Re-Focusing
Last December, Christine Kane posted on her blog about choosing a word-of-the-year. The idea is you select one word to guide your intentions for the coming year.
I thought about a variety of words over the next couple of weeks, but the one word I kept coming back to was focus. As in “I need to get focused…” and “I really want to focus on being…”, etc. So, my word for 2009 became “focus”.
We go into the new year and I am filled with excitement about what I am going to focus on. And then….some changes in my personal life made me wonder if I shouldn’t change my word to “patience”, something I have little of on a good day. Instead, I decided to focus on patience while I needed to, then focus on other things.
I focused on where I was in life and where I wanted to be. I made a Vision Board with images and words I wanted in my life. I completely changed my plans for the future, started a business very unlike what I’d been talking about for the past 3-4 years (and which in its first 7 months has made more money than my other business ever did).
I’ve focused on my business. I’ve focused on getting clients, on making clients happy, or networking to get more clients. And I’ve focused on pursuing what makes me happy.
But along the way, I’ve felt overwhelmed and, well, unfocused. The last couple of months have been exhausting mentally. I sit down and make out a plan on ways to move my business forward, then never follow through. I say I don’t have time (and in many ways, that is true), but I also feel like I am trying to do so much, that there will NEVER be enough time for it all. Yet is all seems so important…
Several weeks ago, a good friend and client (who is also a small business owner) said that for the rest of the year she was putting aside some hobbies she enjoys to devote the extra time to her business to get it moving in the direction she wanted. That really made me think. My first reaction was “I don’t want to give up things that makes me happy”, but then I realized, maybe I need to temporarily put it put them aside to focus on other areas that will move me and my business forward. Later, I can add them back in if I find they still have meaning for my life.
And then this post by Jonathan Fields showed up in my Google Reader. Wow! Talk about making me think, and encouraging me to focus in on what is really important to me now and in the future. If I am going to play a bigger game, what is going to need to be set aside, even temporarily. What are my priorities? What am I going to focus on?
We are now into the last quarter of 2009; the perfect time to make plans to end it with a bang! I’m still sorting out how this will play out in my life and business, but I have made some decisions.
Business-wise, I am focusing (there’s that word again!) on areas that are my strengths, that I enjoy, and that are in high demand. There are new skills that I want to learn, but I am being very selective about which ones I pursue right now – and I’ll only do one at a time rather than having my focus scattered in too many directions.
I am also focusing on taking care of the clients I have now, and meeting more of my ideal clients. I’m not going to just throw my name out there. Instead I’m going to direct it toward people I want to work with. I’m not responding to every RFP I come across; instead, I will reply to those that seem to be a good fit with my skills and personality.
There are plenty of articles I want to read, podcasts I want to listen to, and web sites to check out. For the rest of 2009, however, I am seriously limiting how many of these I pursue. If it doesn’t offer something to my business – or to the business of one of my clients – then it will have to be put aside.
What about you? What are you going to focus on for the rest of 2009?
Fourth Quarter Goals
First, a brief update….I have officially moved to site/blog over to WordPress.org. I still can’t get the theme to upload, but it has been two weeks and I want to start playing around on here. So it is moved. As with any move, there are still a lot of things to be unpacked, sorted out, made just right, so please hang in there. I plan to blog about my progress, so maybe someone can learn from my mistakes!
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Where did September go? When did October get here? Can you believe we are already in the last quarter of 2009? This year has gone really fast for me, partly because I’ve been so busy getting my business going. Whatever the reason, 2010 is coming up quickly.
Photo by architekt2
My birthday was earlier this week, and lately, it has become a time of reflection and regrouping. The new year usually fills me with hope and excitement – I look at where I want to be, see what I have to do differently to get there, and go through a big decluttering period. For the most part, I am looking forward.
My birthday, however, has become more of a time to look back at what I had hoped to accomplish and see where I am. The last couple of years, it has been quite a depressing time, realizing how far I am from where I want to be. Last year, I was in quite a funk. It took nearly a month to get out of it, and I finally did because I was tired of hearing myself whine so much. This year I was heading down the same path, but then began to really look at how much I have accomplished, how much I have changed. I realized that I had actually made a lot of changes and that I am making good progress.
This time of reflection, however painful it can be, is also a good thing and comes at a good time. I’m not where I want to be, so what do I need to do in the last three months of 2009 to move me closer to my goals? What changes did I begin that have gotten stuck? What areas can I focus on for the next three months that will have the greatest impact?
