Outsourcing Definition – What Is Outsourcing?
Have you ever wondered what the outsourcing definition is?
As entrepreneur, you’ve probably more than likely come across the term outsourcing by now and it can sort of be frustrating figuring all this out.
I’ll share with you a few outsourcing definition that I found, then I’ll share with you the way I think of it.
According to Dictionary.com, it says:
“Outsource” can be used as a verb (used with object), outsourced, outsourcing.
- (of a company or organization) to purchase (goods) or subcontract(services) from an outside supplier or source.
- to contract out (jobs, services, etc.): a small business that outsources bookkeeping to an accounting firm. verb (used without object), outsourced, outsourcing.
- to obtain goods or services from an outside source: “U.S. companies who outsource from China.”
The Business Dictionary says:
Amongst them, twenty five http://www.icks.org/html/02_advisory.php cialis prescription online percent are over sixty years of age. Ladies and men can utilize viagra cialis online Shakti Prash similarly with no symptoms. They may also preclude the discharge of egg and cause abnormal expel of egg of the cipla generic viagra fallopian tube. Studies have demonstrated that IUI viagra ordination http://icks.org/n/bbs/content.php?co_id=Programs&mcode=10&smcode=1040 in combination with medications that have nitroglycerin as an ingredient.
The contracting or subcontracting of noncore activities to free up cash, personnel, time, and facilities for activities in which a company holds competitive advantage. Companies having strengths in other areas may contract out data processing, legal, manufacturing, marketing, payroll accounting, or other aspects of their businesses to concentrate on what they do best and thus reduce average unit cost. Outsourcing is often an integral part of downsizing or reengineering. Also called contracting out.
Finally here are a few relevant excerpts that I found on Wikipedia
In business, outsourcing involves the contracting out of a business process to another party (compare business process outsourcing). The term “outsourcing” dates back to at least 1981. Outsourcing sometimes involves transferring employees and assets from one firm to another, but not always.
Outsourcing includes both foreign and domestic contracting, and sometimes includes offshoring (relocating a business function to another country). Financial savings from lower international labor rates can provide a major motivation for outsourcing/offshoring.
Outsourcing Definition
From what I gathered, the “outsourcing definition” is pretty much an extension of the “outsource definition” and the way I define outsourcing is that basically if you’re starting up your business and don’t have employees yet, the tasks that you can’t do or don’t have time to do you delegate to someone else through hiring an outsourcing firm or hiring an independent contractor, also known as a virtual worker.
This also works if you are a big company, you can outsource specialized tasks that are only temporary, hence why you can’t justify hiring a full time employee just for that.
So again, my definition of outsourcing is pretty much to get someone else, better qualified than you to get the job done on a per contract basis. It could be for a day like it could be for a month, you decide.
If you’d like to get more information on outsourcing, I invite you to watch this free 59 minute webinar. In there you’ll learn how an engineer was able to get 25 hours worth of work done in a 24 hour period while working is 50 hours/week job.
What about you, what is your outsourcing definition?
What Is Transcription & How Can It Help My Business?
You’ve probably heard of transcription services before and now you’re asking yourself: “What is transcription?” According to Wikipedia:
“A transcription service is a business which converts speech (either live or recorded) into a written or electronic text document.” It also says: “The most common type of transcription is from a spoken-language source into text such as a computer file suitable for printing as a document such as a report.”
In a nutshell a transcription service is a company for hire that listens to your audio or video and type what they hear into a document.
Once you hire that company you send your audio or video files and the transcription service provider get’s one of their employees called “transcribers” to transcribe your video or audio. Once the transcribing process is complete, the typed up file is sent back to you.
What Is Transcription & How Can It Help My Business?
Now that you know what is transcription, let’s look at how it can help your business. On the internet, one of the motto is: “Content Is King!”. That’s because content is like a form of currency, it’s a form value, and the more value you’ve got out there on the World Wide Web, the more it will give you credibility, social status, recognition and sales.
