As you already know by now, organization is one key ingredient to increased productivity. Every step of business planning and implementation requires it. Good organization skills lead to better time management, consistency, focus on getting work done on time, and more.
One of the most important areas to organize and get right first is your work environment or office. You need to power your office space or set it up to work for you to lead you to success.
What Is A Power Office and Why Is It So Valuable?
A power office is the work environment you create to do your work but is explicitly optimized for success. A power office is organized to match work processes and the tasks required to achieve your goals. It inspires confidence and gives you a distraction-free area to highly concentrate and focus on your work.
Here’s what you need to set up your own power office successfully to achieve productivity:
Analyze What’s Not Working First
When you get to work, what causes the most frustration and anxiety? Do you have paper and knickknacks all over the place? Is there furniture or extra things causing more distraction than good? Before you change your space, go to work first and be more mindful of your emotions and surroundings to get a better sense of the space you need to work optimally.
Always Keep in Mind Your Work Objectives
When creating your workspace, keep in mind your main objectives or tasks. If you are on the phone a lot, for example, be sure the phone is right where you need it, or your cell phone charger is there to keep you on track.
Adjust the Layout, Setup, and Location
Find the right location and layout that work for your professional and personal needs. If you know you like freedom while you work, don’t use the smallest or most affordable location you can find in your home or elsewhere. It will only do the opposite and stall your work.
Declutter and Designate
Let go of all the stuff that you don’t need. In other words, trim the fat and put it somewhere else. If it doesn’t pertain to work or provide any kind of motivation and inspiration to get you to work, it doesn’t belong there.
Make It Personal but Simplified
Add things of value you know will inspire you or make you happy but don’t add too many things. You already decluttered the workspace. You don’t want to add it all back. Be mindful of each item you add.
Test and Adjust
Test the space and keep in mind when working on the things that are causing frustration and work to adjust those areas. Over time, your needs and business will change, which means your work environment should too.
Don’t let your work environment be the reason you can’t get your work done. It will only require a few minor adjustments to make your surroundings work hard for you.
One of the most common questions I get asked as a consultant is, "How do I get better at attracting my ideal clients?"
It's a great question. After all, if you're not attracting clients you adore, you're probably not making as much money as you want to.
Pause for a moment and think about who your ideal client is. If you can't write down more than 3-4 characteristics of your ideal client, you're only halfway there.
The myth of your ideal client
Myth: Your ideal client is someone who has everything in common with you (same hobbies, same politics, same beliefs) and who looks like you and acts like you.
We’ve all done the exercise. The first thing you’re taught when you first start your business is to create an ideal client avatar.
This vision of your ideal client guides everything you do, including pricing (you can’t charge that single mom as much as you can the CEO of a Fortune 500 company), pain points (mom probably isn’t worried about shareholders), and even the color of your logo.
So you spend a few hours considering things such as:
- Age group
- Income
- Family status
- Education
- Lifestyle goals
- Location
Maybe you even write up a nice little story about your ideal client. You give her a name, a couple of kids, a husband who just doesn’t get it, and a load of student loans. You know quite a bit about her, you think.
But you would be wrong, and if you stop there, you may be missing a huge piece of the puzzle—and losing out on the best clients because of it.
Personality Mismatch
Here’s something rarely considered in the “ideal client” equation, and it’s arguably the most important part: personality.
If you’re snarky, sarcastic, fun-loving, and loud, then a quiet, middle-aged mom who spends her time volunteering at the church is probably not a good fit for you. Sure, she might need your help and love your products, but this match-up is a disaster for one-on-one services. Either she will be uncomfortable with your style, or you’ll be miserable trying to reign in your natural exuberance.
Better to pass mom on to someone who is a better fit for her personality-wise.
Drive Determines Success
This one can be difficult to calculate, but once you recognize it (or the lack thereof), it’s worth paying attention to. The client without the drive to succeed will—more often than not—only end up frustrating you both.
Better to end your relationship as soon as you see the signs of this than to waste your time going over the same material and exercises again and again with someone who won’t do the work.
If you look at your current and past clients, you’ll begin to see patterns. You can easily see what made some clients a joy to work with, while with others, you struggled. Consider those differences, and add them to your ideal client profile. Then compare any new potential clients to this ideal profile, and you’ll never again sign on with a less-than-perfect client.
First, let’s talk about the many typical time suckers that you probably want to work on stopping right now. You’ll likely find more as you work toward discovery in your own personal situation, but most people can agree that the following are common time suckers that you should stop doing now.
