Successful Blog

Productivity and Focus: Avoid Relationship Detours in a Pay-It-Forward World

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Relationship Detours on the Road to Success

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Monday morning seems a good time to realign our focus, set new goals, dig in and get going on the week. How long does it take before something happens and you find you’ve been pulled off your path?

Avoid Relationship Detours?

A strong reason for deciding where we’re going and what we want to build, make happen, or become is that if we don’t chart out our own true path, other people will. Even after we decide on our destination — the mission and vision that will propel our business or our life — our own true nature can pull us away from that true path.

One of the coolest things about the internet is the community ethic that we’re here to help. I figure it comes from the fact that statistically we’re more alike than different.

  • We all have access to the internet.
  • We all can communicate in text
  • We all use the same tools to do that

Sometimes we even agree on what the tools can do for the world.

Productivity and Focus: Avoid Relationship Detours in a Pay-It-Forward World

Now we’ve started to move that social business ethic into the larger world. Whether we work at home, with a team, or for a company we love, contributing to the community is part of our own success. That community ethic makes it easy to reach out to new people who join us. We want to keep the culture that we’ve come to know and value. So why not show them how it works? Someone helped us when we got here. It’s a pay-it-forward world.

The downside of that can be relationship detours.

  • Are you so busy helping other folks that you’ve lost your own way?
  • Do ideas and projects that other folks propose take you away from your personal goals?
  • Do you spend more time on other folks’ success than your own?

Helping is good, but doing is necessary to get to where we want to go. You have to know where you’re going to know who to help. Time is a limited resource and focus is key to achieving our goals. So, when you choose to help, ask yourself if you’re extending the most help to people who are heading on a similar path. Then the help you give can be part of your learning, expertise, and growing skill sets.

And when folks expect you to set aside your own productivity to focus on theirs, remember that sometimes the most useful help is to show someone how to find the answers rather than to offer a hand.

Be generous with your time.
Share your expertise with abandon.
Help others achieve their goals without expecting something in return.
But know how to decline when what someone asks you will detour too far or too long off your true path.

How do you decide who gets your time and your help?

Knowing where you’re going in irresistible.
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

The ABCs of Scheduling

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Rosemary O’Neill

The ABCs of Scheduling

You can burn the candle at both ends, but eventually you end up in the dark with no candle.
Therefore, one of the most important skills a business owner can have is the ability to take control of the schedule.

A-Always. B-Be. C-Calendaring.

(Apologies to David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.)

Get out in front of your schedule

One of the most embarrassing incidents of my life was in high school (aren’t they all). I was Junior Class President, riding high, and responsible for putting together the whole-school Spring Dance. Unfortunately I was also a world-class procrastinator. Let’s just end this sad tale by saying that there was no Spring Dance, for the first time in years. Picture a 16 year old girl fielding phone calls from angry parents who had bought dresses for their 16 year old girls.

That humbling experience made me a goal-setting, calendar-keeping nut.

Use the calendar tools that work for you

If you don’t wrangle the calendar, and your daily events, it will wrangle you. Here are a few tips for scheduling sanity:

Take advantage of your natural rhythms – Liz recently posted about kicking in your peak productivity time. Don’t try to work against your body, if you’re an early riser, schedule accordingly.

Have a central, master calendar – I use Google Calendar for everything, and have it synced to all of my devices. You can make different colored sub-calendars for various aspects of your life, too. I have an editorial calendar, family and kid activities, business meetings, birthdays, and personal development time displayed together in one master calendar.

Tell people how you want them to schedule with you – If you use an online appointment system like Tungle.me, or you have a virtual assistant, let people know how to get on your calendar. Ideally, you don’t even have to be directly involved. The key is to use only one mechanism.

Start your month, week, and day with the calendar – Everyone should master the art of visualization. When you start out by planning and picturing how the month, week, or day is going to go, you’re already ahead of the game. Put aside sacred time (yes, put it on the calendar too) that you will use to prepare your mind for what’s ahead.

What’s on your calendar this week? How can you start making next week look even more productive for your business?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Keep Time Working … For You

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Keeping Time

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I think my life has sped up in the last few years.
Do you feel the same way?

Things that need doing seem to pile up faster.
Things I want to do keep coming up more quickly too.
Are you having the same experience?

These days I think of time off as the luxury of time to do what I want to.
And I ease into Mondays with ideas of keeping time working for me.

