Our world is filled with distractions, more than ever before with constant access to an internet overflowing with news, information, and entertainment. It’s so easy to get lost on a rabbit trail of information or to find a reason to be discouraged and unmotivated. Having the mental determination to remain focused and motivated is crucial!
Here are five tips to get yourself focused, stay motivated, and watch as your productivity and profits increase!
Boost Your Productivity and Profits With These 5 Ways to Get Focused
1. Learn From Others; Don’t Compare
Comparison is the thief of joy. When you find yourself studying how to be better at your craft, learning new ways to market yourself, or simply trying to build your brand, free yourself to learn from other people in your field but never let yourself compare your world to theirs. Don’t look at how many customers or clients they have, how much money they make, or how many likes their social posts get and compare that to what you get!Learn how they got to where they are! Learn what they do to be so accomplished. Learn how they stay motivated. Focus on being inspired by their success and not discouraged that yours might be different.
2. Don’t Assume That Money Will Always Be Motivation
Towards the beginning of your business or even while you might be financially struggling, it’s easy to think that the profits you could bring in will be motivating enough to work through anything. Unfortunately, this way of thinking quickly drags. If money is your only motivator, then it’s the only way you’ll be able to measure your productivity. If a day, week, or month goes by without you meeting your monetary goals, you’ll easily lose focus. Look at the whole picture and focus on all the things it takes to get there.
3. Get Organized!
One of the easiest ways to lose focus and motivation (and consequently see your productivity spiral) is to be disorganized. Keep your tasks organized and scheduled. Keep your calendar clear and understandable. Organize your processes so they’re as simple and fluid as possible. Good organization will help you save time, effort, and money, which will all work to help you stay focused and less stressed!
4. Set Your Own Goals; Don’t Copy Someone Else’s
This might sound like a no-brainer, but you should really consider it. Set goals that you want to achieve, not just because you heard someone else say it was important. Don’t decide where you’re going based off of what you “should” do, but rather where you want to be. If your goals are inspiring and desirable to you, then you will be so much more motivated to focus on them and work towards them!
5. Surround Yourself With Likeminded People
While you shouldn’t discard old, valuable friendships, you should make sure you have a solid community of people who believe in and support what you’re doing. They should challenge you and inspire you to do better and improve at your trade. They should help you regain focus when you lose it, just as you should help them focus when they’re distracted or stressed. Motivate each other. Grow together. Don’t settle for a lifestyle that’s keeping you distracted and unmotivated.
It’s that time of year where I’ve been trying to regroup, get focused and concentrate on my goals for the last quarter of the year. I’ve been blessed to spend the last year working on some incredible launches for clients; from telesummits, to creating sales funnels, to course and membership launches, the list goes on, it’s been a fun but busy time.
So I took a break from writing, tried to get in as much rest as I could during this busy period in my business. I managed to average 7.5 hours of sleep a night, which was incredible as I used to average 6 hours a night, one of the benefits of quality sleep for me was how much clearer my thinking got, decisions were easier to make, issues were easier solved.
I was set to post last week about the many benefits of rest when my family had been hit hard with a tragedy. I come from a big and close-knit family and this past Canadian Thanksgiving my cousin Jay and his wife Jen were in a fatal car crash. Jay was seriously injured, there were times we didn’t think he’d make it, but as of this writing he’s in stable condition. Jen tragically didn’t make it. This has hit my family hard, we’re in shock and in pain at the loss of someone we loved dearly. The accident was not their fault, someone drove head on into their pickup truck trying to pass another vehicle (the driver of the other car didn’t make it either). So we’re all in mourning, trying to be there for Jay and their 2 teenage children and doing the best we can. All prayers are welcome.
As a result, this past week I found myself needing space from my regular routine. While work and goal-chasing are important, it’s also important to allow yourself the time and space to get the rest you need. Yet, we so rarely offer ourselves an appropriate amount of time to relax since we’re so preoccupied doing other things! This isn’t a sustainable long-term solution.
Think about it. When your cell phone runs low, you plug it in to recharge. If you stop using it and let it be to charge, it will recharge even faster. While you can’t literally plug yourself into a charging device, your mind and body also need time to rest and recharge. In fact, this is so important for your body, that there are noticeable physical benefits to getting the rest you need!
