Author: Kendley Davenport

If you want to succeed, one of the things you’ll need to do is build good relationships with other people. Having good relationships in business is important because you may be able to get referrals from those people or you may need something from them in the future. But most of all, it’s just good ethics to be nice and try to develop relationships with the people around you. Here are five ways that you can do that:

1. Be interested in them. If you want to get someone talking and develop a relationship, one of the best ways to do it is to ask them about themselves. But you don’t use this tactic unless you are actually interested in them. People can tell when someone is being disingenuous. Make sure that you are interested in what they are saying, and your body language will reflect that.

2. Treat them with respect. Just because someone doesn’t make as much money as you or hasn’t achieved the same level of success as you does not mean that they are a lesser person. In fact, they may surpass you someday, and you definitely want them to remember you in a positive light. 

3. Ask them to help you with something. People actually enjoy helping others most of the time. While they might not enjoy being asked to help you move furniture, asking someone for their advice or to take a look at something you’ve done and give you their opinion can be a wonderful relationship builder. 

4. Be friendly. You always want to be friendly to the people around you. Even if you are having a bad day yourself, try to smile and remember that it isn’t your fault. You would be surprised how often people will tell others about “that guy who is always positive, always smiling.” You want to be that guy (or girl).
5. Finally, try to socialize outside of work. If you want to take a relationship to the next level and turn it from a business friendship to an actual friendship, try inviting the person to an activity outside of work, whether that be a drink at the bar or a party that you’ve been invited to. Seminars and other learning events are also great places to take a friend that you work with, especially if you both share the same goals.

Are you looking for a new way to set goals so that you can achieve them? Goals are difficult to achieve, and not having the right method can make this challenge even harder. Luckily, there are some terrific and creative methods that you can use to set goals and make sure that you achieve them. We’ll cover three of the best goal-setting methods out there in this article. 

1. The Long & Short Goal Method: The first goal-setting method that we’ll cover is probably the one that you’re most familiar with. This is the setting of long-term goals that can be broken down into smaller ones. The way that this method works is by setting long-term goals that you want to achieve over a specified period of time. For example, write down 10 goals that you want to achieve in the next five years. Then determine what short-term goals you will have to accomplish in order to make this happen. These short goals may be things that you can do in a week or month or they may take as long as a year. There are no time limit requirements for short-term goals. The only rule is that they lead to long-term ones. 

2. The Checklist Method: If the above method doesn’t appeal to you, then you may want to try the checklist method. The checklist method is similar to the long and short method, but it brings your task list down to a daily level. How you use this method is by creating your long-term goals. Then, make a list of things that you can do daily to achieve those goals. This will be your daily checklist. Put it on your phone or tablet, or as the background of your desktop computer, and make sure that you check off all of those goals every day. At first, it will be difficult to get used to it, but after a while, it will become second nature to finish your checklist before you go to bed. 

3. The Journal Method: Finally, there is the journal method. The journal method simply encourages you to write your goals down in a journal or diary, and then write an entry as often as you can about what you are doing to progress towards your goals. This is a much less restrictive method than the checklist or journal and highly creative people may prefer it. 

Being productive at work can be challenging. It can be hard to know where to start managing your time in ways that are conducive to your productivity. No matter who you are, it can be a struggle to understand how to structure your time effectively. No matter who you are or what you do for work, you need to be on point with how to manage your time. Here are five of the best ways that you can dramatically increase your productivity.

1. Turn Off All Distractions: Every time an email pops up on your screen, every time your phone buzzes, or when your office door opens, your train of thought is destroyed. We all like to believe that we can both participate in a group chat and write our presentation, but the truth is, we can’t. Your best work comes with silence. If you want to increase your productivity, then you have to turn off all distractions. 

2. Stop Multitasking: It can be incredibly tempting to want to try and take care of several tasks at once. However, it has been proven that multitasking just doesn’t work. If you think that you can efficiently juggle phone calls, emails, and presentations without losing your productivity, you’re fooling yourself. If you want to increase your productivity, you need to focus on one task at a time.

3. Take Breaks: You might think that spending more time working will help you get more things done; however, when you’re burned out, you will never work as well. Studies show that taking regular breaks during the day will dramatically help increase concentration and boost your mood. To help boost your productivity, take short breaks and walk around the office or grab a mid-day latte.

4. Implement the 2-Minute Rule: Make the most of your time by filling those tiny windows of downtime with actual tasks. Finding and completing tasks that take less than two minutes to finish will save you time during the day. If you have tasks that you can complete in two minutes or less, just jump in and do them.

5. Tackle the Biggest Tasks When You’re Alert: Understanding when you work best is key to completing big projects on time. No set schedule works for everyone. If you’re a morning person, tackle your big tasks when you first start your day.

