Tasks to do in preparation

The first few tasks below aren’t things you are going to do in the first ten minutes of your day. Rather, they are things that you can do to make the first ten minutes more productive. Think about how you currently spend the first ten minutes of your day.

Like many people, you might tidy your desk, get your coffee, turn on your computer, open the programs you need for the day, check your voicemail, check your email, check Facebook, check Twitter, (and the list goes on and on). Suddenly, you might find yourself half an hour into your work day with nothing to show for it. So the first group of tasks deal with reducing some of those things you normally do in the morning.

Tip #1: The Day Before
I used to work in an office where the habit was to just walk out at 5:30 pm and ignore everything on your desk. When you got into work in the morning, you clean your desk and move over unfinished tasks to the next day and review your calendar. I couldn’t figure out why my mornings felt so unproductive until I stopped that habit and started finishing my day with a little clean-up and prep. Then I could start my next day fresh. So, before you finish your day each day…

• Make sure your tasks and calendar is set for the next day, moving over any unfinished tasks before you leave.
• Clean your desk of the clutter that tends to accumulate through the day.
• If you keep a paper list or paper-based calendar of your to-dos, have it front-and-center on your desk and make sure the tasks are prioritized.

Tip #2: Computer set-up.

When your computer starts up in the morning, you likely spend a few minutes opening the programs that you need throughout the day. In fact, depending on how many programs there are and how fast they take to start-up, it could take up the first five minutes of your day!

1.    So, if you’re running Windows, go to your Start Menu > All Programs > Start Up and right-click Start Up.

2.    Then choose “Explore” and copy a shortcut to the programs you open into the Start Up menu. (For example, you might copy in your web browser, Skype, your IM client, TweetDeck, and other programs you keep open during the day.)

Tip #3: Browser set-up.
In addition to the programs that you open, you should also set your browser to open the pages you use most often. I’m shocked at how often people have a home page set on their browser that they navigate away from and never return to. Make it useful to you! Make your homepage the site you use most.

And, if you use Firefox, take advantage of the fact that you can have more than one page open at start-up: Let’s say that you have 3 pages you want open; Google.com, Gmail.com, and Wikipedia.org. (Of course, you can use anything; I’m just using these three as an example).

1.    In Firefox, go to Tools > Options
2.    When the Options window opens, go to the General tab.
3.    See where it says “Home page” and has a URL in there? Change that URL to one of three sites you want to open. Then type “|” (which is the vertical line you get when you press Shift + the “”" button). Then type the second URL. Type “|” again and the third URL. So the line looks like this: http://google.com|http://mail.google.com|http://Wikipedia.org

Now, when you open Firefox, three tabs will open, each with one of those sites. Some suggestions you might consider:

• The page you visit most often during the day
• Your project management website
• Your online email access
• Your online telephone management console
• Your blog sign-in page

There are other Firefox add-ons that might be appropriate for you, either to recapture and optimize those first 10 minutes of your day or to make Firefox better throughout your day.

Tip #4: Organize your bookmarks
When I sit down to do my work, there are usually several sites I need to hit throughout the day. Now, maybe I don’t want to open them all when I first sit down to my desk but I eventually need to get through all them. For those sites, I’ve organized them into a single folder in the order that I will access them. (Since I use Delicious, which sorts alphanumerically, I’ve labeled them “01 – [the name of the first site I need to visit]“, “02 – [the name of the second site I need to visit]“, “03 – [the name of the third site I need to visit]“, etc. So all I need to do each day is click the next one in the list.

Why bother with doing all of this stuff? For the simple reason that a day which starts productively tends to be more productive. And if you start your day by opening programs and doing “busy work” (work that feels productive but doesn’t directly contribute to your business) then you miss an early window of opportunity to make a strong start.

Tasks to do in the first ten minutes of your day

The next tasks are the three things I recommend you do in the first ten minutes of your day. I’ve found that doing these three things can make a huge difference in how the rest of your day works out.

Tip #5: Review your goals and projects for the day (Duration: 1 – 2 minutes)
You should get to the point in your business where you know what specific goals you must achieve each day in order to attain the level of success you want. For example, you might need to write 1 proposal, make 2 follow-up phone calls, and do 6 hours of billable work in order to generate enough customers and revenue. Whatever your daily effort is, make those your goals and review them each day as soon as you sit down to work.