If you’re looking for motivation to get the rest your body and mind need, here are five benefits for you to consider:
1. Reduces Stress
According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), stress levels at work are higher than ever. Additionally, a CDC publication suggests that “health care expenditures are nearly 50% greater for workers who report high levels of stress.” Excess stress can cause issues for your mind and body, but also for your work! Stress keeps you flustered, distracted, and worried, which is exhausting and prohibits you from performing as well at your business tasks as you’re capable. By allowing yourself the time to get an appropriate amount of rest, you’re helping your body de-stress, which, in turn, helps you stay healthier and more productive!
2. Boosts Immune System
Adequate rest is also linked to a boost in your immune system. Chronic stress greatly suppresses your immune system, making it much easier for you to succumb to illnesses and diseases. Rest helps you prevent this! Adequate sleep is one of the key things necessary to boosting your immune system!
3. Time Away from Work Restores Mental Energy
This might be something you’ve noticed from personal experience if you’ve ever gotten a solid vacation. Allowing yourself to detach from your work during your time off decreases your exhaustion. It helps you become more resilient in the face of stressful work conditions, and it also helps restore your mental energy! A good time of rest will help you renew your balance and inspiration, and you’ll be able to come back even stronger than before!
4. Increases Focus
Not only will getting a solid chunk of rest help you be more creative, inspired, and productive, but it will also greatly increase your ability to focus. According to research, “all work and no play” drastically reduces a person’s ability to focus in the end. Allowing yourself to have regular time off for restorative breaks will noticeably improve your performance!
5. Increases Activity
The idea that rest helps increase your activity might sound impossible. However, lack of appropriate sleep keeps you from doing many of the things you might otherwise be doing! How many times have you considered getting a gym membership, walking in the evenings, or starting up a yoga routine? How many times have you cancelled your plans because you were too tired? By making sure you get the rest you need, you’re body will be better able to get up, get moving, and feel good about it!
Conclusion
We live in a fast-paced world with 24-hour news cycles, immediate email and text message delivery, the ability to Face Time and stay connected all sound glorious, but they’re zapping us of the rest we so desperately need. Everyone is busy and likes to stay busy. What’s worse is there’s a sense of guilt attached to non-busyness. Don’t let that happen to you! Allow yourself the rest you need so that you can accomplish the things you want!
Have an easy week!
Robyn
PS: If you need support with an upcoming launch please click here to schedule a call with me and let’s see how I can help you launch your project to the next level!
PPS: Author’s note: My cousin Jay did succumb to his injuries and passed away on October 21st, 2019.
Downtime is a serious issue for any business to face. When an unexpected problem pauses productivity within your company, it’s going to have consequences. Money is lost, and time is wasted, but there are even bigger disasters to contend with. Being unproductive could mean disappointing your customers, which can harm your reputation. Sometimes, legal trouble can even occur. As stressful as this may be for you, it affects the employees too, impacting staff morale and productivity. With that in mind, here are ten things you can do to reduce downtime.
Employees are the backbone of any company. Without a team of hardworking individuals, your business won’t survive. Because of this, it should be no surprise that employees can be one of the largest contributors to downtime. If the workers are always making mistakes, it will begin to affect productivity. The trouble is, employees won’t know what to do unless you teach them. Even the best workers make mistakes, but they will make less of them with proper training.
2. Work On Staff Communication
Every great leader knows the importance of communication. Unless your employees talk to one another, they won’t collaborate effectively. This means that work will likely suffer, impacting productivity overall. While an open plan office would allow for easy communication, it doesn’t work in all situations. Some employees work much more productively in private spaces. If you offer private offices or rooms, make sure that your staff can talk using email and messenger.
3. Stick To Maintenance Schedules
All companies have equipment that they rely on. Sometimes this is little more than computers and printers, but other times, your staff will need special tools to carry out their work. When this equipment doesn’t work as it should, it can result in downtime. Thankfully, you can usually avoid this issue with maintenance. Not only will this reduce the number of unexpected breakdowns, but the equipment will last longer too. This means that you’ll have to pay out for fewer replacements.
4. Upgrade Any Old Equipment
Even when you take care of technology, it won’t last forever. Eventually, all equipment has to be replaced. Rather than wait for an unexpected breakdown, you should invest in regular upgrades. This means that you can make plans to reduce the effect the replacement has on the business. Avoiding these upgrades might save you money in the short-term, but it won’t do any good overall. It will become difficult to repair certain devices, as the parts will be harder to source.
