What are you doing on a daily basis to build your business? Do you have a daily action plan that sets you up for success? Or do you tend to fumble about your day with no clear direction about what to do with your time?
As home business owners, it can be super easy to let a whole day go by only to look at our to-do list and realize very little got accomplished. There are plenty of distractions throughout the day that can take your focus off your goals.
The distractions are even stronger when you try to avoid the very tasks you know you need to be doing (i.e. income-producing activities). All of a sudden, watering the plants, folding laundry, scrolling through Facebook, making dinner, or vacuuming the living room take priority over calling your leads or making a video that day.
When you pair the laid back environment of working from the comfort of home with the fact that you are also responsible for creating your own tasks and schedule, it’s clear why so many of us home business entrepreneurs easily get off focus.
Of course, everyone’s distractions are different. But one thing is for sure: these distractions can sabotage your success if you don’t find a way to minimize or eliminate them.
In today’s post, we share with you 5 daily practices you can start doing today in order to increase your productivity, stay on focus, and get more out of your day.
1. Start Your Day With Intention
How you spend your morning sets the tone for your entire day. If you wake up groggy with no purpose, then the rest of your day will reflect that. How often do you find yourself just rolling out of bed and immediately checking your phone?
I think we are all guilty of this! When we do this, however, we are putting OTHER people ahead of ourselves first thing in the morning. Whether it’s scrolling through Facebook posts, checking email, or reading text messages, you completely give away your personal power at the very start of your day. This causes you to focus on other people’s problems or requests before you even had a chance to get centered and complete any of your own tasks that day.
A better choice would be to start your mornings with intention (and with your phone on airplane mode). It is far more empowering to begin your day by putting yourself and your goals as the number one priority. You can only help more people so much as you help yourself first.
You can do this by:
- Planning your day the night before
- Reading a chapter from a motivational book
- Spending time meditating
- Listening to a morning motivational call (like the awesome one MLSP hosts every weekday)
- Writing down in a journal what you are grateful for
- Drinking a green smoothie, juice, or eating a healthy breakfast to fuel your brain and energy
Doing any of these things or a combination of these things is a surefire way to start your day off full of energy, passion, and excitement for your business.
2. Do Income-Producing Activities First
Ah, this one is always fun! I don’t know if you’re anything like us, but when we made the transition to home business owners versus employees, we had to go through some major mindset shifts. One of those shifts was to stop thinking like an hourly or salary employee because the reality is you don’t get paid for time as an entrepreneur. You get paid for the VALUE you bring to the marketplace.
Don’t fill your days with busy work just to feel productive. It’s much more important to focus on income-producing activities. You know, the activities that actually bring in sales.
Here’s what we do to make sure that happens:
- Create a master list of ALL of the tasks you need to accomplish
- Go through the list and pick your TOP 3 tasks that are most important
- Complete ONLY those tasks for a designated amount of time with no other distractions
- Once those 3 tasks are done, pick the next 3 most important
When you do these activities first thing in the morning as opposed to later in the day, it decreases the chances of them not getting accomplished. Typically, we get more and more interruptions as the day goes on, so knock out your profit producing tasks before the world can distract you!
Another activity to consider is scheduling out your content in advance. One benefit of doing this is that you free up more of your time during the day to engage with your followers and prospects. If you are someone who finds yourself spending a good chunk of each day trying to create and share your content, this might be a good strategy to test.
Turn your tasks into batch work and see what you items you can get done in one sitting. In a flow making videos? Make 5 or 10 in one session. You can do the same with your blog posts, emails to your list, images you create, and social media posts you share. Plan, prepare, and schedule out what you can so that your week is filled with more income-producing activities.
3. Take Massive Action
Thinking about success and hoping for success will not make it happen. The necessary element is and will always be ACTION. You need to know exactly what you desire and do the necessary tasks consistently to make it happen.
This is where you shift roles from consumer to business owner.
Don’t purchase course after course with no implementation. Don’t attend webinars to learn new strategies but never share that knowledge with the marketplace. Don’t keep planning and dreaming of success, but get stuck in busy work rather than the activities that will make you money.
If your WHY is strong enough and you focus more on your future self rather than your current circumstances, taking massive action will be something that comes easily to you over time.
4. Track Your Results and Progress
Profitable businesses use metrics. If you never track anything, how will you know what works? You need to record your daily business activities as well as the results they produced if you truly want to build a scalable business.
Set goals for yourself, such as how many email subscribers you want to join your list each month or what monthly income goal you want to hit in 90 days. Once you create some measurable goals, you can then break them down into smaller goals. Then you are able to determine what activities you need to do on a daily basis in order to produce those results.
For example, let’s say you want to get 10 leads per day from video marketing. If you know that ONE of your videos typically generates 2 leads per day, then you would need to make at a minimum four more videos (with comparable traffic and calls to action) to get to 10 leads per day.
Now if you didn’t track your results, then you wouldn’t be able to determine which activity you should do more of and which activity no longer serves you.
The more you track, the more you can improve! The more you improve, the more you can grow as a person and business.
5. Surround Yourself with Positive Influences
When you dare to venture down a different path than the masses, it is only a matter of time before you start to notice the negative influences in your life. These can be things like TV, radio, social media posts, and even family and friends. To reach your true potential and achieve your goals, it is crucial that you remove or minimize these negative influences from your life.
Even more important is to surround yourself with the people and information that you DO want in your life. These are the positive influences that serve you and help you grow.
Positive influences can include success books, motivational videos, meditation mp3s, personal development audiobooks, online communities in your niche, and people who support and encourage your vision.
If you can’t physically surround yourself with people who “get it”, you can easily accomplish this by surrounding yourself with messages that reinforce what you are working to accomplish. Turn your car into a university on wheels by listening to personal development on rides. Follow and engage on social media posts by people who understand and support your journey. Plug into a community (like MLSP) where you are free to ask questions, be yourself, and get the feedback you need to achieve your goals.
As a home business owner, you will face obstacles, criticism and setbacks. To get through these hurdles you will need an unshakeable success mindset and positive friends to cheer you on, hold you accountable, and help you get back on track when you lose your way.
Start to implement these business-boosting practices consistently and watch your productivity and profit hit completely new levels!
To your abundant success,
Dustin & Tracy Wisnowski
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