Six Sigma Blogs

Despite having more time freedom than the 9 to 5 grind when you start working form home full time you soon discover that unless you structure your day time can suddenly seem to disappear.

Many work from home entrepreneurs grab whatever they can from articles, courses and magazines about Time Management but the problem is bigger than just that. If you can imagine that from a very young age your day has a routine when you remove yourself from routine it can affect your whole productivity.

For most people who face a 9 to 5 or longer working day the only things they feel like doing when they finally arrive home is to grab a takeaway, a glass of wine and sit in front of the television or laptop to wind down, knowing they have to do the same thing again the very next day.

Your routine, whether it is good, bad or indifferent is likely to be one of the hardest challenges you have to make because it has become part of you. Some people find it impossible to function when left to make up their own routine and it can be a huge surprise that it is even a problem.

This is why people will often comment “You are treating your business like a hobby not a real business” and you will flit like a butterfly from Ebook to ecourse and back again, spend way too long on Social Media and find your day just goes by without having done anything constructive whatsoever. Here are six tips to help you bring more structure to your home based business:-

Tip #1 Create a real office space for your business at home or in the garden the kitchen table is never a good place to run a business from, home business or not.

Tip#2 Focus your efforts on income producing activities and make scheduled appointments with yourself to allocate blocks of time on a calendar or diary to achieve these task. For example use the mornings for lead generation, the afternoons for content marketing and leave prospecting for the evening.

Step#3 If you do not take time out to learn who it is you are trying to attract as customers and business partners you will struggle in everything you do. You will need a well designed and highly converting sales and marketing funnel that is congruent in every part.

Step# 4 No matter how small your budget is to start with; separate out a regular amount of money for your advertising and marketing efforts. The best option is to open a business bank account to keep everything separate.

#5 Create at least 3 Lever Arch files, label them up, index them and call them something like marketing training, mindset training and sales campaigns. Work with each file at the appropriate time, single minded focus on what you are doing.

#6 Practise daily. If you do not plug in to the system daily you will fail. Your mind will start to wander, you will be tempted by other distractions and all your momentum will dry up leaving you with doubt. When you train every day just as an athlete would you will grow stronger both in mindset and in your skill set and you will have no choice but to gain the knowledge and the skills to move your business forward fast.

Diane Cossie specialises in helping others add structure and strategy to their network marketing businesses. To find out more about the most effective way to leverage your business online check out Diane’s Free Attraction Marketing Bootcamp for a 7 day valued filled tour.

In addition to running a top home business, are you also trying to hold down a full time job? Do you feel like you have so many tasks needing attention that you are doing five things at once and few of them very well? And what about all the stuff you’re NOT getting done? How much more effective would you be if you automatically completed tasks without having to constantly find the energy to push yourself to do them? Think about it.

It takes tremendous willpower to focus on and complete all the boring tasks we have to perform each day; especially while dealing with so many distractions. You know, your cellphone, E-mail, children, cash (or lack of), your boss, and so on. Many a time I believed I had worked to the very end of human endurance and I patted myself on the back for a day well spent. But then… when I actually took stock of what I had accomplished, I realized I’d actually done very little. That ever happen to you? I thought I was an amazing multi tasking super efficient cyborg, but the lack of focus only served to make me super-inefficient. The answer was to become fully engaged.

The Power of Full Engagement by Loehr and Schwartz is a phenomenal book on the subject productivity that alerted me to the fact that humans have a limited reserve of willpower and that reserve ain’t very big. They tested two groups of people by having them view an emotional movie. They gave one group instructions to not display emotion and allowed the other group to watch normally. After the movie ended, each group received tests that required intense concentration. Turns out that repressing emotion required willpower and consequently left none for the test. They performed poorly as a result.

So how can this help with you and you home business? Being a multi-tasking giant and living each day blown back and forth between the next emergency or deadline is bad, mmm-kay? Keep your will power and focus by following rituals instead!

