You sit down to work on your business, and you don’t know where to start. You’ve got a to-do list that’s longer than your wingspan, a stack of bills and papers that are now covered in dust, and people knocking on your door more times than are welcomed. It’s paralyzing when you don’t know where to start, how to start, or what to even start on.
So the alternative is just to do nothing, be distracted, scroll your socials, and end the day at 5PM because that’s what your calendar tells you to do. Right?
Wrong.
Small business owners that I work with often want to know the “hack” to getting more done. Sorry to spoil the ending, but there is no hack. However, there are ways to work more efficiently, and ways to build momentum, and always make sure that you’re growing your business while you’re doing the things that need to get done.
Know Your Priorities
The first step we start with our mentees in Perfect Day Business Mentorship is to identify what their priorities are, and what order they fall in. We assess things like: family and relationships, fitness and health, and money. Once we know the order of their priorities, we can begin to map out what their day needs to look like to make sure they’re focusing on what’s important to them.
A quick activity here is to make a list of 1-5, and start to write down – in order – the top categories of what is important to you in your life. Make sure to include your business on that list, as that’s why you’re here in the first place!
Reflect Your Priorities In Your Calendar
There’s a lot of talk in the business space about time-blocking, but in reality, time-blocking needs to be done once you know what and where your priorities lay. If you know that family is your number one priority, and picking your kids up from school is something that is important to you, then it is essential that you map that into your calendar. If your fitness is at the top of the list, adding a workout block into your week is a crucial step.
Because you’re here to grow your business, your “CEO Block” is something that should be mapped into your calendar. Your CEO Block is a space where you will intentionally work on growing your business, not working IN your business.
Build Daily Tasks For Momentum
Once you have all the important spaces marked in your day, including your CEO Block, it’s time to build the daily items that will grow your business when it’s time to work ON your business!
Within this CEO Block, you’ll pick 1-3 things that you’ll intentionally work on throughout your week. Keep these items the same everyday. Choose 1 item if focus is something that’s hard to come by for yourself, and choose 3 if you feel like you’ve got a handle on your focus and attention levels.
The actual items that go into these blocks are things that are NOT to-do list items. Your to-do list will always exist. It’s never going to be any shorter, as you will always be adding new things to it. To-do list items don’t grow your business. CEO Tasks, will. This can be things like content producing, reaching out to leads, or following-up with clients. Whatever you choose to put in this CEO Block, it needs to be things that will actually grow your business.
Our PDBM Mentors provide our clients a direct path with actionable items to fit in these spaces, and all tasks are designed to reach the overall goal to help them get closer to their Perfect Day.
When you know what your priorities are and you take an honest assessment of them, it’s easier to plan your days/weeks/months out in accordance to what is important to you. When we know what’s important, it’s easier to track and allocate time towards it. And finally – because you’re here to grow your business – be intentional about the time window you have to grow your business by mapping out CEO Blocks that will build momentum.
There’s many different ways to tackle the problem of inefficiency and lack of focus in one’s workday. There’s no doubt about that. A simple Google search will elicit thousands of different strategies. This is a trick that we use with not only our PDBM clients, but ourselves too!
If this interests you, book a call with our PDBM team, and let’s brainstorm a plan to help you be more efficient with your time and grow your business!