I'm finding that my calendar is becoming my best friend when it comes to personal management. This past week has been multiple tele-seminars, prospective client interviews and doing all those other little tasks that come up when you're a solo entrepreneur.
Here's a tip: If you want to work smarter and manage tasks, get a wall or desk calendar. Screw the blackberry, I didn't have the time to scroll down, go sideways, click this thing here or anything else - it was look at the calendar and speed dialing for dollars!
People who swear by time management and their planning calendar are routinely some of the highest achievers, from working soccer moms to the CEO of Starbucks. Using an electronic version of a desk calendar to get these things done means you have a tendency to fill up your waking hours, but you also accomplish more in less time.
At the end of the day, I had 2 new clients - four articles completed - met a friend for an hour lunch - planned a teleconference for next week - participated in 2 teleseminars - confirmed tickets to two real estate seminars in different cities and all by 3pm. Oh, did I mention this was accomplished while getting on and off public transportation? In the middle of all this, my car went to the shop.
As solo entrepreneurs we often spend more time during the day in a frenzy of activity, instead of getting any real work done, because there always seems to be more to do than there is time to do it. With a calendar system, you are only concentrating on results, without the stress of playing beat the clock.
Found a couple online resources that may be useful. Let me know, comments are turned on for now.
Open Coffee Club
This networking site was setup to complement an off-line networking group that seems to be taking off. It's a way to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organize informal meetings in their city to chat, get together for brain storming and grow.
Not all the cities listed have scheduled events yet, nor are all cities represented. Who knows, you might have the time and want to get your city in the mix - even if you live outside the U.S. Check it out.
B-2-B
Before you roll your eyes in disgust, take a look at this site because it does have potential. The premise is to offer business-to-business content on marketing strategies from actual business marketers.
It works by putting the most useful marketing articles with links to the source on the front page - since readers vote on the articles that are 'most useful', you can take that with a grain of salt.
But take a look and see if you can find a tip or two to ramp up the marketing for your solo enterprise. Even better, if you do quite a bit of marketing online - submit an article and link back to your site.
That's it for today and I leave you with this
"People should know what you stand for. They should also know what you won't stand for." ~ Author Unknown
Coming Next Week:
Real Estate Investing Seminars
Retirement Planning Tip - It's Never Too Early or Too Late
