Do you struggle with finding time to do activities that will grow your business?
Take a look at your calendar.  What is on the schedule? Are they things that will grow your business?
It is so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of building a business. The question is, what types of activities are you spending time on?

Urgent and important.

The first category is those things that feel like emergencies. They are urgent and need to be taken care of right away. If they don’t, there will be an immediate impact. Personally, this could be a child who has fallen and gotten hurt. As a parent, we will drop everything and take care of that child. Professionally, this could be a potential client who moves up their meeting and you need to do. When we spend too much time in this category we will feel overwhelmed and anxious. 

Not Urgent But Important

This is the proactive category where you want to spend as much time as possible. These are the things that when we pay consistent attention to them things get better. Think about exercise. If you miss a day of exercise it probably isn’t going to affect your overall health, but if you miss a week or a month you will begin to see the effect. Marketing benefits from the consistent effort. If you miss a day or two you may not notice, but a month down the road you may wonder where all of your prospects went.

Feels Urgent and Important (but isn’t)

These are the interruptions and distractions. The notifications on your phone from social media, the email you have to check or the phone call you need to make. We are trained in our modern world to pay attention to these types of events, even though they aren’t really that important. It impacts us more than we think because it takes time for our brain to refocus on the task that was interrupted. When we spend a lot of time in this category we tend to feel stressed.  

Not Urgent and Less Important

This is the downtime. These are tasks that don’t directly impact your business, but they can impact your health. Self-care is often put into this category. While it is not urgent, it is still important to have a balance in our business and our life. Spending time in the garden or watching Netflix doesn’t directly help our business, but it may help us relax and rejuvenate – which then helps us focus on our business. 

If you are not spending enough time on the tasks that grow your business look at your calendar and schedule time at least once a week to work on them.  Try reducing the amount of time in the emergency category by schedule time each day to work on those tasks until you are caught up. Manage distractions and interruptions by scheduling specific times each day to check social media, return phone calls or check email. Don’t forget to schedule a time to take care of yourself too.
With a consistent focus on scheduling time on your calendar, you will find balance in your business.

Dawn Marcotte’s Bio

Dawn Marcotte is the ‘kindergarten’ teacher for online entrepreneurs. She focuses on helping women learn the fundamental skills they will need to build a successful business. Dawn brings her experience from 20+ years in the corporate world and 10+ years as a freelance writer into the online industry, helping women create business processes that are repeatable and reliable.

Get in touch with Dawn from her website; DM Consulting LLC

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