Tag: positive attitudes

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How and Why Getting Rid of Things That You Don’t Need Frees You

If you want to live a more organized and easy life, have less. When it comes to success and overall happiness, less is more.

 

Getting rid of things that you don’t need frees you because it: 

 

Promotes Clarity and Focus

When there are things not put in their place or disorganized, your brain can feel the same way. Confused and lost as to where it should go or look at. Getting rid of these extra things mean you no longer have to worry about making sure they fit.

 

This is why many productive people get into the habit of clearing off or decluttering their workspace. They are not constantly distracted by the things around them that are generally not there, nor do they have to think about having to do that chore anymore.

Promotes Positive Energy and Inspiration

When you remove distractions, unnecessary tasks, or people in your life causing you pain, it only makes you want to keep going forward. You finally get to see how much better life is without the pain and frustration—the power of saying no and taking control of your life breeds positivity and inspiration.

 

Here are a few quick tips and tricks to help you get rid of things you don’t need:

 

Streamline Your Business and Personal Objectives

Getting rid of things doesn’t have to be about material possessions. It can also be clunky processes or systems at work that are making you lose sight of what you care about.

 

Start Small and Categorize

Start with the smallest area in the room or department in your business and take it slow. You don’t need to do this all-in-one day to feel the benefits. The more time you give it, the more efficient you will be and the more benefits you will reap. Donate the things that don’t provide you value or are just sitting around. What are the things you don’t ever use, touch, or often save for last?

 

Take Notice of Your Emotions or Mood

If a task, person, or thing affects your mood to the point where you are bitter, sad, angry, or irritated every time you do it or are around them, you must rid these things or people from your life.

 

While you can’t use this strategy every time you feel discomfort, it should be used when you can’t get it off your mind or move on with your day, week, or worse years. You can always outsource the work or have technology do it for you instead for a low monthly price.

 

No person is worth keeping around that destroys your mental peace either. Even though possessions are most commonly what people get rid of, they are often not the real culprit to their problems. People are.

 

As you can see, getting rid of things is a great way to de-stress and reorganize your life. You don’t need to be caught up with the newest and most significant thing to feel happy. In fact, it only keeps you further away from your goals.

 

 

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5 Rituals to Boost Your Energy and Productivity

Wish you had more energy throughout your day to get each and everything on your to-do list done? You are not alone. Many people, tiny business owners, and entrepreneurs struggle to keep up.

 

Here are five rituals to add to your daily routine that will boost your energy to live each day more productively:

 

Sleep for 7 to 8 Hours Every Single Night

You can’t have good energy and be productive if you don’t get sleep. You may think you function great off 4 or 5 hours, but science doesn’t support this. You are more like a walking zombie. Even one to two hours less than a full night’s sleep of 8 hours can reduce your productivity by up to nineteen percent.

 

Getting a full night’s rest also affects your overall mood, health, and outlook. Your sleep pattern and routine are the first places to look when living a more productive life. Sleep and proper food equal optimal energy. Without both of those, you can’t expect to feel optimal.

 

De-Clutter Before You Get to Work

Nothing is better for freeing your mind than getting rid of clutter and ensuring your workspace is organized. When chaos is around, your brain will feel cluttered too. That will affect your work more than you may realize. Practice decluttering or quickly picking up everything before you get to work. It’ll be one less thing you will have to worry about later. Giving you clarity, focus, and peace to do your work right.

 

Meditate or Stretch with Sunlight

Your body requires vitamin D to feel optimal, and the best way to get that is through natural sunlight. Start each morning off with a short five-minute meditation routine or stretch outside or with your blinds open in the living room. As you clear your mind and de-stress, the sunlight will wake you up and energize you for the day.

 Avoid Burnout: How to Exercise and Sleep More

Wake Up Early and Get Moving

Science has shown that those who are early to bed and early to rise are healthier. They have smaller waist sizes and have longer life expectancy than those who refer to themselves as “night owls.”

 

Even if you feel like you may be a night owl, you can change your habits and morning routine to become one. Try going for a walk, light jog, or practice yoga to wake you up. The workout will provide you a boost of energy to help you work efficiently and allow you to get a full night’s rest once the day is over.

 

Never Skip Breakfast

Breakfast is when your body finally gets a moment to refuel after a long rest. It needs healthy fats, sugars, proteins, and other vital nutrients to be strong and alert. If you feel like you suffer from a lot of mental fog, especially in the mornings, your diet is probably to blame.

 

Watching motivational videos before you get to work or accomplish your goal, always taking a lunch break, or any repeatable task that benefits your life are good rituals to adopt if you want to be more productive. Remember, consistent, repeatable actions get you to the finish line.

