Overcome Procrastination

If you are suffering from a bad case of procrastination, welcome to the club. Thousands of people all over the world are having the same problem right now. And most of them think that there is no way to beat this problem. But they are wrong. If you know how to get yourself into the proper mindset you will be able to overcome procrastination without any problems at all.

1. Instead of thinking that you have to do work, think of it as you want to do work. One of the biggest reasons for procrastination is because you feel absolutely obligated to the task. But if you make the task fun by looking forward to doing it you will cut down a lot of your problem.

2. Do not think about how hard it is going to be to finish a project. Instead of jumping ahead and seeing the task as one giant problem, break it down and look at it as a bunch of separate steps that you will have to take. This will make the task seem more formidable.

3. Never obsess about the project or task at hand being absolutely perfect. If you do this, you will be afraid to start because you know that you will never be able to live up to your own expectations. Instead treat yourself as a human, and realize that you are going to make mistakes along the way.

4. Do not think that by undertaking a task that you are going to be missing out on so much else. Instead, think about what you will be gaining by completing the project. This is a common mistake by a lot of people. After you learn that you are not missing out elsewhere you will be much better off.

5. Never try to tackle the entire task all at once. If you try to sit down and put in a days worth of work without taking a break you are going to burn out before the project is complete. Take time off and break the project down into separate sections. This way you will never feel overwhelmed by your work, and at the same time you will be able to rest your mind in between sections. Not to mention the fact that if you work like this your results will most definitely be better.
Procrastinating is a huge problem in the working world today. Many people do not know how to overcome this problem, so they simply put the task off until somebody else gets around to it. This is not necessary. If you follow the five steps listed above you will be on your way to beating the procrastination bug forever.

Keeping People Motivated

As we approach the summer months, many people will be distracted from work or normal routines by increase outdoor activities, vacations, and our kids out of school, business cycles and even the warmer weather. Your challenge as a parent, manager or small business owner is how to keep people motivated to perform their assignments. I think there are three key factors that you need to recognize and prepare for behavior adaptation and modification during this period. Recognize you are the example people are keying off of.

Key Factors for Successful Motivation.

Communication, always important, but this time of year it is critical. Why, because everyone else is juggling their personal schedules as well job assignments. You must encourage two way communiqué, this will assure everyone is involved and keeps the work flowing smoothly with minimal disruption. Start communicating the critical milestones or dates that need to be supported and planned for now, then each of these items can be planned around. The identified critical dates can be the customer orders, product releases, holidays, planned vacations, depending on your situation identify these through the summer months. Be aware, your normal routine may not begin again until up to 3 months for now when the kids are back in school. Maybe you should backwards plan from this date week by week until you can arrive at today.

Flexibility, is your ability to adapt to change at any given time or when presented with an abnormal situation. If you have are a company with built in flex time (window of arrival and departure times for worker schedules) around standard core hours, communicate this to everyone and as a manager treat each situation differently if possible. You may be limited by Human Resource procedures or State Workforce Regulations, check into these if you have questions. The key is to let the flex time work in your favor, but everyone must be communicating so the work or task is still ultimately covered.

Positive attitude, keep your smile it truly is contagious. Sure there are going to be disappointed people during this period, but focus on the bigger picture, not just the individual situation. Keep the goals informant of everyone, why are we doing this, how we are doing against the goals. Schedule an activity that can be viewed as a reword and positive gesture about the midpoint and if possible prior to a holiday. This can be a catered lunch for everyone, prize give-ways of some type, let everyone off for the afternoon with pay. You get the idea, let the people know you appreciate their efforts during this time of year.

Set forth a constructive model for everyone to follow, do not become the negative case in point.

Why Do You Need To Slow Down?

Think about the last few months and pace at which we all were operating. Some of it is now a distant memory or a blur because we simply did not slow down enough to enjoy the moments we were experiencing. Every challenge or task had to be completed quickly to get on to the next one, this person, that person had to be contacted, people were on vacation, out of the office and who knows where else. STOP and take a deep breath, inhale and exhale that’s better … now that we have slowed down for the moment let me share with you a favorite quote of mine and a few reasons why you need to take a quick break.

Robert Sardello wrote -* The soul requires duration of time -- rich, thick, deep, velvety time -- and it thrives on rhythm. Soul can’t be hurried or harried.... We may go through many events in the day and experience nothing because the soul has not had the opportunity to feel them from many different points of view.*

How does this apply to your life? Let’s first admit we all rush through the day and subsequent week to get to the weekend, right? Then what happens, we pack all of our task and lists of thinks to do into two days, and oh by the way, anything leftover from the office or week that did not get done piles right on top of the “*restful* weekend.

