Achieve Business Success
 4 Practical Tips to Realise Your Business Goals
The turkey’s finished, the decorations are down and the trees are bare, ready for collection. The holiday’s over and the resolutions for the new year swirl in the back of your mind. Resolutions are great motivation to start with a new sense of purpose and energy to achieve business success and realise all those goals and dreams; creating new habits, breaking old patterns and establishing a strong, fulfilling and productive routine. However, these ideals and brilliant plans can fall on stony ground without practical plans to nurture and help them propagate.
Setting out a new working routine or making simple changes can seem trivial, but they can make the difference between achieving your goals or letting them fall by the wayside. The following tips are designed to get you on track and to fulfil those intentions.
Plan your Working Day
Particularly if you’re working for yourself, without anybody looking over your shoulder and breathing down your neck, monitoring your output and whether you’re achieving targets is an arduous task. Without any external influence or encouragement, the onus falls on you to be self-disciplined and to find the inner resolve to just sit down and engage with what you need to do. From bitter experience, I’ve found that just starting the day without any sort of plan usually ends in disaster. Yes, the washing gets done, the kitchen’s cleaned and you’ve reached your highest score on Tetris, but as far as achieving your work objectives, you might as well have stayed in bed. Planning your day can focus the mind and help you monitor your progress. Doing this the evening before can allow you to programme you mind to wake with the right intentions.
Planning your day can focus the mind and help you monitor your progress. Doing this the evening before can allow you to programme you mind to wake with the right intentions.
Write a To Do List for Business Success
Writing a list of tasks the previous day or before starting work will help you assess and prioritise the important tasks, rather than avoiding them and letting the low-level stress build. Focusing on the most urgent tasks first can reduce your stress levels and release endorphins, making you feel better about your work. However, some tasks can seem insurmountable, which brings us to the next point.
Break Down Business Projects into Achievable Tasks
Breaking down large projects, that can seem abstract and ungraspable, into manageable concrete actions and tasks can make the amorphous monster of a mountain not as imposing as first thought. A project with multiple parts that can take weeks, months or even years to complete can always be reduced to a series of daily tasks that will get you one step closer to completion. This can also be broken down further into chunks of thirty minutes. Using techniques such as the Pomodoro Technique are incredibly useful for this and also for ways to avoid both internal and external distractions.
Find a Business Support Network
As a proofreader for PhD students and copywriter for businesses, I spend most of my time alone, with only my laptop for company, which can lead to a lonely and isolating existence. With no colleagues or co-workers to banter with or share ideas, maintaining focus and motivation is a continual struggle. Working in cafes can help with this. Having a change of scene prevents you going stir crazy and having an interesting and comfortable environment can be an inspiration to work. Support networks can also help. Finding other lonely souls who are also working alone and need inspiration and encouragement can help tremendously. Finding or creating local silent coexistence groups is an opportunity to connect with others, where you all meet in a cafe or suitable location and work together on your own project silently. Having somebody work alongside you can give you focus and there’s always cake to share if the going gets tough.
These are just a handful of practical tips to help you be more productive and to achieve business success. They might seem simple and obvious, but putting them into practice can mean the difference between success and failure so why not give them a try and see for yourself.
Doctor John offers high quality proofreading services for students and businesses, specialising in PhD thesis editing. For more information on PhD help, proofreading, content marketing and social media email info@doctor-john.net or ring on 0800 852 7258
Great article John!
I find that scheduling key tasks for the week ahead works and I try to do this on a Friday afternoon or Saturday morning.
I block out periods of time in my diary to get them done as I found that just writing a list meant that I had to keep adding more to the list making it impossible to achieve.
Carol
Thanks for your comment Carol. Yes, that’s a great idea. Having an overview of what you need to achieve is vital, otherwise it’s so easy to get swamped and demoralised with the amount of work. It’s also easy to lose track of the important daily tasks and scheduling in free time. I wrote another article on time management, which I found helped me to be more productive: http://doctor-john.net/time-management-and-the-pomodoro-technique/