Nobody tells you to get out of bed in the morning. Nobody brings you a list of things you need to complete by a certain deadline. Nobody tells you what the limits are to what you can accomplish. You make all the decisions when you’re a business owner, and there’s always a lot of weight on your shoulders.
It’s easy to put a lot of pressure on yourself when you’re responsible for everything. It’s even easier to feel like you’re not accomplishing much at all. You see, when we’re sitting down and planning out our work, we’re typically in a certain mindset. I’m generally a bit over-ambitious when I’m planning out my work, and a bit unrealistic in my expectations of myself. This causes me to sometimes feel like I haven’t gotten much done – when, in reality, I actually accomplished a lot.
Avoiding this sort of confusion is important, because feeling accomplished helps to elevate your mood. When you’re in a good mood, you’ll have more energy, being more creative when it comes to finding solutions for challenges, and have better interactions with your customers.
On the flip side, it can also be easy for time to just slip right on by if you aren’t keeping a diligent watch. “Tomorrow is always a good day to be productive, while today I’ve earned my rest and need to relax and recuperate.” Sound familiar? This may be true from time to time… but when you don’t have a boss keeping track of your “sick” or “early” days, you can end up losing one or two full weeks of productivity in a month.
So, always keeping a clear perspective on your accomplishments is critical. That’s why I highly recommend two things: a daily journal, and an end of the month review.
How to Keep a Business Journal
There are a lot of different thoughts on this topic. The right answer is really going to be up to you. For me, personally, I mix in a variety of things. I’d show you an example of my journal, but it wouldn’t be relevant to running a contracting business, because what I do is so different. The important thing is that my journal helps me keep track of what I want to accomplish each day, and what I actually did accomplish.
I spend a few minutes with it at the end of each working day, writing down what I accomplished, a few of my thoughts on the day, and then what I want to accomplish tomorrow. For me, specifically, I plan out four 2 hour blocks of uninterrupted focus and one 2 hour block dedicated to my health – exercising, meditating, and cooking a healthy meal. Yours will be something very different.
This day to day journaling activity helps keep me tightly focused and on task. I always know what I had to do today, whether or not I got it done, and what steps I’ll need to take tomorrow. There’s never any confusion when I wake up as to what it is I need to get done, and it’s easy to determine whether or not I did. But this is sort of like seeing the forest for the trees. How do we keep a birds eye perspective on things?
Seeing the Forest for the Trees
I’m a huge fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. There are plenty of free resources, including this great summary at Wikipedia. In my own words, GTD is a framework for building out an organizational system that will help to keep you focused on the “big picture” in your life – no matter what it is.
With GTD you’re supposed to build out a series of folders that help to keep you organized. These folders are based on time-frames – one folder for each day of the week, one for next week, one for next month, etc. I can’t remember the exact specifications laid out in the book, and it definitely goes deep in the book with metaphors and detailed descriptions of exactly what to do… but like all things in life, you’ll end up implementing it in your own special way.
The idea, though, is to have a dedicated place where you can deposit and keep track of all of the things you want to get done. I manage my day in five two-hour blocks, because I typically work in my home office. As a contractor, this isn’t going to work for you, because you’ll spend a lot of your time on the job site, in the truck, etc.
Spend some time researching GTD and you’ll get a good feel for how and why the system is so effective. It will be easy to see how it combines with journaling as described above to help you stay productive… but the most important thing from the entire book:
“Someday, Maybe.”
There should be a dedicated place where you can keep track of all of the great ideas that pop into your head throughout the day. As an entrepreneur, you’re constantly thinking about how to grow and improve your business. Some of these ideas really are golden geese, but others are just rotten eggs. It can be tough to differentiate between them, though, when they first come to mind.
This section will help you review ideas that may be worth pursuing with fresh eyes. It’s also a good place to write down things that you want to think on a little deeper. But most importantly, it becomes a place where you can permanently capture all of the money-making ideas that come into your head.
Your End of the Month Review
At the end of the month you can take a look back and see everything you’ve accomplished if you’ve been keeping a journal the right way. This will help keep things in clear perspective – you’ll not only see everything you did accomplish, but also everything you didn’t. How you evaluate these two lists is critical.
Compare the list of things you’ve done to what you wanted to accomplish and then ask yourself:
- Did I set realistic goals for myself?
- Did I put too much emphasis on things that weren’t important? (Major Time vs Minor Time)
- Did I accomplish more or less than I expected of myself?
- Why?
Now look at all of the things you didn’t get done and ask yourself:
- Did I procrastinate or were they unnecessary tasks?
- Did I fail to do something major and instead focus on something minor?
- Was I keeping myself busy, or was I keeping myself productive?
This is also the perfect time to review your “Someday, Maybe” section and see if you should take on any of those projects, or defer them to another time down the road. You should keep all of these “Someday, Maybe” ideas in a collection and review them on occasion – quarterly, or yearly… but I guess I’ll need to talk more about that in a “year in review” type post.
Journal to Stay Honest with Yourself
When you’re the only one really holding yourself accountable it can be easy to let things fall to the wayside. Journaling will not only help you keep a running list of tasks completed and to complete, but it will also help you stay honest with yourself over the long term. You’ll be able to spot patterns in your behavior that may be resulting in self-sabotage, as well as patterns in your behavior that are contributing to your success.
When you can see everything so clearly from so many different levels, it really will become possible for you to build your success one day at a time – and as I like to say, by laying one brick at a time.