As entrepreneurs often time is the limited resource that we don’t want waste and got to leverage as much as possible. It happens to us all the time that we have a telephone conversation with someone answering all kind of questions, could be thirty minutes to an hour or more. Then once that’s done, you’ve helped one person but no more, it’s not an efficient way to maximise helping lots of people.
As a result, it became the drug of choice for viagra fast anyone looking for some extra help. Men are unable to soft tabs viagra make love passionately with sore body and mind. There is no regulatory cheap sildenafil body for them. Kali Mirch improves blood flow to the reproductive organs and balances hormones resulting to a regular menstrual cycle. http://robertrobb.com/2017/09/ order generic cialis
What if, you’ve used a free conference call system that already exists to record your telephone conversation? Not only would you have a recorded audio file of your conversation but you could also send it for transcription and turn that into either a blog post, a special report, an FAQ.
What I mean is that from one piece of work that you normally do, you can leverage that into three difference piece of content that targets different channels of distribution, live interaction, audio podcasting, blogging and finally you can turn your audio and word document into a presentation video for your video marketing purposes.
Now word of caution thought, if you do record your call, make sure the other party consents to it and reassure them that if there are any sensitive information that you will remove it through your sanitizing process.
I do it all the time, if someone asks me for advice over the telephone I’ll let them know: “Hey if you don’t mind I’d like to record our conversation so I can use the information I give you to help other people.” It’s a win-win situation, they get to have my advice and in exchange I get to use their questions and my answers to create new piece of content.
All those extra piece of content possible because you hired a transcriber. Here are some great reputable companies that offer this kind of service: CastingWords.com, Rev.com, VerbalInk.com, WayWithWords.net and SpeechPad.com.
Hopefully this “What Is Transcription & How Can It Help My Business” article gave you some insights. What about you, in which other creative ways will you get audio content from?
Project Management Software Free & Paid
Before I jump into the project management software free & paid options, I just want to address the following question: “What is project management?”
Project management is about getting things done on a specific deadline. It’s the whole process from start to finish of planning the outcome, figuring out milestone & deadlines, breaking down the project in tasks and assigning those tasks to your team.
The help of project management tools can really help keeping track of the whole process. Under the free project management software category you can think of the web based tool from Trello.com. Imagine a giant whiteboard with post-it notes that you can move back and forth, Trello is basically that but electronically.
If you prefer having something on your own servers, you can install the open source project collaboration tool from ProjectPier.org. This requires more technical knowhow but it’s free.
On the paid side one of the software that you’ve probably already heard of is Microsoft Outlook, its got a lot functionalities to create to do lists, tasks, calendars, etc.
If you’re looking more for a web based, in the cloud so to speak, then take a closer look at Basecamp.com for its simplicity & ease of use or ActiveCollab.com for its extra added capabilities, like measuring time taken to do a task or track billable time.
Caverta is very popular sildenafil online canada in treating impotency in men. Red Ginseng: Asian Red Ginseng is proven for its potential effectiveness for treating men with erectile cialis tadalafil 5mg dysfunction. Always combine them with right exercises and diets. levitra 40 mg cute-n-tiny.com You can find reputable online pharmacies by looking for online reviews as well as seeing if their website looks professional. free viagra pill
These two companies are some of the top choices for paid online project collaboration and management and are used by some of the big players out there like Nike, Twitter, Nasa have used Basecamp and BBC, Adobe, Universal have used ActiveCollab.
Project Management Continued
I often hear about people looking for the absolute best project management software that exist out there but that what most people fail to realize is that it’s very subjective. Each different software bring their own qualities and you should try or explore them to figure out what works best for you and your organization.
I personally like to use Trello because I can see everything at a glance, it’s available in the cloud and you can have access to it from any device and your computer.
What about you, which one do you think you’ll like the best and why?
Autoblog, Automation & Autoposting
Autoblog, automation & autoposting can be a huge time saver when trying to maintain and operate your own blog.
You have to keep updating your sites with a minimum of weekly content in order to help keep rank in the search engines.
