Posted by Amy Hale on October 24, 2011 at 6:54 am
Have you been putting off larger tasks because they seem so big? Or getting smaller tasks out of the way in order to immerse yourself into the larger task, except the little things keep cropping up and you don’t make much headway? That used to be what I experienced and those larger tasks or projects were the money making portions of my business. So what did I do?
I made the larger projects my first priority and created focus days. Now I take one or two days per week to focus entirely on the larger projects.
The smaller stuff doesn’t tend to generate income, so it can be organized into other times around my projects or an assistant can do the smaller things for me.
Focus Days are spent exclusively on high-income projects. This means no interruptions, email, phone calls (unless these are your high income activities). These days could be spent making proprietary systems or fine tuning the ones you have.
For a salesperson, Focus Days might include following-up with customers to see if their needs are met and contacting leads for future business.
Now if you don’t have someone to help you with the smaller tasks, you can create Support Days. These are the days you commit to tasks that help maintain your business. These are days you return phone calls, clear your inbox, file all of your papers, and set up more Focus Days.
With all of this, you must schedule at least one free day per week. If you don’t, you will suffer. Whenever I push myself further without a free day, my immunity goes down. So I’m a stickler for the free day. It relieves stress, lets you focus on non-business priorities, and allows you a day of fun.
A lot of people wince at taking breaks or time off, however, you will be more productive and more focused if you do so.
This Week’s Experiment:
First, figure out what your high income projects/tasks are and begin scheduling your Focus Days for later this week.
Second, use the days before as Support Days and plow through as much maintenance as you can.
Third, schedule your Free Day. Make a list of things you like to do. Go to a movie, take the kids out for a play day, or go for a hike. You will look forward to these days every week.
Remember why you are in business – to make money. So make sure you prioritize your high income projects into their own day. By organizing by the day, you’ll accomplish more and stress less.
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Posted by Amy Hale on January 25, 2011 at 10:45 pm
If your favorite team is playing this season, do you want a tense, stressed-out person shooting a free throw, or kicking a long field goal in the last moments of the game? Or would you rather see a confident, calm, rested player step up to the challenge?
Most people stress themselves out believing it’s as a form of caring. But it’s not caring, it’s just stressing out. Stressing out makes one do worse. True caring makes one do better. That’s why it’s vital to know the difference. The two couldn’t be more different.
Caring is relaxing, focusing and calling on all of my resources, all of that relaxed magic, that “lazy dynamite” that I bring to bear when I pay full attention with peace of mind. No one performs better than when they are relaxed and focused.
“Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth,” says the great creativity teacher Natalie Goldberg. “It’s a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.”
A successful person knows when to lie down. And when to stand up.
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Posted by Amy Hale on October 3, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Are you doing what you incarnated to do? Do you love how you spend your days, every day Monday thru Friday?
If you’re like thousands and more thousands of people, these questions may hit a sore spot or even seem ridiculous. ‘I can’t afford to ask myself things like that,’ one man said to me. ‘I’ve got a family to take care of and a mortgage to pay.
But just because it’s a difficult question doesn’t mean it’s not worth answering. And the question becomes more and more important as you get older.
Trying to ‘make yourself’ do what feels wrong to you is like walking in whatever direction you are facing and forcing the needle in your compass towards north. While it may work for a while, as soon as you let up the pressure for even a moment, the compass will begin to self-correct and you’ll find yourself in the wrong direction. You might be lost and don’t know how to come back to full reality and sanity. Uninspiring and treacherous stress comes from forcing yourself to do what you don’t want to do each day only leads to strain, tension and potential illness.
If you’ve spent a lifetime ignoring your feelings and quite literally ‘making the best of a bad job’, it may seem like it’s too late (or too scary) to do anything about it. But chances are that the changes you need to make are nowhere near as dramatic as you think. So don’t go quitting your job, selling your things and joining the convent. Even if big changes are called for, you don’t have to make them in a dramatic way.
Here are three simple changes, as described by Michael Neill – Super Coach, you can make that will make a major change in how you feel about your working life:
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1. Become self-employed while you’re still at your job.
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If you’ve begun saving money for your retirement, chances are you’ve done it by withholding money from your paycheck each month. A more effective strategy is to have all your money paid into a central ‘reservoir’ account. This can be a savings or even a home equity account. Then ‘deduct’ the money for your monthly expenses into a checking account.
Now instead of taking money away from yourself in order to save, you are having to take money away from yourself in order to spend. And for most people, when you see your reservoir of cash begin to grow, you will become less interested in spending and more interested in the freedom that comes with not being dependent on your job for your income.
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2. Get noticeably better at whatever it is you do.
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Extensive research into optimal experience at work shows that people who challenge themselves to continually improve at what they do not only increase their value in the marketplace, they enjoy their jobs considerably more than those who just do the minimum required to get by. While further training may or may not be a practical option for you, there are always ways to enhance your skills on the job.
One simple trick is to imagine you are training your replacement – if you had to teach someone to do what you do, how would you do it? In thinking about how to teach someone else to do your job, you will invariably find little improvements you can make that not only make you better, they make the job more enjoyable.
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3. Begin exploring new possibilities
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Many people fear that if they begin exploring other options, they will become more and more discontented and miserable about what they are currently doing. But only one of two things can really happen. Either you will find out that what you’re doing isn’t as bad as you thought when you compare it to what else is out there, in which case you’ll begin to appreciate and enjoy it more, or you’ll find out that there really is a job or career path that’s calling to you.
And if you are fortunate enough to find a job that’s also a calling, you will never have to work another day in your life!
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Do you push and push, day after day, not taking a break? Not even for a moment? I’m not talking about all of the work that you do. I’m talking about the self-bullying you do to yourself. Do you ever get tired of telling yourself that you “should” have done something different, or “If I hadn’t said that?”
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