The most frequent reason I hear from people about why they don’t market their business on a regular basis is a lack of time. When I’m listening to these business owners, I can hear my trainer telling me that you need to make time, but to be honest I’m better at making up excuses as to why I can’t go to the gym, so I can empathise with busy business owners.
A lot of us use this pattern when facing our marketing. Those brochures you’ve printed will not market themselves in the corner of the room. You will not meet new and interesting prospects sitting in your office alone. But you’ve heard all this before, haven’t you?
I’m with you in that our lives, compared with our parents working lives, move at a much faster pace, however excuses won’t get us anywhere, we just need to find the modern day rules to fit it all in and that’s what I’m going to share with you today.
Here’s the 8 time busting strategies that I use to fit it all in and to ensure I market my business. Enjoy!
1) Build a Default Diary - So many business people still don’t use a diary to plan their day. They simply do whatever comes at them first or react to whoever shouts loudest, which means that many important things never get done.
A default diary is a great tool and so simple to use. Firstly, split out your day into bite sized sections. Mine are early morning, morning, early afternoon and evening. I then fill them with the appointments and tasks that I need to do on a monthly basis, including invoicing, accounts, marketing, sales, admin, follow up calls, personal appointments and scheduled client appointments. I now know what time I have left each week to fill up with marketing activities and sales appointments to actively promote my business.
I also ensure that I plan a hunter half day each week and a marketing half day every two weeks. This is time that I actively work on my business rather than everyone elses!
2) Use a Planner App - I also use an App called Schedule planner which helps me plan my diary. This syncs with my google & outlook calendars so my team also know where I am.
3) Create a Daily Focus List - Each evening before I leave for the day, I create a list of 5 tasks/items that I’m going to achieve the next day. These are the must do’s which I am fully committed to achieving. However, as life has a funny way of throwing curved balls at us, when an emergency breaks meaning I drop all I planned to do, I simply move the unachieved item(s) to the top of the focus list for the next day.
Mark Forster in his book Do it tomorrow, also suggests planning time first thin in your day to work on a current project. This means that you can progress a project continuously. You also have the flexibility to use this time to crisis manage any projects or complete any tasks where you need to catch up if you have fallen behind.
4) Create a Holding List - For those tasks which I need to do some time, which are not urgent and not important, (Usually admin orientated rather than revenue earning); I add these to a central holding list.
When I’m working, I frequently have an idea or remember something that I need to do. Rather than do it immediately and lose my train of thought on my current task, I add it to the bottom of the holding list.
I review the holding list several times a day to see if the status of an item has changed and now needs to be moved to my focus list or to find a task that I can fit into a time slot that I have free.
5) Eat that Frog - Brian Tracy also talks about Eating that Frog. This is the concept of doing first what you are putting off. I regularly munch on frogs and as we have seen in the bush tucker trials on I’m a celebrity, there is no better time to eat that nasty tasting frog than first thing. After that, nothing can taste quite as bad as what you dread the most!
6) Be realistic with your time - As an eternal optimist, I frequently underestimate the amount of time that I will take to do something. There is no real cure for this apart from understanding why you do it and also bringing a level of reality into your daily planning. I track the actual time I take to do something versus the planned time and record it. Next time I am undertaking something similar I base it on reality rather than my rose tinted view of how long it will take.
If there is no other information available on how long it will take, I take a guestimate of the time and allow half the time again. That is my deadline for getting it done. If I finish early, I reward myself with a coffee and fit something from my holding list into the now free time! If I don’t complete it, I reschedule the remainder of the task into my diary.
7) Choosing tasks that will make a difference - We all have tasks which we like to do but that do not honestly make a difference to our business. These are the ones I add to my holding list and are always my first choice to do when I have some free time from my schedule such as when I finish early.
8) Delegate what you hate - The biggest evolution in my time planning came when I delegated all the parts that I hate. By that I do not mean abdicate all responsibility, but I have outsourced all the parts that I really dread and that I have to do on a regular basis such as Payroll, book keeping, vat etc. This means that I know they are done in an orderly fashion and all I do is plan the checking of them into my default diary. Magic!
Using this system, I know where I am and what I’m doing daily. Now you can use it and all you need to do is promise me is that some of the time you schedule will be spent on marketing!
Photo credit: ppdigital from morguefile.com
Posts
