Undoing The Stress That Makes The Meat It Feeds Upon

I was on a Skype with one of my mentoring clients yesterday, and the topic came up about how to use your time effectively. Over the years, I have learnt many ways to analyse this task, but the most useful of all was to ask a simple question… Is this activity putting me into contact with new students? Of course, I are talking about your time in the business, not your time with family, friends or in conscious rest. When you are "on" what are you "on" to? There are so many tasks required to build a business, and one way to categorize them is like this: 1. Urgent and Important 2. Not Urgent and Important 3. Urgent and Not Important 4. Not urgent and Not Important Of course, we all have a desk full of the last one. All the fiddly little things that easily distract you from a focused day. Cleaning the toilet, getting your laundry done, buying some hooks to put that picture up - all not urgent and not important to your business, but we eventually do them nonetheless. The one to delete from your business working time is Urgent and Non-Important. These are things like: answer that question someone challenged you on in Facebook. Or pay the bills before the due date comes. Did you know that many large businesses deliberately delay paying their bills to the absolute limit possible without fines? And there you are, often feeling bad if you a day over the due date. (Not everyone I am sure - it is just an example!) This is all about awareness. This is about waking up to how you are using your Self to work on your business. Well, there is another way you can approach this. A New Way To Start Your Day You know how there is always an important "something to do" that keeps niggling you?

It's a task you realise will grow your business, but for some inexplicable reason, you keep putting it off. That is what I might classify as being in the second category: Not Urgent and Important. Look around in your life for these tasks. Instead of delaying, figure out what are all the Important but Not Urgent tasks you have. Make a list. Now put that list through the simple question filter: Is this activity putting me into contact with new students? If you get a no, then it is not really as Important as you think it is. At least, not in terms of building your business. So cross that off your list, and only keep those that are directly or indirectly putting you into contact with a new student. Then start each new day with one of those tasks. It might be finally ringing the woman from the Intro two weeks ago that you had an intuition about. You want to have a conversation with her, but you don't ring her because you don't know what to say, and eventually you start telling your Self "Oh, it's been too long now. I can't ring her this late, I will look silly." Or you have your mailing list of people, but you haven't communicated with them for several weeks. Or your blog is getting behind. Or you know you want to change your fees, but you need to sit down and work it all out: how much, when, how will you tell them, who might leave etc. You keep thinking "I must do that" but you don't. All of these things, if not attended to, start being a cause for unconscious stress, and stimulate the story "I am not good enough. I can not do this." It's time to put a stop to this. Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to make a list of all the Important and Not Urgent tasks, put them through the simple question filter, then start each day by tackling at least one of them. Put aside time to work on your business with student critical tasks, rather than just working in your business. Share with us on the group at least one of those tasks that you plan to do next: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ATCSProMembers/