5. Bring In Professional Help
Good equipment operators should have no trouble in diagnosing and repairing many smaller problems with their tools. However, you will need an expert for any complex issues. Trying to fix problems you don’t understand could make them much worse. Because of this, you should research nearby IT experts and find help that you can trust. It’s particularly important that you have professional help in large and complicated scenarios, like relocating the business.
Working technology is little use to you unless you can power it. A power outage could bring your company to a halt, especially if it relies heavily on technology. Thankfully, there are several ways to limit the impact. With variable speed drives, you can continue to feed power to conveyor belts, plant machinery, and other equipment, even if power output dips. A backup generator would also help to keep the business up and running until you could get the power back on again.
7. Reward Your Hard Workers
Punishing an employee for causing downtime would be a natural response of many employers when that employee doesn’t perform. Some bosses would dock pay or cancel benefits to those caught sitting on the job. However, this isn’t the best way to motivate your staff. A much better approach would be to treat those staff members that are working hard. There are many ways to reward employees, from paid days off to fancy lunches and even gift cards for local stores.
8. Make A Healthy Office
Sickness can cause chaos within a workforce, seriously affecting productivity. As a leader, it’s your responsibility to ensure that everyone on your team is functioning at their very best. They must be capable of handling the work you delegate to them, or huge issues could arise. Making a healthy office will prevent sickness, as well as injury. When a worker is sick or hurt, you should offer your support. Showing that you care in this way will motivate your staff to get back on track.
9. Look At Your Budget
While downtime is costly, resolving the problems that cause it isn’t cheap. After all, electricians, replacement tools, and backup generators can all be pricey. For this reason, you must take a look at your budget and plan how to cover the costs associated with downtime. If you were to build an emergency fund, for example, you would be able to dip into that whenever you had an invoice to pay. Make sure that you also have a great business insurance policy to fall back on.
Unless employees are told they’re making a mistake, they will continue to make it. It’s for this reason that performance reviews are so crucial. Giving your workers constructive feedback lets them improve, benefiting them and the company. Just remember that you can improve too. Make sure you also allow your staff to offer advice of their own, whether it be face to face or using a suggestions box. Staff productivity is just as much your responsibility as it is the employees’.
Nearly all businesses experience downtime at some point. However, that doesn’t mean that your venture should be destroyed by it. Downtime may cause chaos, but you can protect your company. With the advice above, it’s possible to prevent downtime in your business, saving time and money, as well as unnecessary stress. If you can’t avoid downtime, the tips above should still help you to limit the impact that it has.
There are a lot of things that are entirely unique to the era that we currently live in. After all, the march of progress never stops moving forward and over the last several decades it’s been getting faster and faster. And there’s one thing that is both responsible for that speed as well as for many of the advances that are happening all of the time. That thing is, of course, technology. Technology is one of the most important aspects of modern society and that is especially true if you’re running any kind of business. However, there are plenty of business owners who find themselves either uninterested in technology or even actually afraid of it. A lot of the time these are the kinds of people who work under the assumption that, because their business has survived for this long without the need for technology, there’s no reason to embrace it now. If that’s the kind of attitude that you have then I have some bad news for you. The truth is that technology is an integral part of running a modern business whether you like it or not. It’s just a matter of knowing how it can help. With that in mind, here are some ways that you can use technology to improve your business.
Understand how to use it.
The reality of technology is that it’s not just going to come in a save your business. There’s no singular “technology” that you can put in the center of your business that will solve all of your problems. The key is understanding how it is exactly that you can use it in order to make your business better. How you go about doing this is often going to depend pretty heavily on what kind of business it is that you’re running in the first place. Whether you need a raid capacity calculator or the hardware and software for full-scale automation is going to depend entirely on your business’s needs. However, you’re never going to be able to make the most of any technology if you don’t understand how most effectively to use it in the first place. The only way that you’re going to be able to solve this issue is to do as much research as possible. This may well be a lot of work but the improvements that it can lead to in your business are well worth it.
Improve your website
It should come as no real shock to anyone that, if you want your business to succeed in the modern world, you need a website. Without one, you may as well not have a business in the first place. Your website is the place where your customers will come and find you, the place where you will put out essential information, and is a huge part in making your business as visible as possible. However, it’s not just a matter of having any old website. Your website has to be one that people will actually want to visit in the first place. It might sound rather shallow but the truth is that most people in the modern world aren’t going to spend much longer than a minute looking at your website before passing judgment. And it’s not just the website itself that they’re judging. The truth is that if your website looks cheap and amateurish then people are going to assume that the same can be said about your business as a whole. You need a website that properly reflects the kind of quality that people can expect from your business. This means not only making it attractive but highly functional as well. A beautiful website that’s impossible to navigate is as good as useless.