Not every day will be productive, so don’t beat yourself up over it. Instead, try to refocus your energy and implement these productivity tips into your day. Once you find what works for you, you’ll be amazed at how much you can get done.

Leaders and Entrepreneurs are both blessed and cursed. On the one hand, they have more control over when, where, and what kind of work they do. On the other hand, most self-employed business people tend to end up working crazy hours. Fortunately, there are some simple ways for you to start doing less while accomplishing more. 

1. Employ the 80/20 Rule: If you want to get more done in less time, then you need to create your daily work schedule around the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. Creating a daily work schedule using the 80/20 rule will allow you to spend 80 percent of your day working on the most critical tasks, and 20 percent of your time on the menial, but necessary tasks. Using the 80/20 rule to create a daily work schedule will allow you to spend 80 percent of your day working on the most critical tasks and 20 percent of your time on the menial but necessary tasks.

2. Disconnect: If you want to keep your mind fresh and your energy levels up, then you need to take a break from your work frequently. Don’t continue to work under the assumption that you have to work harder to accomplish your goals. Taking frequent breaks throughout the day and disconnecting from your email and phone calls, and stepping away on the weekends, will allow your brain to refresh and your body to recover. 

3. Be Willing to Say No: Those who are highly successful have to contend with many demands on their time. It is essential that you know what it is you want to achieve and be willing to say no to other projects. Working less and achieving more is necessary for a balanced life. If you can’t achieve that balance, then you’ll quickly find yourself overwhelmed and on the verge of burning out. Prioritize your tasks and be willing to pass on other work and projects. 

4. Have a Plan: While most entrepreneurs have a long-term plan on how they’re going to reach their goals, they fail to plan and prioritize their days. When you are scattered throughout the day, you aren’t able to maximize your time. If you want to get more done, then you need to set some time aside every evening to plan out and prioritize the tasks you need to accomplish the next day that will move you forward toward achieving your goals. 

5. Outsource Where You Can: This doesn’t just apply to work tasks that someone else would be better suited to complete. Think about the 20 percent of menial, but necessary jobs that you have to complete every day and determine if you can outsource them to a freelance or contract worker.

While it is impossible to restart your career overnight, following these five time management strategies can significantly improve your productivity.

Engaging and maintaining your productivity is a difficult thing to do for most people, especially when the Internet is just a mouse click away, and unfortunately, your bad habits are killing your productivity. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be this way. All it takes to get your productivity back on track is a little awareness and some quick action on your part. Here are six habits that will kill your time management efforts and decrease your productivity.

1. Multitasking: Of all the bad habits, one of the worst and most common is multitasking. Multitasking tricks you into producing incomplete, subpar work daily. When you fall into the habit of multitasking, you aren’t doing multiple tasks at the same time, but rather you are giving partial focus to a single task while giving the majority of your attention to switching jobs.

2. Not Having a Work Routine: You’re setting yourself up for disaster if you are in the habit of working whenever you feel like it. It is essential you establish a work routine if you want to get your mind into productive gear. Without a work routine, you will always go into your work mode cold, which can make getting into the zone much harder.

3. Being a Perfectionist: Another common productivity killer is perfectionism, which can manifest itself in many ways, including being thrown off balance when things don’t go your way or having unrealistically high work standards. When you set unrealistic standards for work, you will tend to work your tasks to death. This can lead to falling behind, which then causes a mountain of tasks to build up.

4. Having a Giant To-Do List: When you are creating your to-do list, it can be easy to get overzealous and fill it with a dozen or more tasks, that you most likely won’t be able to complete. If you can only finish half of your to-do list at the end of the day, it can lead to you feeling overwhelmed. Unfortunately, when you start to feel overwhelmed, you can quickly lose your momentum.

5. Being Indecisive: Indecision can quickly bring a productive work session to a halt. When you don’t know what to decide on, you end up sifting through the information you have and mentally rehearsing the pros and cons until you end up making a decision. Indecisiveness can eat up a lot of energy and willpower in the process and derail your work.

These are just a few of the bad habits that could be killing your time management efforts. If you find that your productivity is lacking, take a look at your daily habits to see if any of them could be sabotaging your time management efforts and productivity.

Regardless of how successful you already are, like most entrepreneurs and business leaders you probably would like to become more productive. However, the work involved with managing a company can create a ton of stress, which inevitably leads to a decrease in your productivity levels. Here are five proven practices that you can use to increase your productivity dramatically.

