Most business owners know the value of a developing a business and marketing plan before a business is launched. But once the proverbial open sign is lit, many neglect to focus on day to day operations, managing with little more than an over-loaded e-mail inbox and a to-do list scratched out on a sticky note.
If you aren’t meeting your goals, it could be due to the fact that you haven’t defined them. Creating a productivity plan gets you organized and allows you to accomplish more in less time.
A productivity plan is simply an outline of tasks that you intend to complete on either a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Tasks can range from basic operations to marketing and sales activities. Use your plan to get the most out of each work day.
Designing Your Plan
Design a plan that fits your individual goals. If there are specific tasks that you need to complete each week, designate a specific day of the week to accomplish each task. For example, you might review financial statements on Mondays, schedule one-on-one time with your staff on Tuesdays, focus on marketing activities on Wednesdays, and so on.
Assigning tasks to days of the week will help get you into a routine and minimize procrastination. In addition to specific daily tasks, you can also create a list of other goals to accomplish throughout the week. For example, a consulting business might include the following tasks: attend a networking function, update three pages of the website, make a new media contact, contact three potential alliance partners, develop one new worksheet for clients, and complete at least seven introductory calls.
The tasks for each business vary greatly. When developing your list, ask yourself these questions:
*What tasks will help me with my general organization?
*What do I need to do to make sure I am constantly marketing my business?
*How can I improve the company’s bottom line?
*What tasks should I be doing that I tend to avoid?
Here are some ideas to get you started:
*Perform X number of cold calls.
*Write and send a press release.
*Evaluate reports (website traffic, P&L statements, inventory, etc.).
*Attend a business networking event.
*Read an industry-related book or e-book.
*Update website.
*Add new content to website.
*Write X number of words for book manuscript.
*Make contract with X number of potential alliance partners.
*Submit an article.
*Develop new marketing campaign.
*Give away X number of freebies.
Take it Seriously
Write your plan in either a word processing document or in a spreadsheet format and update it regularly. Print it out and post it near your desk so it’s always handy. In addition to a weekly plan, you can also define monthly and yearly goals. Once you begin to check off tasks, not only will you feel a sense of accomplishment, but your productivity will inevitably improve.
Your plan doesn’t have to stop with you. If you have employees or a virtual assistant, be sure to create plans for them too. Soon everyone in your business will be working smarter and your only regret will be that you didn’t create your plans sooner.
Sample Weekly Plan
Monday:
*Review weekend sales reports
*Meet with staff to review weekly goals
Tuesday:
*Update website
*Place merchandise orders
Wednesday:
*Work on newsletter
*Develop at least one new promotion idea
Thursday:
*Make six cold calls
*Write thank you notes to clients and vendors
Friday:
*Spend two hours on new product development
*Clean up e-mail inbox (less than 30 messages)
Other Weekly Goals:
*Attend one networking function
*Lunch or dinner with a client
*Lunch or dinner with a business partner
*Investigate new advertising opportunity
*Read one trade book or report
Stephanie Chandler is the author of “The Business Startup Checklist and Planning Guide: Seize Your Entrepreneurial Dreams!” and founder of http://www.BusinessInfoGuide.com, a directory of resources for entrepreneurs. Subscribe to the newsletter for hot tips and small business tools by sending an e-mail to Newsletter@BusinessInfoGuide.com.
What is a great presentation? As you might have already seen on the Internet, or read in books, there are many definitions of great presentations. Nevertheless, they all emphasize one point - a great presentation is one which, ideally speaking, completely holds an audience enthralled. It is not entirely true that only great personalities can give great presentations. To develop great presentation skills, which you will need, especially if you are a Six Sigma professional, you need to understand the anatomy of a great presentation.
Anatomy Of A Great Presentation
Unlike written reports where you have a chance to correct mistakes, presentations are a sort of ‘get it right the first time’ business activity. So, a considerable amount of preparation is necessary to make a presentation great.
1. All Great Presentations Are Well Researched and rehearsed in advance. You must determine how much information or statistics needs to be given in proportion to a plain lecture. Too much statistics defeats the purpose of your presentation and makes it boring.
2. Encourage The Audience To Have Confidence in you at the beginning by greeting them and briefly explaining the points you are going to cover during the course of your speech.
3. Presentations Are All About Scoring Points and winning over others to your opinions. Delivery skill is a vehicle of driving a point home. Statistical information should be presented in logical sequences and in the right doses.
4. Make The Presentation A Light-Hearted One wherever possible but without compromising on the seriousness of the matter. All great presentations are made in simple language using industry specific jargon, but not words that are too hard to understand.
