If you are a small business owner engaged in small business marketing, it is absolutely critical that you learn how to be productive.
There are many demands on your time through email and phone communications, staff management, stock control, product and service development, accounting and taxation, relationship building with clients and strategic planning – to name just a few demands.
On top of these demands, you may be faced with the all-consuming task of developing tenders to generate new work from existing clients or to expand your market to capture new clients. If you are engaged in writing tenders, you will often have to demonstrate nowadays that you have a Business Continuity Plan and a Business Sustainability Plan (as well as policies for every conceivable area of operations).
So just to operate effectively and profitably, it becomes important to learn how to be productive. Improving your productivity becomes even more critical if you are trying to grow your business through your small business marketing online,
However, there are very real internal challenges that you have to face if you are to learn how to be productive for the sake of your business and its development.
The things that block you from learning how to be productive
There are many internal things that get in the road of you increasing your productivity – being able to do more with less. Fundamentally, they come down to your fears. Here are some ways that your fears may be manifested:
- Fear of failure – you tell yourself that if you are not successful at your endeavour, then people will think ill of you or you will think poorly of yourself
- Fear of success – you are worried that success will bring increased visibility, unwanted attention and major changes to your lifestyle which, though desirable, are themselves very challenging
- Procrastination – you put off things that you know you should do to be successful, but there are often more attractive things to do
- Being busy on the wrong things – you spend all your time on things that are not important for your small business but you feel productive doing them (e.g. wasting hours on YouTube or Facebook or spending hours talking to your neighbouring business owner)
- Perfectionism – this is a hidden form of fear and relates to fear of success or failure as it stops you short of achieving your goals or dreams
- Feeling overwhelmed – this can be because you are anxious or fearful and are not prepared to make a commitment to a course of action.
Unless you learn to overcome these internal challenges in the form of your fears, you will not be able to be productive.
The following free course on how to be productive helps you to identify and address these fears:
http://www.how-to-be-productive.com
This e-course on productivity is like dipping your toe in the water to see what it’s like. If you want to make a real commitment to becoming productive and to realizing success, you could wade into the water and try out my productivity membership course:
http://www.how-to-be-productive.com/join
Audio on how to be productive
If you want some idea of what this course on productivity covers and how it will help you, listen to my introduction for subscribers to the membership course (4.56 mins):
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I have added audio to many of the lessons of this how to be productive membership course so that you can download them and listen to them at your leisure (on your morning or evening walk?)