Ok, so we all fall into this trap, what to do? Here are my Four simple *Slow Down* techniques:

1. Schedule time off into your planning book or weekly scheduler. Simple to say but not often planned for. Think about time off this way, we plan and plan for the tasks that we want to accomplish, make time off a task to e planned for because it does not just happen these days. Look at your week and if there is not 30 minutes a day or during the week then make it 15. On the weekend you need to schedule 3 – 4 hours off to slow down, read a book, catch up on the news watch a movie or just veg-out for a while. Try it.

2. Plan a day off once per month (if you have that much vacation saved) in advance from work or your business. Put the day off into in your planner, let everyone know about it and stick to your schedule and take the day off. Why once per month? Because it gives you a chance to re-charge and get some of the carryover tasks completed quicker so they do not linger into subsequent months. Don’t wait to take time off until the big planned vacation because that event requires all sorts of tasks to be done right up to the moment you leave and is often stressful in itself.

3. Get better organized with your time. Time is a valuable commodity to all of us and the better we utilize the time we have the more efficient and productive you will become. Plan your time around vale added tasks; try to eliminate the non-value added tasks. Think about what takes up a lot of time and see if there is a better way to complete the task. Do you do you grocery shopping once a week or is it every day like most of us. Just think about the couple of hours you could save per day by NOT stopping at the local grocery store for just a few things.

4. Spend quality time for your family. Have you ever noticed how your spouse or kids can get caught up in the rush around I do not have enough time frenzy? Look at your family and see if your schedule has any family time built into it and what this actually is. I’m not talking about the kid’s organized soccer or basketball game. What I am talking about is true family time. Completing a project together, playing a game inside or outside, going to the zoo or museum. When was the last time you went bowling? It really was fun.

I close with this quote: H.G. Wells wrote -*We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.*

Slow down and enjoy life, you can do it if you just try.

Family Members in Business Together – Is it Right For You?

Running a business with members of your family is a desirable prospect for some people; let me give you five (5) items to consider before you get to a point of no return that may influence the chances of you business not being successful and possibly straining your family relationships.

Nowadays more than ever, home based and centralized businesses have become a perceptible place in many peoples mind, for families and extended family members to begin their entrepreneurship journey. As in the business world, each family member may provide a different skill set that actually can contribute to the successful start of a business. However, extensive consideration and a lot of pre-planning must go into the business plan before you launch full force or extend any funding into your business project.

Five (5) items you need to consider prior to committing to your *Family Business*
1. Create and develop a Business Plan. The business plan as a minimum should describe the Mission and Vision of the business, product or service to be provided, long and short term goals (include financial expectations), roles and responsibilities. This needs to be completed independent as possible of family member role allocation. Why, because you do not want the beginning of your business plan to get bogged down in the creating phase.

**Note: The plan can of course evolve as you get farther and further into the process, my point is to have a structured way to start planning and discussion, especially if you are going to seek institutional funding, they will require a very formal business plan.

2. Define Your Financial Commitment and Goals. How much money is going to be required to start the business, maintain overheads (standard recurring expenses) and of course expected salaries. Where is this money coming from? There needs to be some real sole searching done in this area, benchmarking of other similar companies and a careful look so you do not impoverish your family if things don’t start as fast as expected. The financial plan should extend a minimum of two years, with a goal to break even the first year. Seek out financial professionals to help you with this if there is any doubt what amount of money it may take to start your business, better safe than broke!

3. Establish a Schedule of Major Milestones you expect to achieve during the first year. You can be as detailed as your personality allows. The Milestone chart needs to be a large visual reminder to every one of expectations and what you all are working towards. The milestone chart will also serve to keep everyone focused in the event *new ideas* and innovations crop up for discussion that may take peoples focus off the original plan.

4. Identify and Define the Roles and Tasks of each position a family member may fill. This is critical for you as the business *leader* and each family member to clearly help each other and not have overlapping tasks being confounded or duplicated. You want to be as efficient and productive at the start of a business as possible. You can not afford to have any wasted effort or the potential internal conflict of who does what and when. Have a discussion on how conflicts and problems will be addressed and who will be the final decision maker. Everyone must buy into and agree to this process at the beginning because you do not want infighting to carryover into the family side of your life.