 

 

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6 Habits That Are Destroying Your Productivity

Are you constantly scratching your head at the end of the day, wondering why you feel like you worked so much to get nowhere? The good news is that you are not alone, but unfortunately, there is bad news too.

 

The bad news is the habits you have adopted over time are killing your productivity. It doesn’t matter how busy you are. If you are not doing the right tasks to complete the job, you will never get it done.

 

Here are six habits that are destroying your productivity that you must end today:

 

Doing Everything at The Same Time

Most tasks require your undivided attention to get done and get it done well. Stop multitasking and expecting too much from yourself at all given times. You are not productive. You are only causing unnecessary stress, confusion, and poor-quality work.

 

Avoiding Technology or Using Too Much

Are you still keeping track of your bills, inventory, and tasks on paper? That is slowing you down too. Utilize technology where appropriate but be sure not to overdo it. Technology can be great until it becomes a distraction instead.

 

Not Following A Schedule or Routine

While it can seem like a business owner waking up and going with the day’s flow would be fabulous, the truth is, it’s not great for business or productivity. Routines and schedules make your day easier and help guide you in the right direction. When you have a clear idea of your goals and what to do next, you can get it done faster and with more confidence.

 

Poor Sleep and Diet Choices

It’s not something anyone wants to hear or admit to, but your diet and exercise routine has a direct reflection on how you perform throughout your day. Your work, business, relationships, and mental state are all affected by what you do and eat, negatively and positively. You’ve already heard the common phrase “you are what you eat,” and it’s true. Too much sugar and not enough nutrients from your diet leads to mental fog, body pain, and fatigue that can negatively strain your overall performance.

 Avoid Burnout: How to Exercise and Sleep More

Poor Communication Skills

Too much back and forth and confusion takes away the time you need to get work done efficiently. Not only that, poor communication means it’s likely not getting done correctly either. You are only pushing your schedule back and getting you off the path.

 

Poor or Distracting Work Environments

Working at a coffee shop or home is a dream come true for many entrepreneurs, but they quickly learn it comes with many challenges. If you are easily distracted, your work environment needs to be completely free of distractions.

Being busy and thinking that busy means productivity is also a bad habit. That thought process must be changed. Break your bad habits now so you can work less and do more.

 

 

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Learn to Say No to Be More Productive

Fear of conflict, disappointment, social awkwardness, or dealing with any negative consequences is a few of many reasons why many people can’t say no.

However, saying no more often can lead to more productivity and isn’t as scary as you may think once you get started.

 

Here are four ways to learn how to say no to live a more productive life:

eliminate, delegate, automate

Take Control of Your Life

Instead of saying no, directly offer a different time or day that better suits your schedule. However, only offer this if it’s something that will provide you benefit or something you can genuinely offer. Helping people is great for your health and growth, but just because you are busy doesn’t mean it is valuable to your goals. Remember, you’re not selfish to take care of yourself first. You are the only one who can provide or offer your time. Don’t allow other people to control you.

 

Provide an Alternative

The best way to say no to anyone is by suggesting who will do a better job. This way, you don’t need to feel any pressure saying no. You can simply explain why you are not best for the job and who will be better—giving the other person good reasons to move on without you feeling guilty or pressured to do the job.

 

Look at It from A Different Perspective

Saying no is also saying yes to another opportunity and vice versa. If you keep saying yes to opportunities you don’t want to do, you also say no to things that you would enjoy or get value from. While helping people is healthy and beneficial to the world, it can’t overshadow your dreams and aspirations twenty-four seven. If you skip your self-care, you will not provide value to them either-even if they think you will be better for the task.

 

Be Honest and Clear

Overall, the best policy is honesty. If you can’t do something because you don’t have the time or have other important things to get done, explain it to them. Even if you have no reason other than you don’t want to, they will appreciate the honesty and won’t take up your time in the future asking again. It’s essential always to be yourself, even if there is a little awkwardness in between. It only saves you time and frustration in the long run.

Avoid Burnout: Reassess Your Goals

Saying no can seem harsh and uncomfortable at first, but you won’t want to stop once you get started. Just because you are saying no now doesn’t mean you can’t come back later either. If you’d like to get more stuff done, try saying “no” more often.

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How to Be Realistic About Time

You know it, and practically the whole world knows it: time is money. It can instantly steal your success if you aren’t being realistic or use it right.

 

The following are a few things to keep in mind to ensure you are realistic about your time:

 

Time Yourself

Make sure you understand how long each essential task takes. How long is the average for you or the person you are working with? Don’t try to rush it or see how fast you can do it.

