Most of us Home-Based Business Owners and Network Marketers who have worked a “real job” have dreamed of the day when we could finally give our notice, tell the boss good-bye and never look back. Ahh, freedom. It’s a beautiful thing.
Freedom is a funny thing, though. On the one hand, when you have your own business you can do what you want when you want to. On the other hand, because you can do what you want when you want to, it’s really easy to not do anything.
Keep Your Focus
It’s also really easy to get caught up in “busy work” and put the things that will make you money on the bottom of the “to do” list.
The other day I got a really cool video from Eban Pagan promoting his course “Wake Up Productive”. In that video he talks about all the time that gets wasted in non-productive things like checking email, surfing the net (in the name of research) and returning phone calls that could be put off until later, or even delegated to someone else.
Here are some suggestions.
Figure out when your most productive times are. Let’s face it. Some of us are morning people and some are night owls. While I might get my best work done in the mornings and early afternoon, you might do better to sleep late and work later in the day. The cool thing about most of our businesses is that they’re international, so sending an email from the west coast at two in the morning would get to a business associate in Australia at a normal time. Work with your own internal clock instead of against it.
Set aside blocks of uninterrupted time to focus on just one project. Schedule one to two hour blocks of time and don’t work on anything else but that one thing. There’s no such thing as multi-tasking folks, as much as we’ve heard all the hype about it. Try this little experiment. Think about a green dog now at the same time think about a purple elephant. You have to focus on one or the other (and you can alternate between the two of them pretty fast), but you can only concentrate on one thing at once.
So many of us home based business types will simultaneously be talking on the phone to a prospect, while checking our email, while writing ourselves a reminder about something at our kid’s school and what did we really accomplish? Our prospect (the most important person in this scenario) isn’t getting the full attention he or she deserves and they can feel it. We give up effectiveness in the name of efficiency and nothing important gets accomplished.
The bottom line is this. The freedom of a home based business is in being disciplined with your time.
When you’re writing an article or blog post for your marketing campaign, do only that. Give it your complete attention and don’t stop until it finished.
When you block out time for your follow-up calls, do only that. Then your prospects have your undivided attention and they’ll be able to feel that you’re really listening to them. That you really care about what’s important to them.
When you can master your time and focus all your energy on one project at a time, you’ll be amazed at how much more productive you’ll be and how much extra time you’ll have for all the fun things in life.