5. Separate the Business and the Family activities. My experience is you must leave the business out of family get together or events as much as you can. Sure there may be a discussion or two, but every member of the family must continue to put for the effort into maintaining the family structure and values as hard as they are putting effort into the business. You want to minimize the carryover from the business to the family and deal with any conflicts when they occur. What happens a lot is the tensions of the business begin to creep into family events; you must recognize and deal with these situations immediately. I know I’m repeating this point, but it is a backbreaker of many families and small businesses.

A family can have enough of normal stresses in there day to day activities raising children, maintaining a household, paying bills, getting the kids to their sporting events…on and on the list goes let alone starting a business, give your situation careful consideration.

I support you in your entrepreneurship and desire to be independent with the caveat; do your preplanning and preparation before getting into a *family* business because you can not let the family part of your life fail!

Why You Must Have a Vision

I know...I know... I am not telling anyone something new by writing about this topic. Every now and then we all need to be reminded of what we have learned, re-think how it applies to our current situation and implement actions as appropriate. Basically, I just wanted to emphasize the importance of having a vision statement. Having a vision statement for your company, group, team, family or yourself makes common sense because it provides direction on where you want yourself or the group to go. Without a vision, neither you nor anyone in the group knows where they are going or what needs to happen to get there. Your vision statement needs to be to clear and concise.

Vision statements should not be complex nor take too long in developing. The best way to get started is by brainstorming a few key phrases, formulate a sentence or two and think about it for a while. Ask yourself, if I were reading this for the first time, would I get it? If not try again, you will get it. After you create the vision statement, write it down, communicate the message and display with pride. One very effective technique in creating vision statements is to incorporate the use of your company's name and key words such as; we, our and us. Avoid the generalization and soft words such as; transform and create.

In support of the vision statement, many companies develop the supporting mission statement and at times have combined the two. I think keeping the vision and mission statements separate promotes better communication of your message and keeps people focused. The mission statement explains what a company does and supporting attributes distinguishing your company from another. Again keep the mission statement clear and concise when your create one.

Here are two vision statements I like:
Amazon.com: Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.
3M Canada Vision Statement: We will grow by helping our customer's win-through the ingenuity and responsiveness of people who care.

The vision statement facilitates decision making by aligning everyone towards a common purpose. For the decision makers, the power of vision statements supports timelier and less controversial decision discussions. If you are part of a company without a vision statement, I'm sure you have observed the chaos that can be created when different agenda's collide. Even back during biblical times, people realized the power of a vision; refer to Proverbs 29:18... without a vision people will perish...

There are many helpful resources online; a little research may be of assistance to you if creating a vision seems confusing. Put some thought into your vision statement and see the positive results and benefit of having one. May your hopes and dreams turn into reality and success.

Eight Keys to Success

Who among us does not want to be successful? Everybody wants to achieve some level of success; whether it be in their personal life, or in the business world. Below are eight keys to success that everybody should follow in their daily routine.

1. Set Goals. By doing this you will be able to work towards success in a logical manner. Most people do not know how to find success, so they jump from area to area in hopes that it falls in their lap. And this rarely happens. Instead, you need to set goals so that you are aware of the direction that you are moving in. After you successfully meet and conquer one goal, you will then want to move onto your next one. After a while, you will see your self confidence rise, and your success increase.

2. Find inspiration for your goals. If you are inspiring to be the top Sales Manager in your company, look for inspiration from somebody who has been their before. Inspiration can often be found in the most surprising places. Many people turn to books in order to find somebody to look up to. This is a great way in finding somebody to look up to that is already successful.

3. Plan out your day in correspondence with your goals. In order to reach your goals you are going to have to know how to get their. By setting out a daily step by step process you will be able to reach smaller goals that will eventually lead you to the big goal at the end.

4. Pay attention to your progress. At the end of everyday make sure that you look back and see if you did what you needed to do in order to reach your goal. If you did not, find out why, and then come up with a way to solve this problem in the future.

5. Don’t give up. There is no reason to ever give up on your goal. If you do it is your own fault. By sticking with your daily steps, you will get to your goal sooner or later. The only thing that can stop you is quitting.

6. Look forward to the end. By visualizing what it will be like to reach your goal you will be pushed to work harder.

7. Think positive. You never want to tell yourself that you cannot reach your goal, or that you are failing. By thinking positive you will always be on the right track to success.

8. Appreciate the opportunity. By appreciating the opportunity to reach your goal you are already half way to the end result. Do not lose sight of why you want to be successful.