5. Great Presentations Use Audio-Visual Aids for greater impact. This is based on the principle that a picture speaks a thousand words. Even a budgetary speech or an accountant’s presentation can use slide pictures.
How To Give Great Presentations
Begin with greeting the audience; end with asking their feedback and then thanking them. Announce that you will answer their questions later at the end of your speech. Apart from the apparent benefit this provides you, you get their undivided attention to your speech which is vital to your success.
Proven Steps To Give Great Presentations
Whether it is a formal speech to a large audience or an informal briefing, knowing your audience is vital to your speech preparation and helps you to relate it to them. Here are a few steps to making the actual presentation.
1. Judiciously Use Examples from everyday life or from past events to make your point quickly understandable. But don’t let examples occupy center stage.
2. Don’t Forget, Your Audience may have come from different departments within your organization. Each of them has different interests and different levels of understanding on your topic. Strive to address the needs of the entire audience, not just a select few.
3. Grasp Audience Responses that show whether and how much they like your speech. Make midcourse corrections to the tone of your speech if necessary. At this point you can engage them to lift their moods.
4. Extemporaneous Presentation goes a long way to make it interesting as this obviously eliminates the ‘report reading style’ and gives your speech a natural touch. You can use notecards if necessary, so that you don’t forget them.
5. Using Body Language Effectively. Make eye contact with members of the audience. Make gestures like hand waving, nodding and voice. Using body language in this way helps to break the monotony of a possibly long speech.
Giving a great presentations at work is not limited to just benefiting your organization. Use this vehicle to travel that extra mile to reach your career goals.
Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solutions - Six Sigma Online ( http://www.sixsigmaonline.org ) offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.
Homeostasis is a relatively new and obscure science. It is the study of the effect of time on man and on other living creatures. It is also the study of our perception and response to time. Some of the latest discoveries in this realm of science may not win a Nobel prize but they guarantee to fascinate even the dullest curiosity.
In one experiment people were placed deep in underground facilities where they had no way of knowing sunrise or sunset and they had no clocks or any other means of telling time. After a brief period of disorientation they all began develop a routine of sleep, productivity and recreation time that fell into a perfect twenty four hour period. Where did that come from? It seems that providence has placed a twenty four hour clock in the human psyche apart from external stimuli.
Another interesting fact has been uncovered through the science of homeostasis about our adaptations to time and climate. Put quite simply. man adapts to time first and always before any other natural influences. For example, man can live in extremes like cold or heat as long as the twenty four hour internal clock is working. Other species cannot do that. Some bears hibernate until winter has passed conversely there is a badger like creature in the Northeast US that can’t stand the summer heat so it hibernates until cooler weather returns.
When I was performing Celtic and American style folk music I loved a particular song called, “You Won’t Make Old Bones” In it was one of the most intriguing lines I have ever heard. “The young man sits and curses the time upon his hands…The old man sits and curses time’s slipping sands” Every time I sang this song I could hear echoes of my mother warning me about how time only seemed slow because I was young. She would always add that when I grew older time would fly so swiftly that I would be asking myself where it had gone. The line in the song is right, ma was right and I’m still seeking answers to the reasons why this is true.
The feeling that time is short comes to me daily now, and I question whether I have time left to accomplish something worthwhile in my life. The Bible tells me that the days of our years are three score years and ten. It says that, should we make it over the seventy year mark that it will still be filled with labor and sorrow. Psalm 90:10 I’m too old and well experienced to argue with the Bible at this point. I have plenty of proof to corroborate this scripture passage. Yet I see this fact as a very good thing, it is what gives me the ability to concentrate on what is good and differentiate more accurately about what is dross. Here is a key!
Perhaps the very best advice I have heard in my entire life about how to better handle time is this. Always make a distinction between the urgent, and the important. The phone ringing, the knock on the door, three children all calling to you at the same time, this is urgent, but is it important?
This is not just another tip or piece of easy advice. If taken seriously you will see a positive effect immediately in your life. Whether you make mental notes about what you need to do daily or if you’re a corporate executive with a secretary to tell you what’s next, you need to take a hard look at your “to do” list. With complete honesty sit down and remove every item that is only “urgent” and leave only those things that come under the heading of “important” and you will feel a weight lifting as you do. The functional word here is “honestly.”
We are traveling through something we all recognize as time and space. In youth we are mostly involved with the space aspect of life. Later in life we all realize that our travels through time are far more important than we had ever thought. It is our consciousness of this traveling through time that raises some of life’s most important questions. Questions that have to do with quality of life, relationships, love and true productivity.