1. Not Setting Goals for Every Part of Your Life
First, you should set up goals based on your morals and values for your entire life. Set life goals for your life psychologically, physically, and spiritually in each area of your life, including personal, relationships, and work. For example, if you want to be healthy, you’ll need to set healthy eating goals, healthy exercise goals, and so forth, according to the results you desire.
2. Not Planning and Scheduling What’s Important to You
Once you have identified what’s important to you, it’s essential to create a plan and make a schedule of the steps in chronological order of what you need to do to get to success and reach your goals in the time frame you’ve set up for yourself. For example, if you believe it’s important to eat dinner with the family 4 nights out of seven, what are you doing to ensure it happens? Likewise, if you want to publish an 80,000-word novel by December, what do you need to do to get there?
3. Lack of Organization and Systemization
One reason people don’t reach their goals promptly has to do with not organizing based on the real amount of time you have to do the tasks. If you really want dinner on the table at 7 pm each night, plan the meal carefully, taking the actual time it takes for things into consideration.
Plus, not creating systems with automation in place is a big time sucker. For example, there is no reason to spend hours paying bills each month when you can automate the process via your bank. You can even organize and systemize family dinner by assigning each person a task to do that ends up with dinner being on the table by 7 PM in a realistic manner.
4. Not Delegating and Always Doing Everything Yourself
Whether you’re a stay-at-home parent, a salary earner, or an entrepreneur, you can’t do everything yourself. It’s imperative to your future that you learn to delegate and stop trying to do everything yourself. There are people in your life that can help you, and if you don’t have those people yet, you can find them.
Your spouse, your children, your friends, and even people you hire can help lighten the load for you just as you do for them. However, if you’re a people-person, who is a pleaser, you can recognize this by asking yourself, “Who can help me do this task?” If you cannot come up with an answer, you have work to do building relationships with people who can help.
5. Not Setting Boundaries and Saying Yes Without Thought
This is usually related to being a people pleaser, too. Some people call these people “yes” people. You see them in every single PTA, Church Group, and volunteer opportunity. There is usually one in every well run office. This person may be seen as the “go-for,” who gets things done for others. These people are often stressed, overwhelmed, and have a low self esteem.
Many people-pleasers say yes to every single ask of them without even thinking. This is a huge time sucker because there is no reason why you need to say yes to everything. First, weigh the things people ask you to determine whether it’s worth being involved. An excellent way to decide is to have criteria for saying yes.
For example, ensure that doing this will get you closer toward your goals in each life area. Check your calendar to be sure that you really do have the time available before saying yes. Say yes with enthusiasm or no without guilt.
Now you need to look at your own life and start identifying and eliminating time wasters. Only you can truly determine what a time sucker is and what is not. For some people spending five minutes on social media is a time suck, but it might be how you schedule your downtime. It’s your time, so if you can reach the goals you set for yourself, you can choose what tasks you want to do and what responsibilities you don’t want to do.
Do you set aside time regularly to plan what you want to do in your business? If it’s not something you currently do, I strongly encourage you to embrace it for the remainder of this year as well as the one coming up. Setting aside time at the end of the year, to plan out what I want to do and more importantly what growth I want to achieve in the coming year has been crucial to my own success. Over the next seven days, I want to share some of what I’ve learned and what I’ve found helpful with you.
Let’s start off by taking a look at why business planning is “the secret” to success. There are a few different factors that come into play here. The first is efficiency. When you go in with a clear plan, you can focus on what’s most important. Instead of spending time trying to figure out what you should be working on, what pieces of the puzzle are missing from your product funnel, or what you need to do to break through to the next income level, you know exactly what needs to come next.
As we’ll explore in a future blog post, with a clear goal in mind and a plan for the year, it becomes easy to walk backwards to create effective and efficient daily to-do lists. Work on what needs to get done each day and you will reach your goals.
Next, setting a big goal for yourself helps you think outside the box. If you don’t believe me, try it. Decide on a big income goal for the coming month. Write it down. Keep it in front of you. Then get to work and start to notice what happens next. You start to think of things that didn’t occur to you before. You come up with creative ways to get more traffic. You decide to run a fun promo that adds dollars to your bank account. The same happens when an important deadline comes up unexpectedly. Think back on that time in college when finals rolled around, or the last time your in-laws told you they would stop by later in the day. You got very creative about studying and cleaning respectively.
Last but not least, let’s talk about the subconscious. So far we’ve been focused on what we are actively doing to make progress by making a plan, setting goals and following through. There’s another dimension to all this and that’s what’s going on in our subconscious mind. While we are busy plowing through our to-do list, cooking dinner for the family, and even sleeping, our subconscious mind is working towards those goals as well.
In short, planning and setting goals is important because it helps you grow faster. That means you end up with more money for yourself and your loved ones while spending less time slaving away at your desk.