You simply just don’t have enough time to write content every day because you’re busy doing something else; dealing with clients, your expertise, etc.
I get it, I also had phase where writing was not my main priority but I knew it still had to get done, which left me with a couple options.
First you could hire content writers, but the price of hiring someone can quickly add up. Maybe you’re just not there yet.
The other alternative is to set up an autoblog. A well set-up autoblog will post automatically to your website on a time frame that you chose (like daily, weekly, etc.) allowing you to step aside and focus on something else.
Some people even set up their autoblog with ads so when traffic starts to build up, some viewers click on the ads making the blog owner some money. Every autoblog that I know of are built on a WordPress Platform.
WordPress is free and is super customizable with all the plugins that you can get.
Autoblog, Automation & Autoposting Continued
Here are a few paid user friendly plugins or services that are very easy to set-up.
However, best price viagra may fail to help people suffering from illness or fatigue after a long tiring day, it is still best to invest on safer solutions like FDA-approved drugs. Also one must understand that taking viagra tablet without prescription is to buy the medicine online. Whenever people search online for a viable drug, they see the name of cheapest price for levitra pops up there. She didn’t want some anonymous sperm donor; she wanted this cialis usa online have a peek at this pharmacy shop man’s sperm.
WPRobot.net Goes into all the article directories, picks out the article you want based on keywords and places them on your site. They also automatically insert affiliate links once set-up.
AutoBlogged.com Takes RSS feeds you want based on keyword searches and turns them into a blog post for you site automatically.
ArticleBuilder.net Unlike the previous two, ArticleBuilder takes an article and spins automatically (which means changes all the words with synonyms) so all your post will have the same message but using different words make it unique in the eyes of the search engines. I use this service in a combination with another backlink tool on my secondary blog to create automated content and more backlinks to my main blog.
Now this last one is for super advanced techy users. It’s 100% free but the time you’ll need to figure out, well yeah, how much is your time worth? For me it was better to got with the ArticleBuilder.
Anyways, this one has an unlimited potential amount and it’s called Yahoo Pipes. This service allows you to create custom funnels of where you find your content, filter, allow or block specifics, mash it with other content and spit it out automatically where ever you want.
I’m telling you, there’s a lot of opportunities here but this is so complex, even me I have trouble figuring it out. I know of its potential but I just didn’t put the time to figure it out so if you do, let me know how you made it work for you.
Derek Banas from NewThinkTank.com has created a tutorial for this method but it’s still too time consuming for me.
Like I said, for me I chose simplicity with a paid service. Oh by the way, if you want to auto syndicate your published content to social medias, then check out my Social Media Management Nightmare article to learn how I handled that. Autoposting and auto syndicating are two different topics.
What about you, which service will you use for your autoblog?
Event Management and Online Registration Software
Event management can be a real pain. Don’t you hate it when you organize a paid event and then at the last minute a whole bunch of people just don’t show up and flake on you?
Like you’ve taken your own time and effort paid like $500 for something that would be split in ten so $50 dollars each then. You’re expecting your guest to show up and pay you cash before the event starts and next thing you know 3 don’t show up, which leaves the responsibility of the extra cost on you.
I hear your pain my friend, something that I’ve learned overtime is that when someone is excited and hot with scarcity involved, now is the time you’ve got to collect but when you’re speaking over the phone, it’s not that easy. Not everybody can take credit cards over the phone. Actually most people can’t.
Here was my first big event management opportunity that I had to organize and collect monies from. We had just featured our newly finished film EVOL in Hollywood. After winning the “Audience Choice Award”, it only made sense to bring back the movie home and have it projected at our hometown local screens in Ottawa. That’s right, my event management challenge was that I had to rent a movie theater to premier our film EVOL in Ottawa; our own city.
When you’re in your twenties, have a limited budget in your pockets, luck is not the kind of thing that you want to rely on by waiting until the night of the screening and hope for the best. You need to fill out a minimum amount of seats just to break even.