To get daily goals, use your annual goals and divide them by your workdays: You (hopefully) have annual goals for your business. Take those goals (perhaps a revenue goal, profit goal, number-of-customers goal, or some other kind of numeric goal) and divide it by the number of weeks you work in the year (probably 48 to 52) and then divide that number by the number of days in the week that you work (probably 5 or 6). So let’s say you want to earn $125,000 in income in a year: Divide it by 50 (and take a 2 week vacation) to get $2,500; then divide that number by 5 (for working 5 days a week) to get $500, which is your daily income goal.

Once you’ve reviewed your goals, quickly look over your projects, just to refresh your memory.

Tip #6: Get started! (Duration: 5 minutes)
Before you check your email or Twitter or Facebook or RSS feeds or (fill in other potential first-thing-in-the-morning distractions), open your first project and work on it for five minutes. Try to get in as much work as you can in just five minutes, just to get some critical mass building on the project. Doing this kind of work this early in your day can help set the tone for the day. You’ll come back to this important project later in the day and you’ll have already done some good work on it!

Tip #7: Anticipate (Duration: 2 minutes)
One of the best ways that small business owners can outpace their competition is by anticipating what is going to happen in the day and proactively dealing with it before it happens. Get into the habit of anticipating what is going to happen to you. Are you expecting a difficult phone call? Is there an email that will probably contain bad news? I’m not talking about being a fortune-teller and trying to predict what could happen; rather, I’m talking about being aware of your business and making it a habit to see the trends that will influence your day. One way to do this is by taking two minutes early in your day to list the two or three challenging things you expect to face in the day. For example, it could be an irate customer or a vendor who is wondering when they will get paid or a frustrated employee. Think about what you are going to expect in the day based on what you know is happening in your business. At first, this list will feel like you’re writing down the things you dread. But soon it will become almost another to-do list that is uniquely focused on issues that could bog you down (but which you can start dealing with right away).

Your first ten minutes of the day will race by. Once you’ve done those three tasks, move on to what you would normally do after you opened the programs on your computer. It probably includes checking your email or opening Twitter. But by optimizing your morning for a faster start, and by focusing your first ten minutes on goal review, head-start efficiency, and anticipation, you’ll set the tone for the rest of the day to be far more productive.

Related posts:

1. Mastering Google AdWords in 10 Minutes – Part 1
2. Mastering Google AdWords in 10 Minutes – Part 2
3. Master Your Day in Just 10 Minutes – Part 2

This article is written for 3 different audiences in mind. Nearly all of my readers will fall into one of these 3 categories:

• Some businesses might hire a designer or developer (or their tech-savvy nephew) to build the site and get it up-and-running; other businesses might hire a virtual assistant to keep it maintained. But there are a lot of “in between” things that need to be done but which might not be completed by either outsource party.

• There are some businesses that are just starting out on a total shoe-string budget (“total shoestring budget” meaning they either eat or pay someone to help with their website so they’ve chosen to eat instead). They can’t afford to pay anyone to do the work. But they also don’t really know where to start.

• Some businesses have a website and just need some ideas to grow their site sensibly without wasting hours every day. They may do a lot of this work themselves, perhaps out of necessity or interest or habit.

Ultimately, there are two secrets to creating and maintaining a really good website in only 10 minutes a day: First, you need a plan. Second, you need a Content Management System. If you have these two things, you can do nearly all of your work in just ten minutes. The plan keeps you on track. The Content Management System (CMS) helps you to reduce the amount of time you spend performing the tasks on your plan.

Create a plan

A plan will keep you on track. Too often while building and maintaining your website, it’s easy to get caught up in things that either seem to be “must-haves” or are the latest thing of the moment. For example, you might have a great site but then suddenly notice that two or three sites you really admire have something that you don’t. You drop everything else in your day to add it in. At the end of the day you review your productivity and discover that you didn’t bill any time today because you spent so much time working on your site. A plan will help to fix this.

In fact, you’re going to need two plans (although I tend to stick them together and refer to them as one plan; but they’re actually two different plans).

• The first plan is a web design/web development plan. It’s the “back-end” of your side. Changes you make here govern the look and functionality of your site. Even if you outsource most of your site, you’ll end up handling some of this stuff (like that whiz-bang “must-have” widget I mentioned above).

• The second plan is a content plan or publishing calendar. It’s the content (mostly words but sometimes video or images) that people see.

The reason I stick these together is because sometimes there isn’t a clear delineation between the two. Also, I often think of stuff for one list while I’m working on stuff for the other. It’s just easier.

