result my website and emails had crashed, costing me potential business, some stress, and a couple of hours of my day to get it fixed.

The one thing about technology is that it works brilliantly to make our lives better, however it requires human input and intervention to make it work.

How can I avoid this happening again? I honestly don’t know. It’s one of those spanners that stopped the wheels… but it doesn’t have a clear answer, with nobody officially to blame.

This kind of thing happens rarely, and when it does – we just have to get it sorted quickly and with the least amount of fuss. There’s no point investigating who was at fault because the problem has now been solved. And there’s no process I can put in place to save it happening again.

So in my ‘outsourced’ world built on automation and efficient systems, even I succumb to problems that cause the wheels to stop.

When a spanner is thrown in your works, do you feel safe in the knowledge that the providers you’re using are doing the best they can? I believe that having trust in your providers and keeping calm is the fastest way to get on with the business of making money and having a life.

As my partner and I were getting quotes and narrowing down our preferred providers for different services, I was amazed at the difference in standards by business owners in different service businesses.  We experienced people not showing up and some answering their phone with nothing more than a “Yes?”… Aren’t businesses TRYING to make money these days? It is baffling.

One thing we both had in mind was to outsource anything that we couldn’t easily do ourselves, and which would take time away from our businesses and increase our stress.  That was our ‘strategic vision’ for the move, and it proved to be a wise one.

One example is arranging a proper quote for professional cleaning. I was instantly impressed with the cleaning company and felt confident that the job would be done to a high standard. And, if I wasn’t satisfied with it, they guaranteed to come back and keep cleaning until I was happy. Now there’s a guarantee that rings my bells!

We applied the same rules for outsourcing in our business to outsourcing all the functions of our move – one of life’s most stressful activities.  Most importantly, we were able to achieve our vision for the move, not just because we decided to keep our stress levels low, but because we chose the right people to help us.

What About Your Outsourcing?

In business there are many providers of services who can do the work for you… and there are many levels of service standards too.  I’ve heard some awful stories from business owners about who they trusted their work to, but I’ve also heard good stories.

It pays to get an example of their work, have a trial, AND get testimonials before trusting your work to someone else.  Keep your standards high and ensure you trust where your money goes.  Remember that the whole purpose of outsourcing is to leverage your time to enable you to make you more money.  So if it’s actually costing you in time, re-work and stress – then you better go back to the drawing board and look for better providers.

When following the steps outlined in Ferris’s Dreamline worksheet, the cost for those things that we put off every year (a great holiday, a car upgrade, a gardener, etc) are typically not that much in total monthly income — remembering that figure is on top of the usual household costs. In fact, some of my “costs” also could provide an income, if using a low-cost virtual assistant. (Part of the outsourcer’s work could be billed to clients, or at least free me up to do more billable projects.) Tim Ferris blog – Ideal Lifestyle Costing has all the necessary calculators to work out costs of your own ideal lifestyle.

Also, qualified remote support staff can be outsourced for as little as US$300 per month (around $2 an hour) and they can do a variety of things like follow up calls, invoice creation/reminders, link building for your SEO, etc… all those things that eek away your daylight hours. Because they are working specifically for you on the projects you need, there won’t be any staff time wastage or double-instructing. See www.remotestaff.com.au for ongoing administrative tasks, or ask about the specialists at Infusionoz.com.au for higher level tasks like web design, e-marketing, CRM implementation, and content writing (also offering good value/prompt attention services and located in Australia).

Of course, remote outsourcing goes hand-in-hand with automated technology and streamlined systems. Great systems means higher productivity. Higher productivity for the average small business owner might mean more billable hours, with less stress and chaos in their lives. For a Mumpreneur it might mean more time to spend with family because her income doesn’t drop with periods away from the business.

So many business people are still stuck in the paradigm of exchanging time for money – what is my hourly rate, how many hours can I bill?

But when we see our business as a marketable entity – with products (passive income), Intellectual Property to record and protect, and a brand to promote – we start to see it as an Asset. We may even have a saleable asset, if someone else could take over the systems and product sales down the track and continue the revenue streams. Does that sound worthwhile?

Let’s look at what the most successful entrepreneurs tend to do. They research and learn from others. But a critical difference is that successful entrepreneurs do not ‘buy in’ to a guiding Guru’s opinions. They have their own. They question common preconceived notions (this often leads to new markets or new products).