What the heck’s a ritual? We aren’t talking about magic or dancing in the moonlight; maybe some meditation and some human sacrifice without any knives or volcanoes. Get it? OK… anyway. Take a series of actions and do them the same way each time and you’ve created a ritual. These “actions” are really just some good habits you’ve created for yourself. Remember, ninety-five percent of the stuff we do everyday is done automatically; no thought needed. How much concentration does it take to take a shower and dry off? Do you think “take right hand turn hot knob… wait… now turn cold knob… now warm… now step in…” Of course not, your shower ritual is a habitual. All you have to do is create rituals chock full of good habits for other parts of the day. Maybe your trying to improve your health and energy level. If so, you might want to try a morning ritual like the one I swiped from Eben Pagan.

For me this takes about 2 hours every morning. I get out of bed, drink a couple of glasses of water, brush and floss, workout, do some meditation and visualization, I look at my goals, plan my day, eat my breakfast, then shower and dress. The cool thing is that my workout is smack in the middle of my ritual so I do it automatically. I don’t even think about it. It may take you twenty one days to develop the habit or a few months. But once it’s become a habit, it will likely start to take you more willpower to NOT do it. And that’s what you want.

So let’s talk about rituals you can create to boost your home business. Maybe you’re a video marketer and it normally takes you a couple of hours to shoot, edit and post a video. Maybe if you’re focused and not watching Jersey Shore or True Blood at the same time, you can bring the time down to 1 hour. So what you do is come up with a series of steps, an exact time to begin and DO NOT ALLOW ANY DISTRACTIONS. If you’re time to begin is at 5 pm, do it EVERYDAY at 5pm with the same steps. Make it a habit. Soon the random stuff that comes up each day will find itself automatically moved to accommodate your new habits. And once your good habit filled rituals start to take over your day, you’ll be amazed at what you will accomplish.

Creating more than one or two rituals at a time may be too much because you’ll need some willpower to get them started so instead build slowly. Full Engagement with your highest value activities will do wonders for your home business.

Learn more about Rocking your Top Home Business with Full Engagement. Stop by Jesse Walker’s site where you can find additional resources to increase your success.

We all work very hard trying to achieve our goals. Lots of effort goes into creating the goals, and then even more effort goes into trying to bring these to fruition. But if you just work tirelessly with no break then you are very likely to suffer from burn-out, which is the successful persons worst nightmare. But relaxation should not be something you should feel guilty about.

Some people view relaxation as a reason to feel very cautious. They worry that being relaxing, and unplugging from the daily hard work we all endure means that they are lazy, unmotivated, and unproductive. They become tense at the very mention of the word relaxation. These people believe intense and unrelenting hard work is the only way to get to our goals. However relaxation is very important part of our quest to become more successful.

For the sporting fans you may watch MMA or mixed martial arts. These fighters have an incredible level of intensity due to the nature of their sport. They are carefully trained and an important part of this training is not to do too much. They can lose power, and timing if they try too hard. Desire can sometimes cause us to be unrelenting in our pursuit of our goals.

Whether we are sports or business people, relaxing holds importance to us all. By slowing down and allowing ourselves recovery time we can maximise what effort we can give the next day. We will not suffer from a slow down as a result of overwork. The effort we need to succeed demands a combination of rest and hard work. Working too hard for too long does not help you.

The optimul method of relaxation is not to simply sit quietly. People who are stressed out can sit quietly their minds awash with what is stressing them out. On the outside they seem relaxed, but they are suffering turmoil inside and are not relaxed in any way. Some people are so stressed out all the time that they have been that way for years. Some people do not even notice it because it is almost a part of them.

I find the best way to relax is to indulge in my favourite hobby, Pool. I find this therapeutic because this is something I do well, something I enjoy and something that makes me move my effort into something that I do purely for myself, under no pressure from anyone. I also use relaxation tapes to help intensify my relaxation to levels I could not have otherwise.

If you are not used to relaxing, then using a relaxation CD will probably work well for you. You can choose when you use the material, therefore you are in control and can give your all to putting that time to good use. The benefits will surprise you, and it will likely become an important part of your life as you enjoy the benefits. Hopefully you should see yourself become calmer, and better at carrying out your daily tasks.

Ensure that you always prepare the correct conditions for using a relaxation product. Certainly you should never use a relaxation CD whilst driving or in any area where you could subject yourself to danger. I only use them in the house where I can lie down and know I am safe. As you begin to put maximum effort into relaxing in the right conditions, you will see the benefits.

You will be far more productive if you stop worrying, relax and let the positive effects transfer into real self development.