ROTARACTNIS

5 Extreme Time Management Techniques for Your Online Home Business

The simplest way to increase your home business income is increased productivity.

If you embrace the extreme productivity tactics outlined in today’s lesson, you will stack the deck in your favour and notice immediate benefit to your mental energy, your bottom line profit and your home business success.

This has nothing to do with time management, goal setting or visualisation. They are important but the fundamental principles that hyper productive top earners have mastered is self-organization.

If you are a home business owner, an online marketer, an entrepreneur, right now in today’s fast-paced information age, there is so much available media you can potentially consume. This is why managing yourself in that environment is critical to productivity.

Let’s get one thing out in the open first and foremost about what this article is NOT about.

This article is not about time management, goal setting or visualisation. Here’s why.

Firstly, time management is a waste of time – excuse the pun. You cannot manage time. You can only manage yourself in time. Time itself is fixed.

It’s what you do within the 24 hours you get every single day that makes the difference between someone who is highly productive and someone who is easily distracted.

Secondly, there is already a wealth of excellent information and training on the value of setting out goals and visualising your success. So I’m not even going to try going there right now.

Good. Now that’s sorted, let’s get into what this article IS about and that is managing yourself in time in relation to your goals and vision of success. If you can learn to do this, you can become hyper productive in working towards your personal and business objectives.

Achieving Life Work Balance

As a general principle that spans all five extreme productivity tactics, it is important to take care of yourself so you can give back to your life, family and your business. As they say on airplanes when the oxygen mask comes down, put your own mask on first.

If you spend a portion of time looking after yourself – your mental and physical energy- you will increase your focus and productivity many fold.

Too often we mix up our life and work, we get the balance completely wrong, or reversed.

When you’re working on your business, perhaps you have experienced feeling guilty about not spending time with your family or on hobbies that we know are important in our life.

And vice versa, when we’re with our family or doing our ‘thing’, we feel guilty we should be working and worrying about all the things that aren’t getting done in your business.

Extreme tactics for managing yourself in time

Hopefully, the tactics I’m going to outline here you will find the solutions to some of your current feelings of overwhelm, distractions and focus. It’s not a conspiracy on your time, it’s a prompt to you managing yourself in time.

If you embrace these and implement even one of them (at a time), you will notice the benefits to your sanity as well as your productivity.

And of course if you increase your work productivity in the right way, as I’ll explain, you will stack the deck in your favour and your home business income will grow and grow.

Right, let’s get started.

1. Scheduling your daily activities

In today’s climate of multiple social media, electronic devices and sources of information, multi-tasking isn’t necessarily a good thing! We try to be all things to all people in all places and juggle these things throughout the day. That’s a recipe for ending the day with little productivity to show for your time.

Identifying and doing the most profitable activities in the absence of distractions will result in you becoming highly focused and hyper productive in your home business. In order to do this effectively, you need to block out certain times in your day for different types of activity.

As a priority, you should try to identify what are the activities that earn you 80% of your income – that is, your income generating activity (IGA).

For home business owners, your IGA is normally (1) your marketing and (2) your follow up.

If you’re in a multi level marketing company, another source of income is the residual commissions from your team’s productivity, so you might add (3) team training & support (and managing that activity well is a whole other topic!).

So first tactic is this. Identify what times of the day you are at your most efficient, your most creative, your most relaxed, and schedule these income generating priority activities into that hyper productive part of your day.

And give your activities a start and a finish time. If you’re not done, learn from that for future planning but move onto your next scheduled activity.

2. Dealing with overwhelm

Overwhelm is a huge problem in today’s information age and it’s growing in intensity. How you view overwhelm and information coming at you will determine how you deal with it.

The tactic here is not to try to avoid overwhelm but to embrace it and manage it.

There is so much available media and you need to think of overwhelm as being a wealth of opportunity to learn and educate yourself. Better to be overwhelmed than under whelmed, right? Overwhelm always exceeds growth.

You need to (1) learn how to be selective about what you tap into to match what you are trying to achieve and (2) schedule a time to manage this kind of information.

As information comes at you, pick out what is primary and what is peripheral and note or file it for later. The primary information, books, training, webinars, podcasts etc. is information that will support your current priorities and current IGAs.

Schedule a bit of time in your day or your week, when you have a ‘developmental’ session and consume the primary information and journal the key things you get out of it or actions you will take, techniques you will implement, and so forth. (This is what I call my wisdom journal or success journal.)

This way you stay on top of information overload and select what you tap into rather than getting distracted and going off on a tangent. (If you time out to explore or research something proactively, make sure it’s scheduled not spontaneous.)

As soon as you commit to scheduling this activity and reflect on the results of your study, you can look back after a few weeks or 3 months and see what has the biggest impact and that you know you are getting on top of managing the information.

3. Managing the ‘noise’

One of the biggest time bandits in your business is not email or twitter or facebook. It’s actually your distractions. You need to disconnect from the ‘noise’ of the distractions from people and things that you allow into your world and your ‘work’ environment that stop you from being as productive as you need to be. Set up boundaries.

Rather than trying to manage all of these streams of communication throughout the day, instead, try to batch these tasks.
For example, I run a busy and successful online internet business and managing my emails and voice messages has made a tremendous difference to my focus and my productivity.

Instead of responding ‘on the hoof’ as calls or emails come in, or even first or last thing each day, I have started to move towards a schedule where I deal with messages and calls on Mondays and Thursdays only. I know I need to respond to calls and emails but I don’t have to do it everyday.

