Happy New Year from ME!

Getting Organized for the New Year!

One thing you have to admit, with the anticipation of the new year ahead one often has hopes and dreams that the upcoming year will bring good things and why not it's wonderful to have goals and visions of good things happening to oneself whether it is finacially, family or health related as long as its good!

When in business, working for yourself, however, constitutes a lot of self discipline that not everyone is patient to conquer. Many people try to start a home based business or become self employed and do not realize that 90% of their stuggles are self induced. They either procrastinate and put off what they should be doing with the infamous statement "I'll get to it soon". Well soon turns into a day, which turns into a week, then a month. Soon a year has flown by and the person is sitting there saying "What the hell just happened?" and then the business venture they were pursuing is full blame as opposed to the lack of self discipline it took for the person to see any results.

Time management is something I stress often to people and other than a budget, and good business model and a system or plan to reach realistic goals, time management is right up there in order of importance. I usually make this step 2 in a 4 step process of business building.

Here is a quick ritual you might want to try that can help you keep focus and get organized for the coming New Year.

1. - Write down what you did the previous year incuding all business ventures, money spent, money gained, money lossed (If you were doing things right you would have a profit/loss statement where this is all jotted down already for you).

See where things went wrong, what worked, what didn't work. If something wasn't profitable for you research why that may have been. Research how you lost money if you did and could you have made a better business decision. If you have lost money and time in 2009 don't look at those losses as a failure. Instead use those experiences as educational lessons and try not to repeat those same mistakes going forward. Did you overspend in your marketing? Did you not market enough? Did you utilize the free resources available to you to minimize your advertising efforts? Do you HAVE free resources available to you to minimize your marketing efforts?

2 - Create a monthly calendar for yourself and for the first month jot down everything you do from wake to sleep, allocating time even for showering, eating, and indicate how many hours you are sleeping. Get a full spectrum of what you are doing 24-7. See if there are ways to improve perhaps some gaps of wasted time.

Wasted time could be watching 4 hours of television a day, or reading funny jokes and tons of pointless emails a day. Find things that are wasting your precious time that could be used for more constructive purposes.




3 - If you find there are gaps in the day of white space I call it, perhaps there are areas that are not predefined or there are areas where you could not take so long in doing a certain task you can use those times to work on your business. If you treat your self employed business as a true business and not just a fly by night hobby you will start to see results.



4 - Try this exercise. Pretend in your mind that you are not the boss of your home based business, that you are an employee of a large corporation and your boss only pays you based upon your efforts and the results you are getting. If that were the case would he or she be giving you a paycheck every week? Every month? It's very easy for us to not take ourselves seriously in a home based business but what if you try that scenario I just mentioned. Do you think you would work harder so that your employer would pay you? Perhaps this is a good exercise to try for the coming year.



5 - Here is another mind exercise. If I was to tell you that in 30 days from reading this post I would pay you $1,000,000 if you lost 15 lbs but I would not give you any resources as to how to lose that weight not any diets, pills, exercise programs, nothing, do you think you would somehow find a way to lose that 15 lbs in order to get that $1,000,000? I thought so. Well of course I am not going to do that but why not try that same exercise in your brain with the business you are in? If you figure out how to acheive $1,000,000 in your business based on the pay structure, give yourself a realistic time frame that you feel you could obtain that dollar figure or ANY dollar figure for that matter and research methods you would need to utilize in order to get to that $1,000,000 figure. Do you think you could find a way to try to acheive this? I bet you would try very hard to. It's a good analogy and will get your struggling business partners to focus and use that analogy to their advantage.

If you ever have any questions on what I am posting please always feel free to contact me through my communications portal, it will also help organize your time, and don't worry you can use most of the features by becoming a free member. Remember,  I am here to help. More to come!

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