#personalproductivity

Here's a video summary of this post. (If the link in the video points back to this page, it means the next blog post isn't ready yet!)

https://youtu.be/Mk5o_oDIsIc

Most small business owners feel overwhelmed and far too busy. We're always looking for a way resolve this and achieve both "success" and a good work-life balance. There are serious health issues involved here.

But we're caught in a dilemma. And this dilemma is almost insurmountable for single person online businesses. In a nutshell, the dilemma is the reality of these two facts:

Fact 1: You MUST be highly systematized and organized to maximize the use of your time - which is essential for success. Fact 2: You're FAR TOO BUSY to spend the time needed to set up your systems and organizational processes.

Here's the longer version of the TOO BUSY argument.

The resources you need to run a single-person online business amount to about 2-3 people if you want to do everything properly. And you HAVE to do everything properly if you want to maximize your chances of success.

So unless you can afford to hire people, your only option is to do everything you can to increase your own personal efficiency. That means being as organised and systematic as you can possibly be. Of course, it does NOT mean that you ignore the creative elements of running a business.

But if you want to be organised and systematic, you need to have very well defined processes and systems in place.

Unfortunately, THAT means adding a very large area of work to your already impossible workload: creating and maintaining your business and personal efficiency systems.

What do I mean by that? Here are the general areas...

Managing all your business records

Documenting all your business processes (and linking them to your business records)

Keeping track of all "business assets" that you download and store on your hard drive

Keeping track of all "business assets" that you create and store either on your hard drive or online

Managing your time, your tasks and your priorities

Keeping track of, and documenting, the multiple work streams that you're working on simultaneously - many of which can last for several weeks or more

I think you get the picture. Pretty much everyone is going to feel too busy to sort all that out!

Let me give you one concrete example: testing and tracking

An online business lives or dies by the effectiveness of its testing and tracking. Unless you're extremely lucky, any marketing campaign you create is unlikely to be as successful as you would like. Indeed, if you don't have much online experience it's very likely to be completely unsuccessful. Now that doesn't mean you abandon the whole thing right away. It means you test it and tweak it until it DOES become successful. Or until you have enough evidence to justify abandoning it.

When you're testing the effectiveness of a campaign, there are many things to test so that you know which parts are successful and which need adjusting. Usually, that means using different tools and systems to access the different statistics about the campaign. For example, your funnel builder, autoresponder, link tracker, Google Analytics, social media stats, form manager, sales processor etc.

That can become a very time consuming activity which you need to do on a regular basis. And you need to remember the whole process every time you execute it, and you need to store the results in a systematic way. And you need to remember to do it regularly.

Everything included

Notice that that absolutely critical activity for online marketers - testing and tracking  includes nearly all the above areas that I mentioned:

Managing business records: the tracking data which you gather.

Documenting business processes: how you go about measuring the performance of each part of the campaign.

Keeping track of "business assets": the funnels and pages and forms and lists and products and lead magnets and tracking links and affiliate programs and social media accounts and sales processors.

Managing your time, your tasks and your priorities: ensuring you are reminded to perform the testing activity regularly.

Keeping track of, and documenting, the multiple work streams that you're working on simultaneously: tracking the performance of a campaign is only one part of the larger workstream of testing and improving. You also need to decide what to adjust, document it and monitor the results.

It's hardly surprising  that most single-person entrepreneurs ignore this entirely, or do it half-heartedly, because it's so complex and time-consuming.

An impossible dilemma

This is an impossible dilemma.

UNLESS you can find more-or-less READY-MADE organizational systems that you can simply pick-up and use. In particular, you want systems designed specifically for online marketers (or people using online marketing in the business). Systems which only need a bit of simple configuration before you can use them - rather you having to design them from scratch.

The good news is that I have a bit of history in exactly that area. I'll say more about it, and my plans for how I could help you resolve this dilemma, in my next post.

 Do YOU feel too busy to stop being too busy? Let me know in the comments section below and stay tuned!

 The follow-up post to this is: 7 Reasons Why We Need Systems And Processes

 And make sure you sign up to my newsletter to get digital marketing tips and, especially, notification of new blog posts.

Here's a video summary of this post. (If the link in the video points back to this page, it means the next blog post isn't ready yet!)

https://youtu.be/Mk5o_oDIsIc

Most small business owners feel overwhelmed and far too busy. We're always looking for a way resolve this and achieve both "success" and a good work-life balance. There are serious health issues involved here.

But we're caught in a dilemma. And this dilemma is almost insurmountable for single person online businesses. In a nutshell, the dilemma is the reality of these two facts:

Fact 1: You MUST be highly systematized and organized to maximize the use of your time - which is essential for success. Fact 2: You're FAR TOO BUSY to spend the time needed to set up your systems and organizational processes.

Here's the longer version of the TOO BUSY argument.

The resources you need to run a single-person online business amount to about 2-3 people if you want to do everything properly. And you HAVE to do everything properly if you want to maximize your chances of success.

So unless you can afford to hire people, your only option is to do everything you can to increase your own personal efficiency. That means being as organised and systematic as you can possibly be. Of course, it does NOT mean that you ignore the creative elements of running a business.