This frees up a big chunk of my time to spend on creative tasks like writing articles, making video trainings or on research, and income generating activities. By doing this, I can be free of distractions and concentrate solely, for several hours sometimes, on these hyper productive tasks.

Another example is that Wednesday evenings are blocked out for my own personal development. I carve out that time to be in a fresh focused and distraction free environment. My husband is out that night and my kids know that mom is busy.

4. Identifying effective working environments

This one is as important as the others. It’s about getting ‘in the zone’ for whatever task you are doing. Some people are hyper productive and can work in any environment: noisy/quiet, organised/cluttered, light/dark and so on. But for most of us, you know where you work best.

However, like your most productive times (above for your high leverage activities), your most productive environments are likely to vary depending on what you are doing. If you try to do all of your different activities in one environment, you tend to dilute your focus.

For example, the place in your home or elsewhere that you are (or are likely to be) your most creative for activities like copywriting or market research is probably not your home office where you might do your calls or emails.

Find your environment that brings out the best in you. Test it out, enjoy the process of finding your breakthrough zone. It doesn’t matter where you go to, is as long as it works for you and you can do your creative work, or your personal development, in a fresh and focused place free of distractions.

Have you heard people say their best ideas come to them when they are in the bath? This is shown to be because the brain is most creative when you are the most relaxed. So find an environment where you are the least anxious and the most relaxed so you can be your most creative. This is super conductor for being ‘in the zone’ and this is when you’ll be your most productive.

5. Placing a value on your time

Work out what is your actual dollar value on your time. Principle learned from Dan Kennedy. The example is to work out what your hourly value is in your home business.

You know what you made in the previous calendar year and what you want or expect to make this calendar year – your income goal.

Do the calculation for yourself and you will never look at each hour of your day in the same way again!

OK, so say your income goal is 0,000 in next calendar year.

Set down 250 workdays per year, 8 hours per day as a standard workday, taking account of weekends and family time or other commitments. This gives you 2000 hours of work per year.

Simple maths 0,000 divided by 2000 hours gives you 0 per hour.

BUT. Research has proved that even with top business achievers, the Donald Trump’s of this world, only one-third of your workday is revenue-producing time.

So in reality, your time is actually worth around 0 per hour, almost three times what you thought you were worth.

This makes you look at your time a whole lot differently! All those distractions and urgent but not important tasks that waste an hour here and 30 minutes there, will cost you in income to your home business.

Getting rid of the time bandits is not you being rude or mean, it means you are disciplined and focused.

In taking this approach, it is the end result that makes the profit, nothing else matters. If you can actually see that ordinary people are getting extraordinary income from an online business, it makes sense to explore something like this a lot more seriously.

This article is from part 7 of a free 32 page ebook How to Build a Profitable Online Home Business: A Success Blueprint for Internet Marketing by Jay Allyson, covers personal development, profitable business models, marketing education, marketing systems, top tier products, productivitiy and coaching.

Are you ready to learn how to build a profitable online home business now? Then make sure you check out the resource box below and follow the link within it for free access.

Ten Home Business Tips

Virtually everyone would jump at the chance to start a legitimate home business so they could work at home and attain financial freedom. But not everyone has what it takes to transform a home business opportunity into financial success. Here are ten tips that will help you achieve your personal and financial goals through running your own legitimate home business.

1. Secure your start-up funds. Any successful business owner will tell you that you need to invest money in your business in order to make money. A home business is no exception. Expect to spend a maximum of ,000 for a legitimate home business opportunity. If the opportunity is sound, you should be able to get back your initial investment within a matter of days or weeks, but you do need that initial investment.

2. Get high-speed Internet. If you don’t already have DSL or a broadband Internet connection, you should have it installed. The best home business opportunities are Internet based, so you need reliable and speedy Internet access.

3. Find the right opportunity. Like every other person, you have a unique set of strengths and weaknesses. Find a legitimate home business that draws on your strengths. If you aren’t a salesperson, for example, stick with a home business that doesn’t require you to make cold calls.

4. Get support. Launching your own business can be a daunting prospect, so be sure that you have the support you need. Look to family members and friends for encouragement, and look to the company with which you affiliate to provide you with a sense of community.

5. Take advantage of available resources. Unless you are a seasoned entrepreneur, you probably aren’t aware of the nuances of running a business. The home business opportunity you choose should have a number of resources available to you, so take advantage of them. These resources might include a back office set-up, daily or weekly conference calls, and online tutorials.

6. Key in on marketing. The success of any business, whether a brick-and-mortar store or an Internet-based business, is marketing. The bottom line is, if people don’t know about your business, you’ll never turn a profit. Take full advantage of the marketing tools and advice that you’re provided.

7. Set up a wok schedule. The wonderful thing about being able to work at home is the flexibility that comes with it. However, setting your own work hours doesn’t mean that you don’t have to work. It’s helpful – particularly when you’re starting out, to schedule your work hours as though you were going in to a “regular job.” In doing this, you’ll ensure that you put in the time necessary to make your business succeed.

8. Minimize any distractions. If you’ve never worked from home before, it’s easy to divert your attention from the task at hand. While you’re working, close the doors of your home office, turn down the ringer on your home phone, and vow not to check your personal email. Forget the laundry and the errands, and concentrate on your business.

9. Keep good records. It may not seem important know, but come tax time, you’ll need financial records of all of the expenses and income associated with your home business opportunity. Some people use a spreadsheet, while others use special accounting software. Either way, keep track of everything, and keep your receipts.

10. Have fun! Having the knowledge that you’re working toward your financial freedom while being able to work at home in a legitimate home business is incredibly rewarding. Always keep your goals in mind, and have fun creating a stable future for you and your family.

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