Much is made in business about setting your goals and mapping out a path to achieve them. If you can actually follow this, you will truly see yourself becoming a success over time. The reality is that most people fall just short of their goals every day or every week. This could be caused by distraction or simply by an unwillingness. Whatever the reason or excuse is, it happens much more than it should. If you find yourself never quite finishing what you started or falling just short of accomplishing your tasks everyday, narrow your list down to just one task. A more focused approach can help you grow your business little by little every day.
You should try to make lists everyday. Some of the most successful people in the world use this approach to prioritize their entire day. However, if you don’t have time, try thinking of the one thing you want to accomplish on a respective day. This could be moving a deal towards closing, growing your pipeline of potential leads, updating your website or any number of other tasks. Regardless if this takes you five minutes or five hours, make this the one thing you do that day, but do it to perfection. If you have to carry this over to the next day, that is fine, but instead of doing four or five little tasks that won’t really produce much business set your aim high and knock off what is really important.
After enough time, you will find yourself working on the most important tasks regularly. Instead of creating busy work, you will knock off the big items on your list that may have been slowing you down. After you do the one most important task for a week or two, you can start to add another and eventually another. Over time, the completion of these important tasks will start to add up and move you forward. The more you accomplish the more returns you will see. Eventually, working on high priority tasks will become second nature to you.
Over the course of an eight hour work day, there is probably at least two hours that are spent doing nothing. One could make the argument that this number is much closer to four than two, but it is still a good portion of your day. The main reason for this is that we actually have too many things on our plate and instead of knocking them off one at a time, we procrastinate and do nothing. If you start with only one item, you will start to see that it isn’t that hard. This will lead you to get more done and eventually your day will be filled with real work instead of busy work.
If you can make progress every day, you will eventually see results. If you only worked out for 15 minutes a day, after a few weeks you will start to see results and feel better. The same analogy can be used for your business. Do something to grow or enhance your business every day, even if it is only one item.
