Even though it can seem simple and maybe even apparent to tell oneself to concentrate on one thing at a time, we nonetheless come into contact with a lot of people who are trying to juggle many tasks at the same time. This is not an effective strategy for expanding your company and being happy and healthy at the same time. We’ve all been there, but if you try to knock out everything on your to-do list in one sitting, you’ll probably end up accomplishing very little, if anything at all, and even the tasks that you do manage to finish won’t likely be done to the best of your abilities. This is something we can all relate to. Instead, give each of your tasks your undivided attention before moving on to the next one.

When it comes to our personal lives, we all seem to take this piece of advice to heart. However, when it comes to our professional lives, we can sometimes buckle under the pressure of customers, sales prospects, employees, business partners, and suppliers, in addition to the myriad of other demands coming from the outside world! Consider the laundry list of errands you do on a Sunday and give it some thought. You are more than capable of cleaning the windows, vacuuming the floor, organizing the space, and unloading the dishwasher before your guests come for Sunday lunch, but, in order to do this, you will need to handle each of these tasks individually. If you start them all at once, you will most likely end up with partially cleaned windows, pieces that you missed on the carpet, a dishwasher that is only partially full, and you will feel pretty concerned about making that Sunday meal! If you had devoted yourself to each job in turn, giving each task your full attention and concentration before going on to the next, I can promise that you would have completed all of the tasks in plenty of time and to a considerably better quality than you did. Implement this frame of mind into your approach when working at the workplace.

Take your time and focus your whole concentration on completing each activity one at a time. There are times when the day might seem like it is packed to the brim with activities that need our attention, but you should attempt to take a few deep breaths and address these responsibilities in a manner that is calm, rational, and focused. First, you should provide yourself with crystal-clear goals and objectives, then you should ensure that you regularly examine them, and last, you should divide these larger goals into smaller, more manageable chores. You might then build a logical to-do list every morning, which enables you to work towards your overall objectives in a manner that is both reasonable and attainable. Create the list, and then arrange the tasks on the list in the order of their significance (note that I did not use “urgency” on the list). You should prioritize value-adding tasks first, rather than the person who sent you the most emails the previous day. After that, you should attend to each job one at a time and cross it off the list as you complete it. You will eventually develop a sense for exactly how realistic the amount of chores that you are setting yourself actually is, and you will begin fulfilling your to-do lists each day without any issues, at which point you will be able to delegate the things that are beyond your capabilities!

When it comes to the topic of goals, it is just as vital to have an idea of where you are in life as it is to have an idea of where you want to go in life. It is of the utmost importance to have a plan for both the things you are doing now and the things you want to be doing in the future. Constructive techniques should be used to evaluate both your present status and your aspirations. It’s possible that you’re now bringing in $500 in daily income, but you’d want to increase it to $600. In this respect, it helps to set SMART goals—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. That is, make sure you are “specific” in the goal you are setting (e.g., “to increase average daily sales revenue to more than £600”), make sure it is “measurable” in some way so that you can really evaluate whether you have reached the goal, make sure it is “achievable” given your current resources and constraints, ensure the goal is “relevant” to your overall long-term objectives, and ensure that you place a time constraint on the goal, achieving the goal within 3 months, for instance, as otherwise it is very easy to ignore!

Make a plan, set a number of SMART goals and objectives, then break them down into specific tasks (in the form of daily or weekly checklists), focusing on a single task at a time. I promise that you’ll notice your productivity shoot through the roof and your mind start to feel a little less exhausted! Make an effort to stick to your strategy right up to the very end. If it fails, don’t get discouraged. Instead, revise a few of the steps and then continue under the new plan. Perseverance is certainly the key to success!

Try to visualize your goals. Write them down on a physical sheet of paper (or a whiteboard) and then display them somewhere you’ll see them every day. Do the same with your daily or weekly task checklist so that you’ll stay on track. If you are a visual thinker you could even create a “vision board”, where you not only write out your goals, but you illustrate them and thus add associate more emotion with each goal you have set yourself. What does that goal look like? What would it mean to achieve it?

So many people get caught up in the day-to-day demands of growing a small business, neglecting anything outside of the office, and lose sight of why they set the business up in the first place. This lack of focus makes them feel demotivated, so they fall behind and then want to quit. Of course, quitting won’t bring you the life you dreamed of, and all of your hard work will have been for nothing. Focus on your goals, surround yourself (visually!) with the goals that you are striving for, and then try to motivate yourself in as many ways as possible in your pursuit to achieve them—this includes taking a well-earned rest. Don’t quit!

Make Use of Leverage

When it comes to expanding a small company, many of you will likely have come to the conclusion that it is impossible (or at the very least, unwise) to handle everything on your own. It’s possible that you lack the expertise required to efficiently finish some duties, or that you just don’t have enough time in the day to do all that needs to be done. This is where the concept of leverage comes into play, and it is for this reason that you should consider outsourcing chores to one of the experienced Philippines Virtual Assistants that VA FLIX has available.

But just what does the term “leverage” mean? Your power to affect other people and the choices they make, in addition to particular occurrences in both your professional and personal life, is the essence of leverage. It is also the reason why some organizations expand considerably faster than others – those who are able to harness the efforts of other people to enhance and execute their own business processes are the ones that have a competitive advantage. The two primary methods of applying leverage entail utilizing your own money and time, both of which are (of course) finite. Because of this, it is essential to understand how to leverage other people’s money and time in order to maximize one’s own potential returns. There are only 24 hours in a day…if you don’t use your leverage effectively, you are limited to a very small number of hours in your working day to spend time on your business, outside of sleep, family commitments, household chores, keeping fit, commuting, eating, and all of the other time that is spent away from the office.

Consider how just using the Internet is a fantastic way to make the most of your time and effort. It eliminates the need for you to have a shop front with high traffic or to have offices that are centrally placed, it minimizes the requirement for you to drive large distances to visit clients or suppliers, it enables you to interact with people all over the globe, and the list goes on. Can you even begin to fathom how drastically different your company would be if it hadn’t been built on the back of the Internet and the technology it spawned? We want you to take this similar thinking and apply it to additional areas in which you might increase the return on investment (ROI) of your time and money.

This kind of thinking is applicable to outsourcing. It is better to be in business for yourself than by yourself. Your company’s pace of development will explode if you create a win-win leverage situation by outsourcing chores to a professional Philippines Virtual Assistant rather than taking on permanent staff who will drain your time and energy. You should make an effort to assign tasks that need an excessive amount of your time and presence (maybe you could hire a virtual assistant?). Instead, you should be concentrating on controlling and bettering the business processes that these activities are governed by instead.