Keep Time Working For You

Time is flexible. We can waste time, spend time, invest time, have a good time, even use time to plan how we’ll use it. We’ve been know to stretch time and cram things into it. Some people actually speak of killing time. Why would you do that? The only thing we can’t do is get more of it. Twenty-four hours in a day is what we get no matter what we do with it.

I’ve spent some time considering the time I spend when I’m feeling like I don’t have enough of it.

If you want to know what you value, look where you spend your time and who you spend it with.

We Make Time for Things Important to Us

Here are a few truths about time that I’ve become aware of. You should too if you want to keep time working for you.

  • We make time for the things we know are important.
  • We find time for the things we want to do.
  • We use time to find things that will save us time. Sometimes using up the time we had do it whatever we would have been doing.
  • If we can’t find time to do something, we don’t value it as much as what we’re already doing.
  • When we take time for ourselves, we’re not so tight on the time we spend on others.

Time is the only resource we can’t renew. We need to use it while we have the time to. Time well invested gets us closer to the people we care about. When we spend time focused on what the relationships, projects, and businesses we’re building, we build them better.

This week, before time gets away from you, take a few moments to choose one goal that’s important to you. Decide to focus your attention for a set amount of time each day on that important goal and see what happens. Quality time focused in that single direction will have an exponential effect. But you knew you.

Be aware of the things you’re doing and the time you’re spending doing it.
Are you spending your time on what you value?

How do you keep time working for you?

It’s irresistible to be generous with your time.
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

5 Ways to Leverage Other People’s Success to Fuel Victories of Your Own

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A Good Wheel Already Exists.

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I had a problem with my computer. The operating systems wouldn’t recognize the CD-DVD player. Every time I tried to reinstall the drivers, I received an error stating that my attempt to install the drivers was unsuccessful. I put to work my problem-solving skills. I tried various and sundry fixes. I approached it from every direction I knew.

The situation went on for a few days — or was it weeks — until a day came that I needed to use the CD-DVD for a project. I was serious now. Again I tried in my usual problem solving approach. Then, when I’d decided the whole endeavor was taking too much time, I turned to Google asked the question. Found an answer. It worked. I did a victory dance and moved on.

The I remembered something I already knew. The kind of common sense that we commonly forget.

The answer had been waiting while I suffered though all if my testing and trials. I’d been thinking that I had to do everything alone, solve every problem myself. I’d ignored perfectly good answers.

Never let a good thing pass you by. Charlize Theron.

I’d been letting those good answers pass me by, because they weren’t my own.

5 Ways to Leverage Other People’s Success to Fuel Victories of Your Own

Now, let’s be clear, I’m not proposing that we shift the burden of doing our own work to someone else. When other people hand us their work, we don’t learn. Rather, I’m suggesting that we take advantage of work that’s available to help yourself. Leverage the success of other people to reach success of your own.

Many people have discovered answers to the problems we’re facing, with a little creativity in our thinking we can save time and get to successful solutions by finding out what they did. When we find their solutions and apply them to our problems we still learn, but with fewer random guesses along the way.

Here are 5 Ways to leverage other people’s success to fuel victories of your own .

  1. use Google to find an established model or solution. See who’s solved the problem or built a process already.
  2. Ask your networks, including Linkedin, Quora, and Twitter, WWhat’s your best advice for doing this?

    3. When people answer be sure to explore what doesn’t work too.

  3. Look at how the “big guys” do it. Email several people who are more experienced than you are. Ask each to answer the same question — one that gets to the solution you’re trying to find. Compile and publish their answers into a single blog post so that others looking for that solution find you.
  4. Look at how it’s done in other domains and other industries. Ask yourself, How would a mathematician, a scientist, a painter, a dancer, a chef approach this problem? What other industries
  5. Find a mentor, join a community, or take a class. Experience is hard won and valued by those who’ve earned it. It’s hard to top the feeling of being asked to share what we’ve learned. Give someone that great feeling by choosing an experienced teacher, mentor, or friend and Inviting him or her to asking them the

Time IS money. Knowing how is good. Knowing how to find the answer quickly save time. When we need an answer to what we might never need to know again it’s time to leverage other people’s success to fuel our own victories. Getting help with problems that are peripheral can keep us focused on what we truly need to learn. Getting help with what we truly need to learn can keep us moving forward toward our most important goals.

Put the two together — focus on what we need to learn and moving forward is powerful fuel for a business, a career, and a life.
Leveraging other people’s success can make our work easier, faster, and more meaningful. And you know those are keys to unliking the irresistible.

Bet you know more ways to leverage other people’s success to fuel your own. Will you share them?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Is Social Noise Unraveling Your Quest?

