Do you feel like the first seven months of this year have been a blur of busyness, but not much actually getting done? It can get like that, can’t it? Would you love to feel more in control of your workload and finally get to those projects that you’ve been attempting to work on for quite some time; those projects that will provide revenue-generating opportunities; and implement them, finally?
If your answer is yes, I dare you to try my nine steps to streamlining your work week:
- Grab a 12 month wall calendar (can be financial year if you want)
- Mark in all of your holidays (don’t forget your kid’s school holidays) and time off. This shows you realistically how much time you have available
- Mark in conferences you wish to attend. Transfer these dates to your electronic calendar as well
- Look at a work week, decide on a task focus for each day, i.e. client day, business development day, admin/marketing day
- Look at your wall calendar again. If you chose one day a week for business development, count up how many days over the weeks you have left in the year to complete your business development projects
- Now you can clearly see how much time you have to complete your projects. Do you have time to complete them all by the end of year? Probably not, so pick the top three from those projects that will move your business forward and generate revenue
- Map these projects on your business development days over the year, setting realistic completion dates
- Spend each designated day working on those projects until, finally, you see them come to fruition.
The hardest part of implementing something like this is not getting your clients on board, but disciplining yourself to stick to the routine. Yes, sometimes you will need to book a client appointment on a business development or marketing/admin day because it is extremely urgent, but at least the above structure means you will be able to achieve substantially more than you probably ever have in your work week.
What are you waiting for? Get started. Race you to Christmas!