I spend a lot of time talking to friends and clients about time management and pre-planning; because you never know what can happen and leaving things to last minute can lead to disaster.
Don’t get me wrong sometimes a last minute quick and dirty solution can work, but it’s never the highest quality of work. It’s never the thing you’re most proud of. It’s just a way to get out of a tough situation and this week I found out how important my own preplanning is!
My plan this week was to hit the ground running. I spent a lot of December making plans for all the great things I was going to do come January 2019 and already had a calendar full of meetings and pre-work for training and talks scheduled for the first quarter of the year.
Instead, I am lying in my bed recovering from eye surgery with strict instructions to move from side to side every hour and while I am VERY bored, I’m not panicking because I have a plan.
I set my yearly, quarterly and monthly outcomes, so while I’ve had to move things around a bit, I can still move forward with my business.
To ensure that life’s little challenges don’t put the breaks on your business, here are 5 tips to help you:
Set clear objectives for your day, week and month - with milestones dates for each element, so that you don’t leave things to the last minute.
Allow extra time to complete your tasks - It’s easy to commit to a quick turnaround, but giving yourself an extra day allows for interruptions (key for me in the HR space where urgencies often pop up).
Don’t try to complete tasks in one sitting - planning in time to sit and review your work can be the difference between an A and a C (or a repeat customer rather than a one off).
Build your team, it’s important not to be a single point of failure. Work with others so that they can take the reins if you are unable too.
Learn from things that don’t go well. It’s always good to review how a project went and work out how it could be done better the next time. I have templates and process flows for some tasks, to help things run smoothly and ensure my knowledge isn’t all contained in my mind.
Using the tips above, I've been able to have a couple of strategy calls today and activate voice recognition on my laptop to write some content, while sticking to my recovery instructions.
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