Focus and Goal Setting
Anyone who has attended any kind of business workshop or seminar has no doubt heard how important it is to set goals. But it’s very easy to say that you want to increase turnover by 10% in the next year without actually working out how to achieve it.
Every goal needs to be reverse engineered and broken down into lots of mini goals, then each day as you start work you need to ensure that your to-do list is focussed around achieving those mini goals that will ultimately lead you to the big one! Many of us get constantly distracted and a whole day can easily go by where there’s no doubt that we have been busy, but we’ve not actually really achieved anything of great significance, we haven’t moved our business forward in the way that we need to. Some of this will be down to fire-fighting, some may even be a little bit of laziness, we might find it hard to delegate tasks and let go, or we might just be lacking focus. There are a whole host of reasons and justifications that we can tell ourselves as to why we haven’t done the things that we really should have completed. If it’s one piece of advice that I have taken on board in my own business, it was Tim Ferriss in his “4 hour work week” who said that you should focus on one or two things each day and do nothing else until they are completed. Those one or two tasks should be things that are absolutely going to make a difference to your business, they are things that are aligned with your goal. Be disciplined about email and telephone calls, make it almost impossible for yourself to have access to those things until you have those 2 critically important tasks done. Everything you do, every decision, every purchase or sale needs to be done with your goal in mind. Ask yourself the question, if you work with a certain customer, how will that help you achieve your goal? We’ve turned down very lucrative business because it takes us away from our goal, the essence of what we are trying to achieve. It can be a scary thing, but sometimes saying no to one thing will help you focus on the things that really matter. All of this takes discipline and it’s hard to constantly remind ourselves of and stick to, those things that we absolutely know we should be doing. But then I guess that’s what makes the difference between those people that are actively working towards their goals and those that have their fingers crossed and are hoping for the best!