1. Use Your Calendar: Most people only use their calendars to remember special events and birthdays, but this dramatically undermines the power that your calendar can serve in increasing your productivity. A simple strategy that can increase your productivity is to schedule the major tasks you have to accomplish during the day. Don’t just create a to-do list with the functions you need to accomplish, but time block your most important tasks and projects that you need to get done.
2. Plan Your Day in Advance: Planning your day in advance can help you get a good night’s sleep because you won’t end up staying up all night trying to remember everything you have to get done the next day. It also helps you to wake up excited about attacking your day because you already know what you need to do instead of wasting time trying to make a plan.
3. Perfect Your Morning Routine: If you want to take your productivity to the next level, then you have to perfect your morning routine. How you start your day is an excellent indicator of how the rest of your day is going to go. You need to find something that works for you and start putting it on your calendar. If you want to increase your productivity, then you have to get serious about your morning routine.
4. Develop a Sense of Urgency: Not having a sense of urgency will not only keep you from increasing your productivity levels, but it will also keep you from reaching your full potential and achieving your goals. Create a trigger that will remind you to move forward with a sense of urgency. Whether you write a reminder down on a notecard or put it on your smartphone, you need to have something that will continuously remind you to get moving.
5. Limit Distractions: If you don’t make an intentional effort to limit the distractions around you when it’s time to work, your productivity will take a hit. Keep breaks to a minimum, limit chatter with others, and stop surfing the Internet when it’s time to get some meaningful work done. 

For leaders, every minute counts. To help you increase your productivity, put these five practices in place and notice how quickly you start to accomplish more throughout your day.

Humans are their own worst enemies sometimes, and there are definitely beliefs that everyone has that can be destructive. If you happen to have those beliefs, then you are going to have a very difficult time achieving success because they do a terrific job of blocking the path. We’re going to discuss three of those habits in this article and give you some great tools to help you eliminate them from your life.

 

1. You Don’t Have the Ability: The first belief that we’ll discuss is a common one among just about everyone on planet earth – not having the confidence to do whatever task that you’ve set for yourself. In nearly all cases, this simply isn’t true. As a demonstration, I knew a man who wanted to be a singer more than anything. The problem was, he couldn’t carry a tune. Everyone told him that he wouldn’t ever be a singer because he lacked the ability. You either had it or you didn’t, they said. The man didn’t believe them, and took lessons and practiced for about 10 years. After a very long time, it clicked, and he was able to sing on key and hear and correct himself when he sang off key. You should look at your business goals the same way.
2. All the Good Ideas are Gone: This is simply a cop-out. All of the good ideas are not gone. In fact, every ten years or so, as technology improves by leaps and bounds, a whole new crop of ideas is available. If you think all of the good ideas are gone, then it is likely that you aren’t opening yourself up to new ideas and inspiration. Instead, you are letting negativity convince you that you’ll never be able to have an idea as good as the ones you’ve heard about, when the truth is, you might have one better.
3. You Don’t Have the Determination: Finally, you need to get rid of the belief that you do not have the determination to reach your goals and be successful. There is one very simple way to combat this. Understand that if you believe you don’t have the determination, you don’t, and if you do have the determination, then you do. It is completely your choice whether or not you have enough sticking power to reach your goals.

Being an entrepreneur entails many professional and personal traits. It takes a lot to be able to launch, execute, grow, and scale a business. As a result, entrepreneurs have to be extra careful with every decision, and being able to manage their time correctly is an invaluable skill. Here are four time management tactics that busy entrepreneurs can employ to get more done.  

 

1. Break Down Activities Into Simple Problems: It requires more energy to utilize your consciousness, but this is something that can be avoided if you can simplify your problems. Improving your time management skills will require you to establish a process and then break it down into smaller, automatic operations that you can grasp quickly and that don’t require intensive consumption of your resources. Successful entrepreneurs take the time to break complex tasks down into smaller pieces to make the process easier to comprehend and follow.

 

2. Create a Prioritization System: Priorities differ from business to business and are generally shaped around deadlines, the importance of execution, ROI, and reach. Learning how to prioritize both your long-term activities and the short-term goals that are necessary for you to realize incremental results is critical and requires you to plan your tasks carefully.

 

3. Start with a Simple Task: The quickest way to become demotivated is by failing to complete a complicated and broad task over the course of the day, which will prevent you from realizing progress with your weekly planning. The best way to break the ice is by starting your day working on a trivial task that will give you a head start. Starting your day with a simple task will put your productivity in motion and allow you to focus on more complex projects later on.

 

4. Create a Long-Term Roadmap: Planning is a repetitive task that can drag you away from your day-to-day activities. Creating a long-term plan can allow you to better focus on your goals and help you decide whether new tasks that come up are in line with them. When you can define the well-known duties that are crucial to your success, you can determine the expected outcomes and measure them every month. Preparing a long-term roadmap will also provide you with a clearer picture of your weekly availability. 

 

No matter how efficient your strategy for managing your time is, there is always room for improvement. With these four time management tactics, you can start to improve your productivity and accomplish more throughout your day.