Many successful entrepreneurs today have followed their passion with true grit and a real mission to complete. They face adversity, as you will, on a daily basis, and learn to make decisions quickly and not get caught up in second-guessing themselves.

Entrepreneurs learn from experts in other fields in order to shortcut their learning. They surround themselves with the best specialist consultants, contractors and employees, since they cannot DO everything.

Examples of single-minded entrepreneurs (no groaning please):
•    Anthony Robbins of Robbins Research International (Booklist on Amazon)
•    Sir Richard Branson (latest book: Business Stripped Bare)
•    Bill Glazer (book: Outrageous Advertising)

“Richard is the only person in the world to have built seven billion dollar companies from scratch in seven completely different sectors” (Amazon).

My point is, you can learn a lot from the work and success of others, as long as you remind yourself that you are taking steps along a path and that no-one is the final figure of authority.  Of course we all need some support along the journey, and some people choose a coach for that.

What role can a Life/Business Coach play?  A coach is a sounding board and guides you to practical, time-saving methods and smart business practices. Sometimes they are the sole encouraging voice, someone to help you achieve your goals in small steps. But they are not the final authority, you are.

You don’t have to wait for all the answers to get started on that lifetime dream, because you learn as you go along. If you learn from others who have built businesses, while promoting your own unique qualities, then you will surely become a business success.

Since being in business for myself I’ve learnt how important it is to have good time management skills and prioritise everything, both business and personal. I’ve learnt that switching off the work by dinnertime each day is paramount to my sanity, health and happiness! So regardless of what’s going on, I don’t work at night… the work will always be there in the morning.

The Paradigm of Busy-ness
Have you noticed that everyone in your network is too busy? “I just don’t have time to relax” you hear people say, or “I wish I had more time in the day”.

It’s easy to just blame lack of time… but time ticks by regardless of our excuses. It’s more important to focus on whether you are doing what’s really important to you and your family… and for the growth and success of your business.

Ask yourself, “how do I want to spend my time today?”

Ask yourself, “is there anything that I’m spending much time on which could actually be done by someone else far cheaper or far easier? (e.g. cleaning the house, raking the leaves, filing, bookkeeping, SEO, typing letters – anything at all). This “letting go” process frees you up to spend more time on your core activity (your talent) and your relationships.

And lastly, ask “what business systems can I use to streamline & automate my regular tasks?” (e.g. software tools, macros, email autoresponders)

No more Excuses! Jack Canfield, with Mark Victor Hansen, found the time to do 5 actions towards promoting their books every workday for at least two years (e.g. call 5 radio stations for interviews), leading to the most successful personal development book series ever – 200 titles and 112 million copies in print in over 40 languages. Jack also found time to write a quality 500-page book, “The Success Principles” in 2005. Within these 64 principles is the foundation for anyone’s success.

If you want success and sanity, will you make the time for important things?

As a business owner or self-employed freelancer, the growth and success of your business rests on your ability to plan and achieve the most important tasks first.

In his book, “Eat That Frog: 21 Ways to Stop Procrastination”, Brian Tracy recommends writing out your bigger goals monthly, and then every night before work write your task list for the next day. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in a diary, computer-based organiser or PDA, as long as you write it down in the one place.

Apparently, people who take 10-12 minutes to plan their day free up to two hours in wasted time ‘muddling around’ and getting distracted. How much time do you currently spend looking for files, looking at marketing email, or surfing the web – the world’s most distracting medium?

The division of priorities Mr Tracy suggests goes like this:

A task: Very important task, if you fail to do this you will be in trouble. Prioritise these if there are more than one.

B task: Slightly important tasks, with mild consequences. Never do a B task if there is an A task to do.

C task: Nice to do, but no consequences if you don’t do it. E.g. telephoning a friend.

D task: Something you could delegate to someone else. So free yourself up.

E task: Something you can eliminate, perhaps a habit you don’t need to have that just wastes time or energy.

Write up a list of tasks that you regularly do. Then place an a,b,c,d,e in front of your everyday tasks on the list.

If you are still thinking “all too hard”, remember that those who complete important tasks get a payoff… a burst of energy, enthusiasm and self-esteem. This ‘endorphin rush’ is also followed by a boost of confidence.

When you keep on conquering your most critical tasks (ones that you signed up for), the good feelings grow and results arrive. So you may even “get addicted” to the positive habit of starting and finishing important jobs. Wouldn’t that be something?