 

You want the actual time it takes to accomplish each task plus a few minutes to account for variables and unpredictable events. Write these times down in your schedule so you can be sure you schedule enough time out of your day to get finished without interruption or being late for other things.

 

Could You Be Automating That?

Investing in technology or outsourcing your work are great solutions that allow you to add more time to your day essentially. While you may only have 24 hours each day, that doesn’t mean you can’t make it by paying for other peoples’ time.

 

Outsource your blog post content, repeatable social media and email marketing tasks, accounting, and more. Anything these days can be automated as long as you have the income to do it.

 

Stay Focused and Keep Moving

In other words, don’t let yourself get off-plan or run off schedule. Planning, creating goals, and scheduling tasks only work if you do it and stick to it. In fact, the less you stick to your plan, the more work you create. Staying on track prevents burnout, stress and keeps you motivated as you continue to see progression each day.

 

Schedule Appropriately and Don’t Over-Book

No matter how lucrative, fast, or talented you may think you are, overbooking is terrible for business. That is the best way to lead you straight to burnout and dread coming back to work. You don’t need to rush the process to be successful. Remember, slow and steady wins the race.

 

It’s Not Just You

As easy as this may sound, it’s easy to get into tunnel vision and only think about what you need to get it done. When in reality, no matter what you do, more than likely other people will be involved too. Never expect the same type of work ethic you display, and always be sure to over-communicate when scheduling meetings or delegating tasks.

 Scheduling to Avoid Burnout: Learn to Take More Breaks

 

eliminate, delegate, automate

In the end, to create a realistic and successful schedule, you need to take time to evaluate every aspect of your life and others. Be aware of your expectations, other people’s expectations, and never underestimate what it takes to get there.

 

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5 Household Management Tips for Parent Business Owners

Battling the household and running an online business at the same time is hard work. A business requires just as much of your time, if not more, as do your children. Both will create more work and stress, but you can manage.

 

The following are five household management tips for parent business owners: 

 

#1: Work in Batches and Block Schedules

Keep similar work together and schedule work time in batches. If you know your kids need to get to school at a certain time, for example, schedule a block of time around that. If you can get two hours of work in before they need to get ready, then find similar activities you know you can do in that time, like checking email or creating your daily to-do lists. Block these times out in your schedule and let your household know when you plan to work. Put the schedule somewhere they can all see it and treat it no differently than you would if you were to clock in for a shift somewhere else.

 

#2: Designate Workspaces and Keep Them Out

Create an area in your house that everyone knows is only for working. Please don’t allow them to come in at any point. It may sound harsh or brutal to do at first, but over time everyone will understand that this area is not for fun, only business.

 

Establishing appropriate boundaries like this is crucial to create a distraction-free workspace. When you are in this space, you work. When you leave this space, you get to take a break or have free time and stop working. Likewise, you won’t need to work when you’re in your other spaces.

 

#3: Schedule Special Time with Your Kids Away from Business

Always add in time with your kids and put it in your schedule. This way, you know you always have time to be with them. Don’t expect yourself to use after work or school hours to do it.

basketball

If you don’t schedule it, you will give yourself permission to be distracted. You don’t have a boss to tell you to stop working. You have to set those boundaries yourself. Scheduling your personal time and time with your family is a way to ensure you stick to your work hours.

 

#4: Create Daily To-Do and Expectation Lists for You and The Household

To ensure you have the time you need to get work done, make daily to-do lists for you and the household. Include chores or fun activities they can do while you need to work. Set up timers and don’t allow them to finish until it’s done. Make sure the tasks you do can be done within these times. Don’t use this time for any critical tasks that require more of your attention.

 Don’t Forget That You Can Automate and Outsource Your Home Management Too

#5: Communicate as Much as Possible and Expect to Make Compromises

Most importantly, you must communicate. You can’t expect others to know what to do just because you work from home. Creating your own home business comes with compromises from you and the entire family. While it provides you the freedom to be a parent and make money, it can also be disrupting. As a carefree space of their home is now for business. Proper communication and not expecting perfection will go a long way to ensuring your success.

 

As you can see, running a business and your household as a parent is possible. However, you must know what it takes to set yourself up for success realistically.

 

 

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Nope: Productivity and Being Busy Are Not the Same

The main idea of productivity is always to work smarter, not harder. Just because you are active, working hard, and doing stuff does not mean you have used your time wisely enough to be productive. Unfortunately, a myth equates being “busy” to being highly productive, while not being “busy” equals laziness.

linkedin laptop

However, the most productive people can easily seem lazy with this mindset when they got all their work done already and get to take the rest of the day off.  Remember, the formula for productivity is your output over your input. If your input significantly outweighs the output, you need to adjust and fix your to-do list.