Rev Bresciani has written many articles over the past thirty years in such periodicals as Guideposts and Catholic Digest. He is the author of two books available on Amazon.com, Alibris, Barnes and Noble and many other places. Rev Bresciani wrote “Hook Line and Sinker or what has Your Church Been Teaching You,” publisher, PublishAmerica of Baltimore MD. He also wrote a book published by Xulon Press entitled “An American Prophet and His Message, Questions and Answers on the Second Coming of Christ.” His book is now being heralded as the clearest book on the subject of the second coming of Christ since Hal Lindsey’s “Late Great Planet Earth” Rev Bresciani’s website is,
http://americanprophet.org
You’ve heard of the Peter Principle: “People are promoted to their level of ultimate incompetence”. But what the Peter Principle doesn’t tell you is the nature of the incompetence. For the most part, it’s leadership incompetence.
A human resources director told me, “Brent, we hire people for their skills and knowledge, but we fire them or fail to promote them or promote them for their leadership abilities — or lack thereof.”
In other words, throughout their careers, people are promoted to take charge of bigger and bigger groups — until they take over a group that’s too big for their leadership abilities.
One main reason they come up short in abilities is they are constantly and unconsciously falling into two leadership traps.
I’ll describe the traps, how to get out of them, and how not to get into them in the first place.
The traps can be particularly deadly because they are in many cases self-set — and even self-triggered. What’s worse: the vast majority of leaders who get into them don’t have a clue they’re caught. It’s one thing to be in a trap and know you’re in it: You try to get out. But it’s a problem of another magnitude to be in a trap and not know you’re in it. In that case, you’ll stay there.
THE FIRST TRAP: “I need …”
A marketing leader in a major global company was stumbling. His team was failing to achieve the targeted results. He told me, “The good news is they do what I tell them. The bad news is they do what I tell them — ONLY what I tell them. Other than firing the worst of the bunch or transferring others out of the team, I can’t figure out what to do. And if I don’t do it soon, I’ll be the one fired or transferred!”
I asked if I could sit in on a team meeting to scope out the situation. “Be my guest,” he said. “But I don’t see what good it’ll do. The problem isn’t in the meetings. Everybody agrees what needs to get done when they’re in the meetings. The problem is the results after the meetings.”
The meeting had been going only for only a couple of minutes when I saw what was wrong. Afterwards, alone in his office, I told him: “They’re not the problem. YOU’RE the problem. You’ve fallen into two leadership traps.”
He looked at me incredulously. “What traps?”
I explained that leaders often fall into traps that prevent them from getting the full measure of results they’re capable of. And the deadliest traps are often the ones of their own making.
The first trap is the “I need . . . ” trap.
Leaders fall into this trap when they say, “I need you to hit the marketing targets, I need you to get more productive, I need you to (fill in the blank)”. I NEED … I NEED … I NEED ….
Why is this a trap? The answer: the Leader’s Fallacy. The Leader’s Fallacy is the mistaken belief by leaders that their own needs are automatically reciprocated by the needs of the people they lead. It’s a fallacy because automatic reciprocity doesn’t exist. But so many leaders go blithely along driven by the Fallacy and so fall into the “I need . . . ” trap.
For instance, the marketing leader thought he was motivating people to get great results. However, during the meeting, he was constantly repeating, “I need … “. So, in reality, he was ordering people to get average results. Of course, leaders don’t order people to get average results. But average results are usually the outcome of order leadership.
The order is the lowest form of motivation. The order leader’s focus of my-way-or-the-highway can’t get great results from people on a consistent basis simply because people usually can’t be ordered to undertake extraordinary endeavors. They must choose to do so. When he said, “The bad news is they ONLY do what I tell them.”, he was unknowingly afflicting them. They were simply responding to an order then going into a kind of suspended animation (masked by busy work) until the next order came along.
In Part 2, I’ll describe how to get out of this trap.
2005 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
PERMISSION TO REPUBLISH: This article may be republished in newsletters and on web sites provided attribution is provided to the author, and it appears with the included copyright, resource box and live web site link. Email notice of intent to publish is appreciated but not required: mail to: brent@actionleadership.com
The author of 23 books, Brent Filson’s recent books are, THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. He is founder and president of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. - and for more than 20 years has been helping leaders of top companies worldwide get audacious results. Sign up for his free leadership e-zine and get a free white paper: “49 Ways To Turn Action Into Results,” at http://www.actionleadership.com