But if you want to be organised and systematic, you need to have very well defined processes and systems in place.

Unfortunately, THAT means adding a very large area of work to your already impossible workload: creating and maintaining your business and personal efficiency systems.

What do I mean by that? Here are the general areas...

Managing all your business records

Documenting all your business processes (and linking them to your business records)

Keeping track of all "business assets" that you download and store on your hard drive

Keeping track of all "business assets" that you create and store either on your hard drive or online

Managing your time, your tasks and your priorities

Keeping track of, and documenting, the multiple work streams that you're working on simultaneously - many of which can last for several weeks or more

I think you get the picture. Pretty much everyone is going to feel too busy to sort all that out!

Let me give you one concrete example: testing and tracking

An online business lives or dies by the effectiveness of its testing and tracking. Unless you're extremely lucky, any marketing campaign you create is unlikely to be as successful as you would like. Indeed, if you don't have much online experience it's very likely to be completely unsuccessful. Now that doesn't mean you abandon the whole thing right away. It means you test it and tweak it until it DOES become successful. Or until you have enough evidence to justify abandoning it.

When you're testing the effectiveness of a campaign, there are many things to test so that you know which parts are successful and which need adjusting. Usually, that means using different tools and systems to access the different statistics about the campaign. For example, your funnel builder, autoresponder, link tracker, Google Analytics, social media stats, form manager, sales processor etc.

That can become a very time consuming activity which you need to do on a regular basis. And you need to remember the whole process every time you execute it, and you need to store the results in a systematic way. And you need to remember to do it regularly.

Everything included

Notice that that absolutely critical activity for online marketers - testing and tracking  includes nearly all the above areas that I mentioned:

Managing business records: the tracking data which you gather.

Documenting business processes: how you go about measuring the performance of each part of the campaign.

Keeping track of "business assets": the funnels and pages and forms and lists and products and lead magnets and tracking links and affiliate programs and social media accounts and sales processors.

Managing your time, your tasks and your priorities: ensuring you are reminded to perform the testing activity regularly.

Keeping track of, and documenting, the multiple work streams that you're working on simultaneously: tracking the performance of a campaign is only one part of the larger workstream of testing and improving. You also need to decide what to adjust, document it and monitor the results.

It's hardly surprising  that most single-person entrepreneurs ignore this entirely, or do it half-heartedly, because it's so complex and time-consuming.

An impossible dilemma

This is an impossible dilemma.

UNLESS you can find more-or-less READY-MADE organizational systems that you can simply pick-up and use. In particular, you want systems designed specifically for online marketers (or people using online marketing in the business). Systems which only need a bit of simple configuration before you can use them - rather you having to design them from scratch.

The good news is that I have a bit of history in exactly that area. I'll say more about it, and my plans for how I could help you resolve this dilemma, in my next post.

 Do YOU feel too busy to stop being too busy? Let me know in the comments section below and stay tuned!

 The follow-up post to this is: 7 Reasons Why We Need Systems And Processes

 And make sure you sign up to my newsletter to get digital marketing tips and, especially, notification of new blog posts.

Nice entry about high bandwidth communication VS interruptions in a team war room.

--> Is the “Caves and Common” idea the solution?  #teamRoom

I remember when non-IT people laugh at me when I say I chat with people in my office. There is a reason for every communication medium ;-)

As mentioned in Scott Adams keynote http://gfader.tumblr.com/post/167151685329/why-are-goals-for-losers-and-passion-overrated --> luck can be managed. 

To me this means the following:

Increase your perception. 

Observe others, Observe yourself

Reflect 

Have a positive attitude

Try to change your perspective

Empathize

Derren Brown has a TV show called “The Experiments” where he dove into “The Secret of Luck"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4mN33w5Ftw 45min

The TV show observed this in the people of the town:

They are willing to take more risks

They stick to doing something longer than they normally do 

They concentrate better

Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) gives a 25-minute talk at IBM Connect 2014 on the topic of success, based on his new book: “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big”

3 major topics included:

Goals are for losers

Passion is overrated

Luck can be managed (sort of)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7Rid9cI6AI   25min 

Q:Why should you ask your haters for a favor? A: Because of the “Benjamin Franklin Effect”.

Some great bits of the blog post:

Attitude: Attitude is the psychological term for the bundle of beliefs and feelings you experience toward a person, topic, idea, etc. without having to consciously think.

...

The things you do often create the things you believe.

.....

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”  Kurt Vonnegut

Self-perception theory says your attitudes are shaped by observing your own behavior, being unable to pinpoint the cause, and trying to make sense of it.

....

The Benjamin Franklin Effect is the result of your concept of self-coming under attack. Every person develops a persona, and that persona persists because inconsistencies in your personal narrative get rewritten, redacted and misinterpreted. If you are like most people, you have high self-esteem and tend to believe you are above average in just about every way. It keeps you going, keeps your head above water, so when the source of your own behavior is mysterious you will confabulate a story which paints you in a positive light.

...

Above all, remember the more harm you cause, the more hate you feel, and the more kindness you deal into the world the more you come to love the people you help.