Every online entrepreneur wants to create products and services that will be popular. Unfortunately, many of us have a huge lack of confidence in our products.
Sure, you may think that a new course or workshop is a great idea, but how do you know it will sell? Will other people in your audience find it as useful as you hope it is?
Imagine spending weeks or even months of time—plus the cost of design, video editing and all the other pieces that go along with it—only to discover it’s not what your audience wants or needs.
How frustrating would that be?
You don’t have to leave it to chance, though. There are plenty of ways to test your idea before spending the time and energy on a full launch.
Below are three methods to research your audience to create in-demand products, services, and even affiliate offers from related creators.
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Survey Your Audience
This is the simplest way to get a feel for what your market needs and wants. Ask your audience what they’d like to see directly.
You can create a survey and send it out to your mailing list, Facebook page or group, and other social media profiles. Use form apps like Typeform, Survey Monkey, or Google Forms to create your survey.
I’ve had success with adding a survey on my website’s homepage as a way to get in touch with new visitors, too.
Don’t forget to provide a way for those who take your survey to subscribe to your email list. That way you can grow your list with any new people who are looking for help as well.
For best results, keep it short. Getting people to start a survey can be hard enough, but the more questions you have, the fewer responses you’ll get.
Keep your survey at around 10 questions or less. If you can do it in half that, that’s even better.
Don’t forget to ask essential questions such as:
What they’re struggling with
Their preferred learning method (video, text, audio, etc.)
What they feel the training is worth (what would they pay)
These three questions will tell you everything you need to know to create a program that’s practically guaranteed to sell.
Listen to Complaints
Find communities where your ideal clients or customers hang out. Pay attention to what people are asking or complaining about the most. These are the things they need help with.
For example, let’s say you’re a business coach. Your Facebook group is filled with questions about running Facebook ads. There are comments on how they’re struggling to achieve the results they know are possible.
If you pay attention to what’s being said in your group, it’s clear that there’s a need for some training about Facebook ads.
You can then create training materials, to answer all their questions like an ebook, course, or video series. On the other hand, you can seek out another creator who’s willing to sell their course to your audience with you as an affiliate.
Study Your Competition
Hopefully, you have a list of competitors and you’re reading their blogs and emails, and lurking in their Facebook groups. This is a great way to gain insight into what they’re doing—not to copy them but to discover what’s hot right now.
Consider checking out their paid products as well. Again, you should never copy them, but you can either:
Promote them as an affiliate
Create a better, more comprehensive version with your own spin
Create a lite, lower-cost version (again, with your own spin)
Coming up with ideas in a vacuum is a great way to waste a lot of time and money on programs that won’t sell. Instead, pay attention to what your market is asking for, find out what they’re willing to pay, and delve into your competition’s offers.
Recap: Create Products & Service for Your Audience
Use one or all these three methods to get a better understanding of your customer before you create a new product or service:
Survey your audience
Listen to complaints
Study your competition
The information you gain from these three activities alone will give you incredible insight into your market. It will show you what they want and need and make easy it for you to create your own hot-selling products and services.
Gather your info, and all that’s left is to create your amazing product.
Are you always wishing you had more time? Welcome to the club! Or maybe you’ve been a member for quite some time already. Having good time management isn’t necessarily a skill you’re born with.
For those of us looking to either start or grow our online businesses, this feeling is compounded by the fact that we often have to do everything ourselves, at least until we can afford to hire out.
The truth is, you probably have plenty of time to work on your business, even if it’s a side hustle. You just need to stay focused, practice better time management, and work on actions that truly make a difference.
Yup, that’s means if you’re trying to drive traffic to your blog or sales page, you probably shouldn’t be focusing on growing your Instagram followers (especially since it’s probably the worst social platform for linking).
Everyone has the same 24 hours in each day, so how is it possible that some people can accomplish much more than you do? How are they still able to be on time for all of their commitments?
If you’re struggling to meet deadlines, complete projects, or actually gain traction in your business, here are a few reasons why you need to take a closer look at how you approach your time management.