I’m still sorting through all those questions, but one thing I wanted was to get my site and blog moved. I wanted everything to be “perfect” (whatever that means!), but if I waited until then, I might not get it moved before the end of the year. I’ve also found that I’ve put off working on it because I didn’t have a large chunk of time to devote to it.
I finally realized I could spend a few minutes each day tackling one or two tasks. Take baby steps. Eventually it would all get done. And if I actually moved my blog and began directing people to it, I would be motivated to actually take those baby step and work on it consistently.
Now it’s your turn – what are your plans/goals for the rest of 2009? What was on your list for this year that you haven’t gotten to, or haven’t completed? What can you focus on that will move you and your business into 2010 and beyond? Please leave a comment and tell us your plans for the rest of the year.
Multi-Tasking
Who out there multi-tasks? I confess that I do – or at least I try to. Even in light of information (such as this article I read today) that show multi-tasking to be inefficient, I still believe I can do multiple things at once.
In looking over a typical day, however, I have discovered that there are ways I can get two things done at once without actually doing them both. While these won’t work for everyone’s situation, see if they may at least inspire you to accomplish more.
1) Wash laundry/dishes while working. Yes, I know this works only if you work from home (and works better if you have a washer and dryer in your home so you aren’t schlepping your work along with dirty clothes), but if you do, this is a great way to get multiple things done at once. Put the laundry on or start the dishwasher, then go to work. If you are really organized, pick items on your to-do list that you should be able to finish about the time the wash is.
2) Cook dinner in a slow cooker. This works whether you work at home or not. Put dinner in the slow cooker first thing in the morning, then forget about it until time to eat. I love not having to stop work to prepare dinner (since late afternoon seems to be a very productive time for me), and my home smells great all day. Need recipes? I’ve tried several from A Year of Slow Cooking, and haven’t been disappointed yet.
3) On the phone and on hold? How much time do we spend doing this? What can you do with this time? How about clean out your inbox? Don’t try to tackle any email that you have to think about and answer, but see how many can be deleted or archived. Go through and find the 2 or 3 most urgent to work on after you get off the phone. Likewise, take a paper folder or two and clean them out. Anything you instantly know can be thrown out, do it! If you’re not sure, save it for another time when you can give it your full attention.
4) If you’re trying to sort out some complex answer and the ideas just aren’t coming, take a break from work and go outside and do some physical activity. Doesn’t have to be strenuous and it doesn’t have to be for a long period of time, but I find that going for a walk or a swim while taking my mind completely off the problem will at the least put me in a better frame of mind when I go back to it. And sometimes, solutions appear I hadn’t even thought of.
Those are some ways I’ve found to be a more efficient multi-tasker, but I’d love to have more ideas. How do you get two things done without having to work on both of them at once?
Edited 8-13-2009 – I found this article, and found it had some great tips in it. I really like the way it looks at multi-tasking certain tasks and mono-tasking others.
Small Steps Lead To Big Results
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Confucius
Have you heard that quote? It makes sense when you think about it – no matter where you want to go, or what you want to do, you need to start with a step.
And the step doesn’t have to be a big one. If you’ve dreamed of what you want, if you have an image firmly in your mind of what you want your life to be like, you are well on your way. But….you cannot just dream. You have to take steps toward reaching that goal. Unfortunately, we often think we have to make a big step toward reaching our goals. And that leads many of us to feeling overwhelmed and unable to even begin
Start small. Take baby steps. One small step each day can move you a great distance over the course of months. You won’t notice it at first, and you may believe that doing little things isn’t helping you reach your goals. But it does help! Each step you take, no matter how small, moves you toward what you want. Sometimes you see results long after you took a certain step, but it was taking the step in the first place that put everything into motion.
So how do you know which steps to take? Start at the end – where do you want to be? What is your dream? Begin listing what needs to happen to make that a reality, then break it down further. Want to have your own business? Imagine what your business will be, what your days will be like. Start listing what you need to make this a reality. Next, list all the little things you can do to move toward that. Yes, there may be a lot of steps involved, but each day try to do a few.
And here’s my personal tip – each day, keep a list of what you have done that day. No matter how small it seems, how insignificant in the big picture, list it. Some days you’ll only have one or two tiny steps you’ve taken – and that’s OK. Other days you may fill a page or more with accomplishments. Over time, they all add up to moving you toward your dreams.
The done list is also good to have for those days when little or nothing gets accomplished. Look back over what happened on the same date the month before, three months before, 6 months before. Look at how far you’ve come in that time!
So, keep going! Keep taking small, baby steps and soon you’ll find you are miles from where you began, and that much closer to your dreams!