So here’s what to do:

Start by listing everything you need to do on your site. If you don’t have a site yet, you’ll need to start at the very beginning, of course. List it all. You’ll end up with a big list and that’s okay. In fact, it’s about to get a whole lot bigger…

Next, break up each project into ten minute chunks. That’s right. Ten minute chunks. In nearly all cases, I’ve found this to be quite possible. On the odd occasion you might need to work longer, but overall you can manage your time well while still building a great site in just ten minutes at a time. Some of your project-break-ups will depend on your skills and abilities. If you’re a decently fast typist, you might be able to blog a single blog in ten minutes. Well, that’s one task. But if you write a lot or peck one finger at a time to type anything, you’ll either want to outsource your writing or break up your single blog into two or three projects.

Now you’ll have a long, long, long list. The next thing you need to do is prioritize them. What needs to happen first? Then what? And after that? If your list is really long and overwhelming, I sometimes find it easier to start at the end and work backwards. For example, a list of 100 items might be really confusing to think what needs to go first, but I can usually identify what needs to happen last! Then work backwards through the list slowly.

Once that’s done, you have something meaningful to work with! It’s basically your step-by-step recipe to building and maintaining a website. And every single day, sit down and do one of those things. Period.

To help you do that, you’ll also want to…

Implement and use a Content Management System (CMS)

Years ago, people used to hand-code sites. I say this because I’ve done it and I know other people who have as well. When you wanted a website, you sat down at your computer, opened Notepad and started typing:

<html>
<head>
<meta>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
… etc.

It’s like riding a bicycle, you never lose it! The advantage was that you ended up knowing code like a pro in no time! But there was a disadvantage. After the fourth or fifth page, your site became difficult to manage. In my own personal experience I remember the odd occasion when I’d think “oh, I want a different link structure” and I’d need to go back and make changes across every page. The bigger the site got, the harder it was to maintain.

A CMS makes it so much easier. A CMS gives you an interface to manage and update content easily without having to open up the code on each page to make changes. Finding and implementing a CMS with your website will take longer than ten minutes. However, once have a CMS in place, it will dramatically shorten the amount of time it will take you do to the rest of your giant “to do” list mentioned earlier. So it’s worth the up-front time investment.

There are several Content Management Systems out there. If you click over to Wikipedia — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Content_Management_Systems — you will see what I mean. (Don’t worry so much about selecting one from the list – I’m about to recommend one).

So, there are lots of CMSs out there but I think the best one for most small business owners is WordPress. WordPress is an opensource (free!) CMS and there is a huge community of people who develop applications (called “plug-ins”) and designs (called “themes”) and offer them for free to WordPress users. A WordPress website gives you plenty of control: You can build website pages and/or blogs, giving you the power to design your site however you want to design it. Of course, you don’t have to use WordPress, it’s just one that I like and would recommend. I’ve been using it for years and coaching others to build successful businesses with the same CMS.

Ultimately, you need to find a CMS that works for you: It needs to be easy to learn and easy to implement. You don’t want to spend too long figuring out how to navigate around it and you don’t want to spend days trying to upload it to a server.

And then what?

Once you have your CMS in place, start rocking that to-do list! Do one thing a day, every single day. (If you have time, or find yourself with 10 minutes between supper and your favorite TV show, why not fire up your list and your CMS and do the next thing?)

Cross off each item as you go but be prepared to add more items as they come up. (You might get more blog ideas or you might find that something else needs to be added to your site).

The biggest challenge you’ll have is to discipline yourself to only do ten minutes a day. If necessary, set a timer and just do it.

Lastly, remember this important fact: Your website will never be perfect. It is always a work in progress. It is always going to be modified. Accept that it is imperfect and don’t lose sleep (or waste time) over not having the latest shiny widget on your site. You’ll eventually get to it on your list, but in the meantime you won’t waste time!

Related posts:

1. Building a Fanbase of Followers in 10 Minutes a Day
2. Saving Time with One Small Addition to Your Website
3. Brand Management in Ten Minutes Will Save You Hours

Now I want to help you achieve your goals even more easily.

I mentioned in the last issue was that smaller goals were better. The goal “implement Twitter marketing plan” isn’t nearly as good as the more granular goals…

• Open Twitter account. Duration: 5 minutes. Due on the 20th.
• Download TweetDeck. Duration: 5 minutes. Due on the 21st.
• Set up TweetDeck columns. Duration: 5 minutes. Due on the 22nd.
• Tweet 5 times on day 1. Duration: 10 minutes. Due on 23rd.