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8 Reasons Why You Suck at Good Time Management
Chances are, you do have the time to do what you need, you just need to take a closer look at how you approach your time management. It’s likely that you waste time in small periods throughout the day—5 minutes here and 3 minutes there—but these little moments really add up.
Go through each item on this list and take note of which ones apply to you and how you can change your behavior. It’s worth paying attention to the ones that you think may not apply to you, too! You may get ideas for improving what you are good with.
You fail to prioritize
One of the most important parts of a good time management strategy is the ability to prioritize high impact tasks and things that must be done before you can start work on others.
You should always have an idea of what’s the most important activity necessary to complete an objective. If you’re not, then it’s likely that you’re not truly working on tasks that have the most impact.
Without prioritizing, it’s easy to stay busy but fail to accomplish anything.
Ask yourself, “What is the most important thing I need to accomplish?”
Then ask yourself, “What is the best way for me to accomplish that?”
Sometimes, you’ll have to do a little bit of learning to find out what you should be prioritizing, but once you know, your focus should be on constantly moving forward instead of around in circles.
Wasting time is probably the most obvious way to improve your time management. It’s also the most common way we fail at managing our time. Everything else is just so tempting!
You may waste time due to procrastination or inefficient work habits. Maybe you frequently get distracted by social media or Netflix.
Whatever your vice is, make choices to avoid wasting time. Make quick decisions or put in the time to work when you’d otherwise be aimless browsing the web or watching your favorite show for the 5th time.
You’re disorganized
Becoming more organized is a good way to boost your time management skills, as well. Disorganized people never seem to have enough time, and they’re frequently late with their work.
When you’re not organized, everything takes longer than it should. You spend time looking for a pair of clean socks, your car keys, searching for files you printed, and trying to pull off things at the last minute.
The same is true for your digital workspace. If you don’t properly organize files on your computer, misplace or forget passwords, or forget where you saved that certain bookmark, looking for these things can slow you down.
Make an effort to organize your life and yourself. There are many available resources that are dedicated to organizing your life. Use them!
You have too many distractions in your life
It could be low-quality social interactions, TV, hobbies, noisy kids, clutter, or your prize-winning rose bushes. Having too many things in your life takes up a lot of time.
Remove the things from your life that are unnecessary. Minimize the distractions you can’t remove, like your children.
Lock down apps or websites that distract you with apps like RescueTime and put your phone on silent or place it in another room so it’s not as easy to grab every 5 minutes.
You don’t start your day early enough
Most of us don’t get much done in the evening. You might spend this time relaxing, just lying around the house or staring at your phone.
This is why so many highly successful people skip the evening hours by going to bed and waking up extra early. Your brain tends to shut down by the late afternoon, whether you started your day at 9:00 AM or 5:00 AM.
Give yourself a few extra productive hours by getting up early and going to bed early.
You don’t track your time
It’s impossible to practice good time management without some form of time tracking, but for this, I want to talk about tracking how you spend your time now so you can find and eliminate time-wasters.
Do you know how you actually spend each day? Are you aware of when you feel most energized and when your energy levels are low?
Track how you spend your time each day. Keep a simple journal for at least a week and make a record each hour of how you spent the last 60 minutes.
What did you do? How did you feel?
After a week, you should be able to notice some patterns and see where you may have some extra time in each day to work on your business. Try to rearrange your free time so it’s later in the day or out of a time when you feel energized.
Your day shouldn’t be random or determined on the fly. To get the most out of your time, you need to have a plan instead of trying to just wing it.
It’s best to create a detailed plan before you go to bed each night. It could be the last thing you do before you stop working for the night or a part of a nighttime routine.
Then, when you wake up in the morning, you won’t waste any of those precious daylight hours on figuring out what to do next. You’ll already know exactly what you want to do.
All you’ll have to do is spend your day executing your plan as well as you can.
