Goal Setting
Aside from the fact that I’m not much of a football fan, the problem I have with goal seeting is that I just don’t know where to stop.
What do I want? Everything
When do I want it? Now!
So my list of goals just keeps getting longer and longer and I start to feel overwhelmed and end up not achieving anything at all. Not very productive is it? Goals are a good thing so I need to learn how to deal with them more constructively. Instead of just an endless list of what I want to achieve I need some kind of action plan with achievable targets. I must stop myself trying to do everything at once and getting burnt out as a result.
There must be a knack to it, I just need to figure out what it is.
Goal!
Just had a real ‘durr!’ moment. I was searching our library catalogue for keyword ‘goals’. Was looking for some books on goal setting, achieving your goals … that type of thing. What did I find? Pages and pages of books about football. Took me ages to figure out why. I’m obviously not feeling very bright tonight - my excuse is that I’ve been suffering with a cold all week.
Fighting the fatigue
Two weeks since I lasted posted, that’s not good. Does that mean my good intentions immediately went out the window? Well, not entirely I hope. The last couple of weeks have mostly been more of the same (work, work, work) but there have been two noteworthy events:
- We’ve arranged for someone to come to us for four hours a week to help out with admin (yay!)
- We’ve had an approach which might result in us having the backing to do a project that we’ve been thinking of for a while (all very hush-hush at the moment, but it could be exciting stuff)
My latest ‘personal development’ project is to see if I can do something about my energy levels. I don’t know what it is but for the last couple of weeks I’ve been feeling really tired all the time. Could just be the time of year I suppose. Anyway, on Saturday I picked up a book on GI from the library and have few other books on various energy-related subjects on order. The GI thing is all very convincing in theory but this one seems to think that you should have time to cook three times a day. Yeah right! I’ll have to see what I can get out of it without necessarily following the eating plans to the letter.
Running off to join a circus
I’m thinking of running off and joining a circus. What do you think? I’ve been doing so much juggling this week that I’m sure I’d make an excellent clown. Seriously though, it’s one of the skills you need to run a business isn’t it … juggling that is? There’s never just one thing to do and it’s impossible to ever sit down and just work solidly on something because there are always interruptions. It’s just one of those things when you run a business.
The trick I guess is to keep all those balls up in the air without getting phased and dropping any of them. Can I claim to be able to do that? Not always entirely successfully. Especially towards the end of the day when I’m just trying to tie things up for the day but people keep popping up with more things for me to do/sort out. But on the whole I do think I’m pretty good at it. I can keep quite a lot of information in my head at one time so that if I get an enquiry about something I have a pretty good idea of where we are with it. I’ve also been developing various ways of dealing with things - spreadsheets for tracking projects etc. and something as simple as making a list if the ‘urgent’ tasks seem to be mounting up and I feel myself loosing my cool a bit.
Has anyone else got any good techniques for coping with multiple tasks under pressure?
A more positive start to the year
When I blogged yesterday I think I was feeling a bit disparaged by what I’d discovered in our finances. It’s certainly not all bad but let’s say there’s definitely room for improvement. I often get frustrated by the feeling that we’re not moving forward - I work incredibly hard but the business can feel like it’s just standing still.
However, later on after a bit more thought (and a small glass of whisky which may have helped) my fighting spirit kicked in and I decided that 2009 is going to be the year that we turn things around. So there! I know what I want to achieve and have the beginnings of how I’m going to achieve it, so it’s now just a case of knuckling down and doing it.
I think my motto for the next few months will have to be “don’t be afraid of a bit of hard work”. Is it possible for me to work harder than I was already doing? Let’s see, shall we?
New year, new me?
I suspect not. Still the same Emily, still dreaming of running a successful business and having a comfortable lifestyle. After a month of no blogging I’m back determined to post regularly - I’m not going to promise every day but at least a couple of times a week.
We’ve actually been having quite a long break over the Christmas period. We stopped work on the 19th December and are opening for business again on the 5th January. And, miraculously, I’ve mostly managed to keep away from work. Hopefully this will mean that I’ll have lots of energy for the coming weeks.
Over the last couple of days I’ve been easing myself back into a work frame of mind by updating our accounts and reviewing our incomings and outgoings for this financial year. I’ve found some good things and some not so good things. We’re getting to the point where we really need to start taking more money out of the business, but unfortunately things aren’t looking too brilliant on that front. So, the next few months are going to be all about turning things around and seriously improving our turnover. Could be interesting…
Need more time!
Another week whizzed by. Absolutely chocka-block with work at the moment. If I had more time I’d be reading up on time management … and a bit of stress management thrown in. I’m working really hard at planning each day and week to keep on top of everything. I think it’s working to a certain extent, the job list is long but I don’t think it’s getting any longer, which must be a good sign.
The weekend is going to be spent catching up on coursework. Got the next instalment of my management course on Tuesday so need to do some stuff for that. Hope I’ll also have time to do a bit of actual management of our business - see what an impact our busyness is having, apart from making me work flat-out. Oh yes, and mustn’t forget to fit in a bit of relaxation.
Very satisfying day
For once I’m not going to complain about not having a productive day or not getting through as much as I’d wanted. Today was a good day! I planned out my day carefully, choosing A, B and C tasks for the day (A being essential, B desirable and C nice to get done) and worked through them. I think this is the first time that this has ever happened but I got through everything on the list and even made a start on some things I had earmarked for tomorrow. How satisfying is that?
I think the secret was that I’d estimated how long each task would take and planned 4 hours of billable work. I must be getting better at this because for once things took less than I’d estimated rather than more. So, even with interruptions I still managed to get through everything. I’ll have more days like that please!
Brilliant mind mapping tool
I made a real find yesterday morning and haven’t been able to stop playing with it since. It’s free mind mapping software. We were talking about mind mapping on the course on Tuesday and that inspired me to have a go, but not being that great with pen and paper (have lost the ability to write because I use the computer too much) I thought I’d see if there is a way of doing it on the computer. An lo and behold there is!
It’s a really quick download (just 8MB) and took literally seconds to install, so very lightweight. It basically works just like doing a mindmap on paper - you start with a central point and then work out, branching in whichever direction you want. If your map starts getting a bit on the big side (which my first one did) you can open and close the various ‘nodes’ (the bits branching off) so you can see everything or just the parent node. It’s fab. What I particularly liked about it was that I wasn’t limited to what would fit on a sheet of paper - if I’d tried to do my mind map on paper I would soon have run out of room, but this just lets you keep going. You can export in various formats (PDF, JPEG etc.) so that you can then use the resulting map in other documents.
So, having installed it for the first time yesterday morning I did a mind map of our business (that was a bigun), a mind map of what I needed to do that day (which I then kept up on the screen and ticked things off as I did them, lovely 
), and a couple of mind maps to work out the structure of client websites, one of which we PDFed and sent to the client to have a look at. Talk about being instantly useful!
Not the most productive day
Despite all my good intentions I didn’t have such a productive day as I hoped yesterday. I went to Penzance as planned, did the banking and picked up a few bits and pieces. Then back to the office for work. The morning went quite well, concentrated on getting the things done that definitely needed doing that day and also some of the quicker jobs to get them ticked off.
Then after lunch I decided to have a lie down for half an hour … 2 hours later a I woke up. Ooops. There went the best part of the afternoon. I guess it goes to show how tired I was but it wasn’t great for productivity. Means I’m going to have to work extra hard today to get through everything. I’m hoping to take tomorrow off but it’s not looking too likely at the moment.