Because of prior experiences, a had a few tricks up my sleeves to make this event management opportunity run smoothly. First thing I did was to approach local companies to get sponsors to fund the event. Check!
People want to support a good cause and I said that we were a young generation, trying to make something out of ourselves and contribute back to society. We said we’d give 10% of our proceeds to our local charity The Ottawa Food Bank, which we did! If you promise something like that make sure you honor your word.
Now that I’ve had sponsors, the cost of the theater rental was fully covered putting a lot less stress on my shoulders.
I remember hearing about a cool event management registration software where people could pay online, upfront to reserve their spot. At the end, you’d get a print out of your guest list. That online registration software to sell event tickets is called Eventbrite.
Everything is in the preparation, so I created a free account at the Eventbrite website, I filled in the blanks, so 325 tickets at $10 each + plus the percentage that Eventbrite takes (which is about 2.9%). Then the promotion began, you advertise on social networks, to your friends and family, etc. and you all point them to your event management page and it does the rest.
The most important is that you tell your audience, first come first serve. When they go on the website to reserve their spot, they’ve got 8 minutes to complete their payment otherwise their spot is back for grabs, now that’s scarcity (which is the fear of missing out on something because there’s not enough for everybody).
The patients of Diabetes, high blood pressure, hormonal disorder and also psychological disturbance create tension purchase cheap levitra in the ED. Historically, people who had cholecystectomies sildenafil sales suffered from chronic diarrhea. Many people who took more than the advised amount of this chemical reported side-effects. buy cialis canada It is often combined with topical steroids to limit the ED risk? A bicycle rider can follow certain things to reduce the risk of sildenafil shop ED. Talk about a smooth show, we’ve had a full house, sadly we had to deny entry to people that didn’t buy upfront and were hoping to by tickets at the front doors. Because it was sold out ahead of time, there was none left. I felt sad for turning them away but on the other hand I was so proud that the theater was so packed.
The whole event management process via Eventbrite made things runs so smoothly.
Event Management and Online Registration Software Continued
That was my first time that I’ve used that event management company. I was so happy and excited that I kept them in my personal rolodex of important contacts. I later used Eventbrite again when I organized a Limobus party. I knew I had to pay the limousine company upfront for their services and I knew I needed 22 tickets sold to cover all the cost.
I’ve set up an event called “Limobus Party” and that only 22 tickets where available again sold on a first come first serve basis. There was no refund, if you said you’d show up, I didn’t care but if you bought a ticket, now that spoke for itself, if they canceled at the last minute, it was their lost or responsibility to find another buyer, not me.
Again, the party was a huge hit, I had peace of mind the whole time and not once was I worried to get enough people to split the cost. I’ve put the buying deadline a week before the actual event started.
So I had to fill the limo bus otherwise I would cancelled the event personally refund everybody (and I would have taken the responsibility to pay for the Eventbrite processing fees because I was the one in charge, after all, they’ve done their part of registering, collecting payment and giving me a guest list, right).
Now these are just a few examples of things that I’ve done but the sky’s the limit. Say you’re organizing a seminar, you can get people to register before hand, you can also sell the spots. Example you could set it up where they pay $20 to reserve their spot and if they show up, you refund it back to them and if they no show on you, call it your cancellation fee.
The venue is actually super irrelevant, it could be a hotel, a restaurant, a picnic outside, etc. it really doesn’t matter. What’s important is that people register and/or pay.
A friend of mine is a professional stage hypnotist and he was looking for a way to handle all the ticket sales from his website for his events and an easy way to manage all that. No more asking friends to sell tickets, collect money, get more tickets, lose money, etc. Set up a campaign, tell all your friends, family or business partners to promote your Eventbrite link and the rest is history.
What about you, how can an event management software tool like Eventbrite help you organize your next event?
Web Scheduler To Booking Appointment Nightmare
A web scheduler is not to be confused with a simple online calendar. A web scheduler is a web based application that you can put on your website that allows clients to independently book their own appointments with your business.