These smaller goals are more likely to get achieved. The reason is not necessarily because they are smaller but because they are reduced to an achievable and measurable end. When you set a goal like “implement Twitter marketing plan”, it’s hard to know when it starts and when it finishes and what exactly needs to happen in between and what exactly needs to happen first. But when you break it down into the 4 goals mentioned above, it becomes so much easier.

You’ve probably heard of the concept of SMART goals. Using SMART goals can help you accomplish more.

SMART is an acronym which stands for the 5 things that every goal needs to be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Actionable
• Realistic
• Time-sensitive

(Note: I’ve heard of other alternatives labels for some of these letters but this is the one I tend to use, for no other reason than habit).

If you actually do the work I recommended in the previous issue – create granular goals and add a duration – you’re already filling in some of the blanks.

Every goal needs to be a SMART goal. Here’s what they mean:

Specific: You need to make sure that the goal is specific (which is why we prefer the above-mentioned four Twitter goals to the “implement Twitter marketing plan”).

Measurable: You need to make sure it’s measurable. In other words, you can’t just say “I’m going to jog today”, because you could theoretically jog in place for 30 seconds and cross it off your list. Instead, you need to say “I’m going to jog 20 minutes today”. That’s measurable.

Actionable: You need to make sure that the goal is actionable. That is, it needs to be something that you can actually do. There should be a verb associated with each goal. In other words, your goal shouldn’t be “roses” but should be “buy roses”. With something like roses, it might seem obvious but if your goals get bigger or your list gets longer, those verbs will come in handy (and they’ll also contribute to the measurability of your goals).

Realistic: Your goal needs to be something you can actually do. “Earn $1,000,000″ might be specific and measurable (the actionable part is debatable, even if it does have a verb) but it is probably not realistic. Your goals need to be achievable!

Time-sensitive: Your goal needs to have a duration and it should have a deadline. Often, SMART goals are considered time-sensitive if they have a deadline only but I’d strongly recommend a duration because developing a sense of how long things take can help you fit work in where you can and it can also contribute to the sense of whether something is realistic.

So, let’s put the concepts from the last issue and from this issue together:

1.    Start by outlining your roles. (That’s something that you’ll already have and it rarely changes from week to week – it’s a one-time ten minute effort).
2.    Then, list all of the things that will enrich your relationships with those roles (and be sure to include the work you    have to do for your individual clients). This is your list of goals.
3.    In that list of goals, review each one and break it down to a granular level so that complex goals are made up of simpler goals. Make sure each goal is a SMART goal.
4.    Now slot those goals into your calendar around your already-scheduled meetings and appointments.

You should end up with a balanced calendar that includes all of your important activity as well goals that will address other (non-business) relationships in your life as well as personal enrichment and education.

With me so far? Good. Now here are a few tips to help:

• You’ll probably find that your calendar looks busier than it used to. However, there are a few positive reasons for this: Your personal calendar and your professional calendar are now blended, and have more granular, accomplishable goals, and your calendar includes intentional relationship-building time with the important people in your life. So those are all good things.

• Make sure you include some extra room for “uh-oh” time.  “Uh-oh” time includes those tiny disasters we face in life or those times when things take longer than they’re supposed to. It’s the unexpected things: Flat tires, a head cold, traffic jams, spills that require a new shirt, you forgot to get milk at the store, or a project needs to be redone. Sometimes it’s a short-term issue or sometimes it might cause delays that last for a week. But if you can build in some uh-oh time – just a little each day – you’ll help to stay saner. It might include adding 10 minutes to your travel time or adding 15 minutes to a large project. You might not need it all but it’s there if you do. (And if you don’t need it all, remember: you have some duration-estimated projects that can probably be accomplished in that time!).

This might seem to take more than 10 minutes so let me point out how this works best:

Toward the end of the week (Thursday or Friday) spend 10 minutes and evaluate how your week went.

• Did you accomplish the goals you wanted to accomplish?
• Did you miss anything that can be done in the “uh-oh” time that is still remaining?
• What needs to be carried over to next week?

Then, after that (Thursday, Friday, or Saturday) spend 10 minutes to create your SMART goals for the week.

Then, after that (Friday, Saturday, or Sunday), spend 10 minutes to slot your goals into next week’s calendar around your already scheduled meetings and appointments.

There you go! In just a few ten-minute steps each week, you can increase your productivity by setting appropriate goals and prioritizing them in a way that makes sense.

