Productivity for Home Business Income

Extreme Tactics for Self-Organization and Increased Productivity for Home Business Income

First, time is not the enemy

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 handling your 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 the super conductor for being ‘in the zone' and this is when you'll be your most productive.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/home-business-articles/extreme-tactics-for-self-organization-and-increased-productivity-for-home-business-income-2382198.html

Jay Allyson, Pro Lifestyle Marketing & Wealth Coach

I'm a Home Business Owner and Internet Marketing Coach. Busy Mum of 2. My Internet Business is a Family Strategy .. Love my Freedom .. Dream Lifestyle.