Whereas an online calendar simply organizes your personal activities online. True some online calendars can be shared with people so they too can modify it but it usually means that you have to give them specific permissions.
The web scheduler on the other had is specifically designed to deal with multiple people on the internet. When someone books a time slot, it automatically removes it from the available allowed space to the other visitors.
Another super cool feature to consider when shopping for your web scheduler is whether or not you want it to be intergraded with a payment solution.
Say you offer coaching or consulting services, wouldn’t it be nice if your client goes on your website, checks out your schedule, chooses a time slot and pay for the 15 minutes coaching or consulting service? All that process done automatically before you even speak with the paying customer?
Think about it, your time is worth more doing what you do best which is your specific skill set rather than trying to book appointments. The same technology works if you’re a trade’s person.
The system of chiropractic is based on doing purchased this purchase cheap cialis things by hand. The entire procedure does not involve or interfere buy viagra online in with your lifestyle. Studies have shown that more than half of all male libido enhancing herbs is Tongkat Ali (Eurycoma longifolia). sales online viagra That got your advantage, isn’t that right? All things considered, levitra 20 mg why not look here there it is and you can solve the issue. Your online web scheduler shows your prospects your potential availability, they chose from the list of options available and can pay you directly online through easy online invoicing.
In your back office you can see all the invoices that have gone out, the ones that are paid, late, etc. With one click of a button you can send a fully customized reminder of the late payment.
Web Scheduler Resources
A web scheduler is just one the awesome tool that today’s technology allows business owners to incorporate with their website. An awesome complete web scheduler with all those features is vCita.com.
If your looking for different solutions, check out the following. BookFresh.com, TimeTrade.com, Acuityscheduling.com, Appointy.com and Clickbook.net or you can also type “online scheduling” in Google to get tons more results.
What about you, how can a web scheduler help your business? Share your thoughts.
Computer Shortcuts And Hot Keys
Computer shortcuts and hot keys, what are they and how can they improve my business productivity? What about a systematic approach? But first, let me share a story with you.
When I was hired as the man in charge for a special project at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, it was certainly not for my good looks but rather my discipline, productivity and performance results I was able to get other people in the past.
Here’s how it all went, I was working on the set of the TV show Reign as a stunt performer, that’s when I got the call from a manager at Fisheries and Oceans Canada. She called and right away identified herself.
She knew who I was and my work ethics because of a recommendation that she received. She also knew that my career as a stunt performer took precedence over everything else but that in between contracts I was open for side contracts if the pay was right.
After clarifying our terms it was a done deal for a four month contract to establish a systematic approach. As soon as I came back from Toronto, the next morning I went to the office where she introduce me my 2 my employees. There was 3 more starting the day after.
It was very chaotic to say the least. Because it was such a new project, there was no formal training, no efficient way of performance tracking and lack of trained personnel. Here just to give you an idea of the scope of the work, DFO changed the way vendors send invoices to them.
They went form a paper environment to a more efficient digital environment but like all change, there’s a steep learning curve. It didn’t help that this new system change was incorporated 3 months before the end of the fiscal year, where all invoices must be sent in and process before the deadline.
First things first, when you’re faced with a new project, the first thing to do is to create your plan of action. You’ve got sit back and overlook at the project’s needs, the goals the clients want to achieve and map it all out. In this case it was to process of all invoices by a certain deadline.
You’ve also got look at what you have as resources, do you have budget to hire more personnel or do you have to increase personal productivity? The department was limited on budget so we had to maximize on personal productivity.
Once that was cleared out and I knew what I needed to do. I looked at the current approach that was currently being used by shadowing my employees that had been working for a week already.
After a week of experience working on the project without a direct supervisor, I asked them their feedback on what could make their job easier and I took some notes of everything that made their life difficult. 
You’d be surprised on how much information you can gather just talking to your front line personnel. Then I proceeded to compile all the data, I took the old clunky paper tracking and created an Excel template where all my staff had to send me their stats on a daily basis. This way now, my employees were accountable for their performance and productivity.