 

Here are a few tips that many successful entrepreneurs follow to be more productive and less busy throughout their day:

 

They Remove Absolutely Any and All Distractions

When it is time to work, take responsibility and remove the distractions you know will disrupt you. Get rid of distracting music. Don’t work where people are walking around and talking. Keep your workspace clean and organized. When distractions are removed, you can stay focused, concentrate and create momentum to get your work done faster.

 

They Create Many To-Do Lists and Know How To Prioritize

Start each morning with a to-do list to tackle each thing you need to get done. If you need to reach out to a customer and also complete a big assignment for the day, then you need two separate to-do lists. Don’t allow yourself to go with the flow, or you will find yourself doing pointless tasks throughout the day. Successful people prioritize their to-do lists and stay on track by sticking to them.

 Steps to Develop Your Overall Content Marketing Plan

They Take Time To Evaluate Their Work, Efforts, And Company Mission

It’s essential always to schedule time throughout your day to evaluate your actions and compare them to your goals. You could be busy all day yet only wasting your time and resources when that time would be better suited doing something else more important.

 

Take five or ten minutes every now and then to make sure you are still on your to-do list and that the goals you need to get done relate to your company mission or ultimate goals. Simply ask yourself, “Did the tasks I do today chip away at any of my goals or get me closer to where I want to be?” If yes, then keep going. If not, adjust your to-do list.

 

They Work in Batches

Working in batches means putting similar tasks together and get them done at the same time. This means less time is required to go back and forth between different tasks, and to keep the concentration and momentum you need to get done fast.

 

They Automate Repetitive Tasks

Finally, productive people automate repetitive tasks using technology, hiring a virtual assistant, or creating templates to make their work that much faster. Create templates for emails, repetitive tasks, accounting, inventory management, and customer management software to keep track of mundane and tedious tasks.

Don’t put out more effort only to achieve no rewards. Compare your efforts daily to your mission to ensure your productivity matches your intentions to live a more successful life.

 

 

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What is Business Continuity Planning?

To build resilience into your business, you’ll need to understand that your business continuity plan will provide the resilience necessary to overcome setbacks and disruptions in essence. Business continuity planning consists of examining your business for weaknesses based on known threats that may affect your ability to do business on any given day.

 

You’ll have to go through your processes, systems and examine what you do each day along with the resources you use (human and otherwise) to help you mitigate problems and issues. Business continuity planning includes:

 

  • Determining and listing possible types of distributions – You need to set up a plan for every eventuality that you can think up. Illness, lousy weather, destroyed technology, government regulations, and so forth are already known issues. Listing them out will help you figure out what you’re going to do for each of them automatically.

 

  • Studying your workflows – Part of the process includes having standardized workflows to identify bottlenecks and note the software and other resources you regularly use so that you can develop a plan if something within that system and process goes wrong. For example, if you outsource blog writing to one person and uploading the posts to another person, you can eliminate the problem of relying only on one person for everything.

 

  • Establishing key performance indicators – As you study your processes and workflow, you can also establish a few important indicators to track that can signal a problem or lead to a solution.

 

  • Setting up benchmarking – One key to overcoming a setback is to live by your data more than your gut. A combo of the gut with data is always better than just doing things without any idea of the metrics. For example, if you set up an emergency budget for your business that allows you to keep going during hard times, what is the number you need to meet? Do you know what your break-even point is?

 

  • Including redundancies – As you set up your processes and systems and examine your workflows, you can identify areas to create redundancies. For example, instead of using only one server space for your website, you can set up two, which will enable you to switch if one goes down quickly.

 

  • Developing plans – Using all the information you derive from a thorough study of your business and enabling you to keep going during hard times, you can use that information to develop concrete plans that you simply implement during a hard time instead of creating it from scratch.

 

When it comes to crisis management, having a plan in place before anything happens is essential. A proper continuity plan will include actual plans in place for the things you know will occur, such as illness, whether governmental or other issues. While you cannot plan for everything, any of these ideas can be adapted to unknown emergencies when needed. The act of planning and putting in place this plan will make your business more resilient and even eliminate many of the pitfalls that cause more than half of all businesses to fail in their first three years.

 

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Tools and Tips for Automating Your Sales and Inventory Process

Whether you sell physical products or hours and services, automating as much as you can of your entire sales process and inventory, if needed, will save you tons of time. When you save time, you’re saving your most valuable and irreplaceable resource, but more than likely, automation will also save money.

