Monday, July 13, 2009

3 Tips to Help Avoid Overwhelm If You're an Entrepreneur With a Business to Run.


Most entrepreneurs feel overwhelmed at one point or another. In fact, staying focused can be one of the biggest daily challenges.

This can prevent your business moving forward as quickly as you'd like... and leads to that feeling of there never being enough hours in the day.

Here are some tips to put yourself back on track:

1. Focus on 'results' rather than 'goals'
Goals differ from results. You might have a goal to complete a new sales page by the end of the month and get it online. You may even have a series of mini-deadlines to help you achieve this goal. But what is the RESULT you want to achieve? The result you want is to land new clients. The sales page is just part of the puzzle to achieve this. Always focus on the outcome, rather than getting bogged down by short-term goals.

2. Be specific
Results need to be specific to be effective. "Increasing sales" is not specific, for example. "Get 10 new sales in the next 30 days" is a very specific outcome. As is: "Get 20 targeted leads before the end of this week." This is a much better way of monitoring your progress.

3. Prioritize
It's easy to get overwhelmed by the seemingly 'urgent' tasks and lose sight of the truly important ones. Supposing you want to increase your online sales by a specific amount this quarter. But maybe your website isn't set up to achieve this outcome. Your first priority would therefore be to get the revisions done and put online. That result would allow you to move on to your next goal of driving traffic to your website. If you do things in the right order, it makes it so much easier to achieve results.

Using these tips will help give you clarity and focus, so that you can build your business faster and with less frustration. Once you get into the habit of using them, you'll find staying on track much easier.

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