You’re not focused
You’ve probably been told to “focus” or “concentrate,” but do you really know how? If you sit down to work on something for an hour, how many minutes is your attention truly focused on that task?
You can come up with plenty of time to accomplish everything you need to do each day if you focus on a higher level than you’re used to.
Focus is built through practice. You need to get used to finding your “zone.” Getting into your own state of flow.
If you struggle to stay focused, try using a timer to practice. Start with 5 or 10 minutes and work up from there. Use the tips throughout this ebook to minimize distractions to help you focus better on what you’re doing.
Using the Pomodoro Technique is a great way to practice focusing while also working on planning ahead and prioritizing—many of the necessary components of a good time management strategy.
Recap: Why You Fail at Good Time Management
Let’s quickly go over those 8 reasons one more time:
You fail to prioritize
You waste time
You’re disorganized
You have too many distractions in your life
You don’t start your day early enough
You don’t track your time
You don’t have a plan for your day
You’re not focused
Just like everybody else, you have 24 hours in each day. Be sure that you’re using those hours as wisely as possible. Go through each item on this list to evaluate your own time management skills.
Make the most of your time by prioritizing, removing distractions, and learning how to focus. You have all the time you need to build your business—even if that’s just slow and steady—if you’re willing to make the necessary adjustments to yourself and your life.
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My story begins like many new bloggers: building a list but feeling uncomfortable about sending emails. Twice I’ve built an email list—one of nearly 1,500 people and another of over 800—and totally squandered it.
I did better with the second one. I even made some sales! But in the end, I still felt bad about emailing my list and eventually quit emailing them.
This whole thing seems kind of weird considering how I’ve managed a list of over 7,000 in my other business. That was a little different because they were specifically expecting sales notifications from me and it wasn’t necessarily through email.
Or at least, that’s what I told myself. That it was different.
Spoilers: it’s not really that different. I was just focusing on things that didn’t attract the right kind of people (buyers and people who wouldn’t mind my commercial offers) to my list. (Another way to self-sabotage, by the way.)
That’s why with this business, I decided I’m going to do things differently, starting with my all-important email list.
I have a long welcome sequence that goes out to every new subscriber, so when I do have new content or something to promote, I know every person on my list has heard from me regularly.
I took what I knew I struggled with and found a way to overcome it. This is how you deal with self-sabotage!
Do you have a story similar to what I just shared?
Maybe it’s exactly the same thing. You’re afraid to email that list you’ve built with new content notifications, let alone trying to sell to them.
Or maybe it’s something else. You’re easily distracted, struggle to make decisions, or you’re quick to quit if you don’t see results right away.
If you’re struggling with your business, it might not be whatever it is you’re blaming your struggles on. It could be something that you’re doing. And if it is, that’s great news because it means you can change your behavior to do better.
So keep reading to discover 6 different ways you could be sabotaging yourself and your business and a solution for each one.
Distractions
The tasks that need to be done in order to be successful are typically less appealing than watching Netflix, browsing Facebook, or spending time with friends. We’re experts at distracting ourselves, and the urge to seek out distractions increases with the unpleasantness or difficulty of the task.
Solution: Allow yourself to have distractions, but control when, and how long, you engage in them.
You might give yourself 30 minutes of distraction time after three hours of work. Or, you might limit distractions to the evening after your work is done for the day.
Try the Pomodoro Technique as a work method that allows you to partake in distractions, but only after you do 25 minutes of work.
Procrastination
Distractions are one way of procrastinating, but there are countless other ways to procrastinate, too. Basically any time you’re doing something other than what you actually should be doing.
That means that yes, even doing other work can be procrastination.
Solution: Be clear on what needs to be done and why. Focus on just getting started, which is often the most challenging part of working.
Having trouble getting started? Tell yourself you’ll just work for 20-30 minutes. Use a timer and see how much you can accomplish in that 20-30 minutes. By the time that time is up, you might be so focused that you just continue working.