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Social Noise Steals the Fuel to Do Extraordinary Stuff

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When I was a kid, I wasn’t looking for my direction. No one said to follow my passion. I was a kid. I was on a quest to be extraordinary.

When I was a kid, I wasn’t bombarded with information from every dimension. My social circle was small. Now I have more social network passwords than the number of connections I had when I was kid.

Everyone seems to doing more than I am. Everything seems to be growing faster than anyone could manage to follow. Conversations bifurcate, trifurcate, and splinter off in bit and pieces. Sorting value from spam isn’t always a case of checking whether it came from a friend.

Ideas get kicked around like a soccer ball on the field where I hang out. I’m following echoes down trap of social media noise and deafening conversation straining to hear what my friends are saying.

In the process, I’m losing my own voice.
And the social noise is unraveling my passion one thread at time.
Sheer exhaustion steals the inspiration and the direction that I had when the day began.

Is Social Noise Unraveling Your Quest?

It’s a challenge to stay calm when the screen is always updating and we’re always chasing the next link or headline that shows up. Curiosity takes fuel to run. And every generous spirit who does a good turn or sends a good wish seems to be calling us to return a good one now then. Do you find that after some time on Twitter or Facebook, your head needs a long, cool transition? It only makes sense that all of that fragmented data makes a brain want some time to sort.

The social interaction can undermine the strongest determination we have to move forward by using it all just to keep up with what’s going on. Is social noise unraveling your quest?

Do you lose track of the kid in you who wants to do extraordinary stuff?

Here’s my recipe for getting past the noise and distraction and back to doing extraordinary stuff.

I turn it off.

In a minute of silence, I remember my quest.
When I look out the window or stand and stretch, it gets easier to tune into my resolve.
Knowing where you’re going is irresistibly attractive.
It also fuels the noble cause.

Passion needs direction, or it gets lost.

How do you keep the social noise from unraveling your quest?

Be irresistible.
–Me “Liz” Strauss

Kick in Peak Productivity Immediately to Win

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Great Weeks Reek of Productivity

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Ten days ago I offered a Productivity Checklist for the best way to end a Friday. Key to the process was setting up things at the end of day — ordering tasks by priority, putting things where you most often use them, and planning the first thing you’ll accomplish on Monday.

Did you try it? I thought perhaps not, but even if you set a plan that ended your Friday neatly and optimized Monday for productivity, take care that you don’t walk in to your workspace and undo all that you’ve set ready to start this week in a great way

Start with Peak Productivity

Being able to kick in peak productivity on a Monday or any other day is function of focus and few steps found in this checklist.

    1. Start your “real work” a hour later on Monday. Most folks don’t want to interact with you first thing Monday. Invest in yourself and your own productivity. Make a commitment reward yourself as soon as you accomplish the simple steps of this checklist. When possible, avoid setting up meetings before 10a.m.

    2. Allow yourself 10 minutes for an office check. Organize everything on your desk. Put things away. Lay out things that still need attending to. Are the things you use most closest to where you use them? If not, move them, so that they will be. Are the files you access most on your computer only one click away? If not, as you work, move them so that they will be.

    3. Allow 10 minutes more to scan your incoming email. Look long enough to know whether a dire emergency is waiting your response. Schedule a time in your calendar to answer the rest.

    4. Make a realistic plan for the week. Plan no more than 3 important tasks per day. Schedule no more than 5 hours of independent work. Leave 1 hour for your social networking investment. You’ll have the other two hours for the inevitable interruptions, phone calls, emails, and meetings that steal time during your day. If you find extra time at the end of the day, you can use it get ahead on tomorrow.

    5. Order tasks what you can get done fastest first. Two reasons support this: It starts you with a quick sense of accomplishment and you’re able to pass on what you’ve finished –which means that someone else can be starting on what was your task one as you move to your task two.

    6. If your habit is to get in early to stop by the water cooler or spend some time on Twitter, keep your investment working for you. Put fences around the time you’ll be spending getting inspired by socializing or you might find that it undoes your performance energy.

The biggest part of kicking in productivity is knowing what we want to do and when we want to get it done. Taking time in the morning to plan a productive day immediately can put us in the mindset to our world flying high for the win!

Whether your workspace is in another building or in your kitchen, you’ll find that peak productivity will kick once you’ve outlined the tasks you want to accomplish in a realistic fashion that fits that time you have to do them. Once you get into the habit, you might find that a 30-Minute Strike Force Strategy may be enough to keep you going.

What’s your best tip to kick in peak productivity immediately?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Work with Liz on your business!!