Related posts:

1. Setting (and Achieving) Daily Goals like a Genius – Part 1
2. Mastering the First Ten Minutes of Your Day
3. Business Growth in Ten Minutes a Day… IS Possible

Haha, okay that might be a serious anti-meeting sentiment but I know that most of you chuckled because deep down you feel the same way. Meetings are rarely an enjoyable experience. And yet, we have them and can’t imagine doing business without them.

In spite of my little joke, I don’t think that we need to get rid of meetings altogether. However, I think that they wouldn’t hurt to be a little more palatable.

A colleague of mine used to work as a reporter in a daily newspaper and he tells me of the apocryphal rule of newspaper writing: That the editor takes a pair of scissors and starts at the bottom and cuts off paragraph by paragraph until the article fits the space available in the paper. Thus, the most important stuff needs to be at the front. While this is (hopefully) an exaggeration, it gives us some inspiration for when we are creating agendas.

Put the most important stuff at the beginning of the meeting. Leaving it to the end is a common habit because people know that it’s a big issue and will take a lot of time so they want to spend “the rest of the meeting” on something. Unfortunately, by that point in the meeting, no one wants to spend the rest of the meeting on anything!

Also, think about whether your agenda items are informational or discussion oriented or analytical or require brainstorming. These are four very different types of activities that are often jammed into the same meeting. My advice? Put the informational stuff into an email and send it out. (And 3/4 of you are saying “But Heather, no one will read that email”… which might be true but then it’s your job to remind them that they either read the email or show up at a meeting). If you HAVE to have a meeting about informational stuff, aim for a 2 minute meeting at the start of the week to get it all out. Or, do what they used to do in school sometimes: write a memo with everyone’s name at the bottom. Pass it around and have each person initial beside their name once they’ve read it. Again, it’s elementary but if you tell people that they can either do it this way or attend another meeting, a majority of your staff will initial the memo without another word of complaint.

For your other agenda items, group discussion and analysis together in one and hold those periodically. It’s okay to have several items on the agenda, provided that they don’t take a lot of time. Set a limit on each item because discussion will often fill the amount of time allotted and if people know there’s a limit, they’ll say their piece and shut up.

Lastly, pick a good time when everyone feels smart and juicy with brainpower and pick a topic and brainstorm. In fact, it might not hurt to have a Monday morning brainstorming session from 10 to 11:30. It’s not too early for people to hate it, but early enough to get people pumped up. And if you don’t have a specific item to brainstorm, then create a topic like “How can we be more efficient in the office?”. A lot of the collaborative, creative energy and ideas that comes out of that weekly brainstorming meeting will carry many of your staff through the week.

Related posts:

1. 10 Minutes a Day For Better Staff Productivity
2. 5 Common Productivity Barriers and How to Eliminate Them
3. How to Develop Organizational Culture in an E-Business

But in my last post I mentioned that not all business growth is good. Growth that happens too fast, for example, without any warning, can cause financial, manufacturing, warehousing, and customer service problems galore.

In this blog I want to talk about another problem of too-fast growth.

Problem 2: Rapid growth that is unpredictable may decline and leave a burden on the business. I’ve seen this recently in a colleague’s business. Just two years ago, business was inferno hot for him! He was so busy he couldn’t keep up with orders for the product his business created. Then the economy slowed. Today, his business is sound enough to pay his bills and allow him to put a little away for the future so he’s not worried about feeding his family. But he is concerned about his tax bill. The spike was unexpected and when he pays taxes this year on last year’s income, he’s paying taxes out of less money this year than he was earning last year. Not only that, as a manufacturer of goods, he has a small storage unit full of unsold items. That’s because he ramped up production quickly during that busy season, but he didn’t anticipate the decline… so he was still producing a high number of goods when the slump struck.

Solution 2: When your business grows, manage it carefully. Don’t just ride the rapids with an oblivious smile. Be aware that it may eventually slow down. Make sure you have money put away for taxes and other expenses that might lag into a slower period. And, watch the warning signs very, very carefully to make sure that your production doesn’t match today’s demand… but rather, that it matches tomorrow’s demand. Warning signs might include slowing orders, but even that might be too late. Get in the habit of proactively calling your customers and estimating capacity into the future. Offering discounts on bulk orders, even when times are good and customers are willing to pay top dollar, can help you keep your finger on the pulse of your customers’ needs.

So, business growth that is not carefully managed and spikes, then falls, can also be costly for a business in inventory and warehousing, taxation (and other lagging costs).

In the next blog, I’ll talk about one more business growth problem I’ve seen.

Related posts:

1. When Business Growth is Bad – Part 1
2. When Business Growth is Bad – Part 3
3. Business Growth in Ten Minutes a Day