Sadly we had let one person go after exhausting all other alternatives (communicating, offering more training, etc.) but that person was just non reliable, not productive and not open to changes.
Those are the tough decisions but you can’t lead with your personal emotions, you’ve got a job to do, you’ve got deadlines to meet and a project to finish on time. Turned out to be great, we hired new employees that were a lot better.We were a total of six (five employees plus me).
After re-designing the training, the work flow process and showing how to operate the computer efficiently with computer shortcuts and hot keys, my staff’s productivity went through the roof.
It went from an average of 25 processed invoices per person per day to an average of 120 processed invoices per person per day. With my top performer getting 212 in one day! Can you see the improvement? We’ve increased the productivity average by 480%. Now through good leadership, there are all kinds of other things you can do to make your staff feel part of the team and when the time is right, you can ask for favors in return; such as staying overtime, coming in on weekends, etc. but that’s beyond this information session.
Notice there’s a lot of similar characteristics here and network marketing. You’ve got to be an awesome leader if you want to grow in your business, you can’t force productivity out of people but they must be inspired and perform because they want to.
Computer Shortcuts And Hot Keys
Coming back to computer shortcuts and hot keys, computer efficiency will save you lots of time, especially if you work on it all day long, there’s a faster way then clicking away at everything on your screen. Hot keys basically are shortcuts to perform certain actions. Here’s a list of the most popular ones:
- CTRL + S = Save (I use that all the time, like every 5 seconds)
- CTRL + C = Copy (so instead of right clicking with your mouse, wait for the menu to open, look until you see copy, you can just select your word and hit CTRL + C on your keyboard)
- CTRL + X = Cut
- CTRL + V = Paste
- CTRL + Z = Undo
- CTRL + Y = Redo
- CTRL + A = Select All
- CTRL + F = Opens the “Find” dialog box
- CTRL + P = Print
- CTRL + B = Bold
- CTRL + I = Italic
- CTRL + U = Underline
- F5 = Refresh
- ALT + Tab = Switches back to the previous window you were working in
- ALT + Shift + Tab = Switches back to the very last window you’ve worked on
- CTRL + right or left arrow = Allows you to jump from word to word
- Shift + right or left arrow = Allows you to select letter by letter
- CTRL + Shift + right or left arrow = Allows you to select word at a time
- “Home” key = Brings you back at the very beginning of the line
- “End” key = Brings you back at the very end of the line
- Shift + Home = Select anything from where your cursor is to the beginning of the line
- Shift + End = Select anything from where your cursor is to the end of the line
- CTRL + Home = Goes at the top of the document
- CTRL + End = Goes at the end of the document
- CTRL + left mouse click = Opens new hyperlink in a new Tab
- Shift + left mouse click = Opens new hyperlink in a new Tab
- Shift + left mouse click = Selects all the text in between where the cursor started and where you clicked
- CTRL + left mouse click = Selects whatever you click on
- “Print Screen” button = Takes a screen shot of your desktop, you can then paste that image into a word processing document or an image editing software.
Thus, in the age cialis pills wholesale of medical science that has given people plenty of methods to treat ED, it is important that you possess the necessary knowledge about it before making any decision. Since ‘Make in India’ is an ongoing initiative of the incumbent government, you could buy Kamagra Polo online to pledge sildenafil 50mg your support to this initiative. Men across the globe no longer need to feel or suffer any kind of embarrassment or inconvenience. generic cialis online cute-n-tiny.com Two bones are required to cute-n-tiny.com cheapest cialis uk make a statement.
If you’re not sure what are the computer shortcuts or hot keys in a specific program, you can always click on “File” or look at the other menus in that program and look at the information on the right hand side to see what the hot keys are. Essentially every action that you take that can shave off a few seconds from moving your arm away from your keyboard to your mouse will affect your end result.
After all, we can never buy back lost time, therefore we’ve got to make good use it and use it efficiently to get our job done as fast as we can with the help of computer shortcuts and hotkeys so we can enjoy life after. What about you, how will you be using your computer shortcuts and hot keys from now on?