Think about how your customers use it.
Of course, it’s not just a matter of how your business can use technology, it’s also a matter of how your customers relate to technology. This is a fantastic perspective to understand because it helps you understand exactly what it is that you really need to be offering to your customers. This applies to a number of areas. When it comes to your marketing, you need to think about what kinds of social media platforms your customers use so that you can best utilize those yourself. If you’ve got a lot of customers wanting to use your business in a digital space then it becomes a whole lot clearer that the best thing to do is to push it in that direction.
Change the way you and your employees work
For the longest time, the ways in which a lot of businesses work and are organized has been relatively fixed. You had business owners at the top with employees working in an office in a standard nine to five pattern. However, technology has created the opportunity for some highly useful and interesting disruptions to that pattern. The most obvious is that the office is can now be pretty much anywhere. Remote working methods allow for your employees to work no matter where they are which means that not only are they going to be able to maintain a much stronger sense of a work/life balance but you’re no longer limited to just hiring candidates who are local to your business. Not only that but thanks to online conferencing programs like Skype and Slack, it’s never been easier for you and your employees to connect with one another no matter where you are.
Of course, it’s also just as important to remember that it’s not just a matter of bringing technology into your business and abandoning everything that you were doing before. The truth is that if you want to run a truly successful business then it’s incredibly important that you foster a sense of balance between what’s new and exciting and you’ve learned from the past. To think that there’s nothing valuable that your business can learn from what’s come before is just as misguided to assume that you don’t need to embrace technology at all.
Let’s get real for a minute. Have you ever taken an online quiz?
From “What Hogwarts house am I?” to “What animal am I?” to “What should my career be?”, online quizzes are all the rage. You’ll be minding your own business, scrolling social media or a blog then BAM there it is…a little quiz grabs your attention and says just the right thing to peak your curiosity! Before you know it you’re answering questions (and even giving out your personal email) so that you can discover what color of cat you were in a previous life…
Admit it. You know exactly what I’m talking about.
Now, quizzes might seem like a fun side-hobby but did you know they can actually be incredibly effective tools for building your email list?
Think about it. People LOVE taking quizzes. And if you build a quiz that grabs the interest of the demographic you are trying to reach, all you have to do is:
Put the quiz somewhere they will see it.
Ask for their email in order to get their quiz results.
BOOM! You’ve got a new subscriber!
When I was asked to test Interact; an online quiz creator software, I jumped at the opportunity. I needed something to spice up the content I was creating and attract more people interested in what I have to offer. Creating quizzes geared towards my target demographic was a fresh strategy I’d never tried before.
Here are the benefits I have discovered from using Interact Quiz Software.
#1 Rapidly grow your email list
When I put my first quiz out there, I had an almost 50% conversion rate from people who clicked on the quiz. That means I got 25 emails for every 50 people who took the quiz. THAT is a great statistic!
#2 Segment your list
There are so many benefits to email list segmentation! A “get to know you” style quiz can help you understand your audience better, automatically separate them based on responses, and enable you to write more personalized, applicable content to them. This is a great strategy for increasing open rates, boosting engagement and getting new clients or customers.
#3 Drive Sales
A quiz is an easy way to show which of your products or services may be of use to a particular person. If you don’t sell anything that can be marketed through a quiz, you can also use a quiz to direct your readers to affiliate products and services.
#4 Get Seen On Social Media
As a business owner, it is getting harder and harder to be seen on social media due to frequently-changing algorithms. A sure way to be seen is if an individual shares something you are attached to. Enter interact quizzes! People often share their quiz results on social media and this is an easy way to spread your business name around on Facebook and grow your presence.
#5 Boost Audience Engagement
Creating a fun, interactive quiz is an easy way to encourage audience engagement. You can also use quizzes to get valuable feedback from your readers and customers.
So far, I have been extremely pleased with my experience using Interact. I was looking for a tool that is simple to use (for myself and my clients), something that looked modern and attractive, and something to boost my numbers that was also fun to do.
Here are more benefits when you use their platform:
Customizable Design
Branching Logic
Multiple Quiz Types
Opt-In Form Builder
In-Depth Analytics
and much more…
There are many options for your business with Interact that I suggest you check out their website and sign up for one of their plans which range from Free to Pro and very affordable!
