How much thought do you put into your day? This question is for anyone; moms, entrepreneurs, employees etc. In order to make sure that you are achieving rather than just being active, it’s important to make sure that you are spending time on those core activities that will lead you to ultimate success.
If you are an entrepreneur, the best use of your time is selling. Making sure that you have customers trumps all other activities. Having customers ensures that you business is actually a business and not a high level, expensive hobby. Everything else that you do falls second. Your selling activities can include marketing strategies as well just make sure you spend actually meeting with new business as well.
For the employees, the first thing to do is to step back and assess what you are being paid to do and also look at where you see your career going. Once you have a firm handle on that you can to a look at what activites are most likely going to get you there. This is important to lay out so that you can identify things that you wont do. I know, actually refusing to do certain things even though you get a paycheck? It may sound crazy but I will give you one instance of a huge time waster for employees. Meetings. Most meetings are too long and are generally pointless. My advice to anyone is to get out of as many meetings as you possibly can. Your career will thank you for it later. This is just one example and I’m sure you can thing of others.
The concept of prioritizing and understanding what’s most important is certainly nothing new. Let this just be a gentle reminder to keep your days in perspective and put some thought into the activities that you are doing. Are you being active or productive? We get so caught up into day-to-day activities, we lose sight of what we really should be doing. How do you decide what’s most important for you? What do you do to stay the course? How do you deal with distractions?