Continued from page 1
2. Clarify business goals. Having spent some time expressing personal goals for future, take a look at your business goals and rethink them. Are your personal and business goals working together, or are they working against each other? If they do seem to be mutually exclusive, what choices will you make next? Putting business goals ahead of your personal ones will inevitably lead to stress and feelings of overwhelm. Determine instead whether business goals can be re-oriented or modified to support what you would like to achieve personally.
3. Identify owner's ideal role 3 years from now. Think about who you want to be - what role you want to have in business – in 3 years time. Will you still be doing majority of work? Will you have others doing work and your capacity is more advisory? Or perhaps you would like to remove yourself completely from operational parts of business and focus on product or business development?
Thinking about what you want as an owner in future can give you great insights into what strategies you may need to put in place now.
4. Conduct a detailed personal time analysis for a one-week period. This is where rubber hits road. If you really are true to yourself when you do this exercise you will learn a lot about where potential lies for making changes. How are you really spending your time? Break your day down into at least half hour slots and write down exactly what you do in each 30 minutes.
5. Create a plan of action for next 30 days. Based on data from steps 1-4, create an action plan to cover next 30 days. Your plan should include: •steps to align personal and business goals •strategy for moving to role owner wants to play in business in future •analysis of results of one-week detailed monitoring exercise •deciding which activities add most value and planning to spend time on those •identify how much time is spent on low value activity and planning to delegate or stop doing those things
There is never a better time than right now for planning to do things differently. Take charge of yourself and your business by choosing a direction that allows you to meet both your personal and business goals, and still retain your sanity!
Megan Tough, Director of Action Plus, is passionate about helping people enjoy their businesses. She works internationally with business owners to systematically remove the stress points from their business, giving them more time and space for - well -whatever they want! Visit her at www.megantough.com, or email megan@megantough.com for more information on taking the stress out of your business.