 

  • Understand Your Buyer’s Journey – Every business type who has a buyer can learn what they do to make a business decision. Most buyers go through a process from awareness to delight, and it’s your job to know what the buyer’s intent is so that you can deliver just the right information at the right time to advance sales.

 

  • Stop Doing Repetitive Work Manually – If it can be automated, stop doing it yourself. There are too many ways you can automate things today that fit any budget for you to keep doing everything like file creation, backups, and inventory tracking. If you continually need to transfer customer information to another system, find a way to automate using Zapier.com or another option.

 

  • Provide the Right Information to Your Stakeholders – Ensure that anyone who is interested receives information that they need to make decisions in a self-serve manner. This can be via internal documentation that you provide access to based on their place, such as Trello.com or Basecamp.com. You can assign access based on who they are. For example, the customer of product A gets access to information, groups, and help about product A.

 

  • Empower Customer Care – If you hire customer service personnel or use a chatbot, empower your customer care to make sales when it seems like the right thing to do, depending on the conversation. You can even set up your chatbots to do it.

 

  • Empower Your Customers – Let your customers care for themselves with self-serve information and AI chatbots so that you don’t have to answer repetitive questions, and they can help themselves.

 

  • Create the Right Email Messages – Every product that you create needs certain email messages set up right away. You’ll need a series for all stages of the buying journey, from awareness to delight.

 

  • Get the Right Software – It depends on the types of products you sell, but many shopping carts have inventory management included in the system. The most crucial factor is to get the right software for your needs and not try to make bad software work for you.

 

Automating your sales process may only involve setting up a landing page, a freebie, and moving them to your email list so that you can teach them information, make offers, and move them through their buying journey faster. But if you sell physical products, you probably want to keep track of how many you have available to buy—the same thing with the hours you sell for your VA business. If you’re a service provider, keeping track of what you’ve sold will ensure you don’t oversell but also ensure that you meet your goals.

 

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Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Social Media Marketing

marketing planThis list of social media marketing automated software and tools that you can use in your small business is not complete. There are so many options today that anyone can find the right tool for themselves at the right budget. There is no reason not to use social media marketing automation because the price is very reasonable for most platforms, and the ROI is outstanding.

 

  • Hootsuite.com – Aside from all the ways you can automate social media marketing using this software, they have an exciting training program through their Hootsuite Academy, where you can learn all things marketing and even get certification. Whether you’re publishing, engaging, or monitoring, Hootsuite can help you keep it all in one place.

 

  • Loomly.com – Manage all your social media content from posts to ads in one place. Not only that, the software will give you ideas about what to post based on trending topics and related events. They also have a great way to keep track of your content assets like photos, videos, notes, links, and templates.

 

  • Activecampaigncom – This marketing and sales automation platform is fully featured and offers almost anything you need to run your small business marketing program. Their solution offers automation with email marketing, customer relationship management, sales, support, and more all in one platform.

 

  • SproutSocial.com – This platform offers features to help you with social media engagement, publishing, listening, and analytics, all from a central hub. Publishing across platforms at one shot easier is essential today, especially for the one-person business.

 

  • Sendinblue.com – This platform offers email marketing, CRM, SMS marketing, engaging chat, and more that you can personalize for your audience. You can also automate your segmenting and make your transactional emails better than ever.

 

  • Sharpspring.com – This is being billed as a revenue growth platform that offers a suite of sales and marketing tools to bring your marketing automation to a whole new level. Build on the funnel idea to help you build your list and get more leads by increasing engagement due to focusing on the entire customer lifecycle. Get chatbots, landing pages, dynamic forms, and more.

 

  • BuzzSumo.com – Every marketer needs to find, produce, and publish as much relevant content as they can for their audience. This platform helps you discover and research your audience. Use this software to find influencers to help you market your products and services.

 

  • Mention.com – An essential component of social media marketing is engagement. It can take a lot of time to find places to engage with your customers but not if you use this platform that allows you to monitor the web to find out what their audience is saying so that you can join the conversation.

 

  • Socialert.net – There is no point in using hashtags if you can’t figure out who else is using them or what is going on with them. This platform enables you to track keywords, hashtags, and your social accounts for activity, making it easier for you to engage with your audience.

 

  • Zapier.com and IFTTT.com – These two platforms allow you to create applets that perform tasks for you automatically. For example, want to create a list of new list members who purchased your book with phone numbers and dropped into your Trello account so you can call them? If you’re asking for the right info, you can use one of the applets or zaps to tell your system what to do.

 

When determining the type of automation to use, first decide what you want automated, know your budget, and then find the right tool. Anything you do on a repetitive basis is game for automation. It might seem like it’s only going to save minutes, but those minutes add up and will improve conversions as well as boost your results from social media marketing.