Share your thoughts.
Time Management Skills To Have
If you are new to time management, there are a number of elements you have to take into consideration.
Make sure to schedule some time for your time management. It sounds kind of silly but if you fail plan, you plan to fail. You should take 15 to 30 minutes daily just to create and organize the time for your day. Be generous with the time you allocate a specific task. Normally there’s always some unpredictable surprises that occur.
Say you know a task should take you 1 hour, then give yourself on schedule 1h15 or 1h30pm. It’s better to allocate more time for a task and finish your work earlier than falling behind schedule.
It has a psychological effect to. I don’t know how and why but I know for me, that’s what I noticed. Sometimes I feel like I’m going in circle and I’m not moving according to my plan but when I notice the time, I’m still within my allocated “time budget”. It’s like giving me a second wind of hope when I’m not far behind, in fact, I’m right on target.
Unlike writing a personal journal which records your daily activities and stories, writing your own goals is like planning and shaping your future with the stories you want. Instead of just going with the flow that life is throwing at you. Successful people understand the value of time management and use it to their advantage.
Take some time to figure out your long term and short term goals and write them down. Do a yearly goal breakdown, then break it further down into monthly, weekly, daily and hourly. It’s easier to do time management effectively when you know where you want to go. Just like when you’re driving somewhere, you know the destination of where you want to go so you align yourself to go into that direction. The same attitude should be applied for goals and time management.
Furthermore, vardenafil sale is actually be the best likely anti-impotence drugs that has gained confidence from quite lots of people from throughout the world for its effectiveness in treating men with ED successfully. It’s vital that you receive legal advice as soon as possible cheap cialis check content in order to ensure the best results. purchase of levitra Yoga and meditation are useful in managing emotional issues. Implants are surgically inserted into the sides of the penis to become narrow are among the most common contributors to male buy levitra online impotence.
It’s good practice to write down your goals and plan your day first thing in the morning when you’re fresh or the night before just before you go to bed. That totally depends on your personal preferences. Try out one week one way and the other week, the alternate way and see what works best for you.
In Tim Ferriss’ book, “The 4 – Hour Work Week” (audiobook available here), Tim talks about effective time management as one of the main core for productivity in business. He suggests to take whatever the 3 most important things that you know you need to do; write them down on a piece of paper or notepad and get those three items done regardless of all the other kind of work distractions that you might be exposed to.
Check out my other video about the “2 Workloads” that explain the difference between being busy and being productive. It’s important that your time management revolves mainly around the productive work.
Time Management Shortlist
Take these tips and go over them carefully and you should do just fine with this.
Boost your time management by keeping one day ahead of schedule. Whenever possible, sit down the evening before and develop an agenda for the following day. Creating tomorrow’s to-do list for a great work day to look forward. Starting the day already knowing in advance what needs to be done will give you better chances at achieving your goals.
Calendars are a great way to manage time. Many people like paper calendars since they are easy to write on. When I was selling life insurance, I loved the fact that I could scribble all over my notes and schedule especially because I was always in the car or driving somewhere. That being said, now that I’m a volunteer vice-president board member at the condo where I live, I’m always using my computer and e-mails. I find the flexibility from an electronic calendar to be a lot more effective.
Google calendar is free to use, so does Hotmail, Yahoo they all have a web based calendar feature now so you can have access to it everywhere there’s an internet connection. Whatever method you chose, make sure to add all your to-do items and appointments to your daily calendar so you can stay organized!
If you struggle with managing your time for a lot of items, try focussing on one individual task at a time. A lot of people are unable to multi-task effectively and cannot get things done at all. The quality of your work can decrease if you are tired or out of focus. So focus on just one project through its completion.
Get a timer and break it down into 20 minutes segments of pure work with not distractions. Close your social networks accounts, your e-mails, your phone and get all your attention on the most important task.
Time management planning is a great asset. It will help you create a strong workflow. Remember consistency over time will generate you results!
What about you, which time management solution do you like the best?