You may enjoy working on your projects but are you avoiding the most important tasks? This is one way that self-sabotage can creep up on you. It seems like you’re busy, but you’re working on all the wrong things.
The most important tasks are often the least enjoyable, so it becomes easy to just avoid them. Instead, you tackle the less important tasks because it makes you feel like you’re still making progress.
This is exactly what I was talking about when I said that doing work can be procrastination.
If you need to work on marketing tasks, work on marketing tasks—not your next blog post. Because we all know that it doesn’t matter how many blog posts you write if you’re not getting out there and marketing each one of them (or at least you should know that).
Solution: Start working by priority. Have a list of tasks to do each day ordered from most important to least. Start at the top of your list and work your way down.
Make planning the next day a part of your work routine so you can get started right away when you begin the next day.
Indecisiveness
Indecisiveness is also a self-sabotaging success killer. When you can’t make up your mind, progress comes to a stop. If you wait until you have all the wisdom and information necessary to make a perfect choice, you’ll be waiting a long time.
You have to pull the trigger and move forward. You can never collect all the wisdom without going through the experience.
Solution: Be clear on what needs to be done to accomplish your objective. Understand what will happen if you don’t make a decision.
Give yourself a time limit. You might give yourself 10 minutes or a day to make a decision. Then just decide and do your best.
Fear of Success
For many people, the closer they get to success, the more negative thoughts they experience. What if you can’t handle the growth? What if you become overwhelmed with all the people you’ll have to deal with?
For me, I’m terrified (sort of) of having affiliates. I’ll have to deal with paying them… which means I’ll have to deal with tax forms. That’s so much.
But I keep telling myself that when I get to that point, I can always hire someone to do that for me. In the meantime, if I create my course through Teachable, they’ll handle the affiliate payments for me.
Phew! A solution.
Solution: Take things one step at a time. Don’t be afraid of what’s going to happen when you reach a certain point in your business. There’s always an answer for something, you just have to figure it out.
And if you can’t figure it out, you can always hire someone who can. There are also all kinds of tools and services available that focus on helping solopreneurs just like you.
Negative Thoughts
Negativity is a big way to self-sabotage yourself, so much so that I’ve split this section into three parts.
It’s easy to get in your head about your failures, your mistakes, and even your successes, but you have to push past it if you really want to achieve success.
Ignore the random noise of your mind. You don’t have to engage with your random thoughts. You can choose to ignore them or turn the negative thoughts into positive ones.
Here are three ways your own negativity could be killing your business and—like the rest of this article—what to do about them.
Self-sabotage also comes in the form of negative thoughts. They may creep up on you due to negative self-esteem. You might say bad things about yourself, like “Ugh, I can’t believe I messed this up! I’m so dumb!”
If you’re thinking thoughts like “I’m so bad with technology,” it’s going to be easy for you to give up when technology inevitably goes awry.
And trust me, it does often. It’s not a problem with just you.
Solution: Take control of your mind and think thoughts that are useful to you. Cheer yourself on rather than criticize your actions.
Turn “I’m so dumb” into “Okay, now I know that doesn’t work. Let me try something else.” You’re not stupid or dumb, you’re trying something you may not have ever done before. Give yourself some time to figure it out!
You can also try using positive affirmations whenever you need a pep talk or just as a part of your daily routine. Repeating something positive to yourself will help you really believe it and realize that you actually do have what it takes.
Fixed mindset
If you tell yourself you can’t do something because of a “way that’s always been,” you’re trapped in a fixed mindset. This is saying things like:
I’ve never been a good writer, so I should avoid creating a blog.
I don’t know how to edit audio, so I shouldn’t create a podcast
No one is buying my product, so it must be trash.
All of these things are fixable. You can practice writing, you can learn how to edit audio or hire someone to do it for you, and you can do better research or marketing to sell your product.
Solution: What you need instead is a growth mindset. Realizing that you can do all the things you need to do or accepting that you may need help doing them is how you can turn a fixed mindset into a growth mindset.
Make a list of all the things you need to improve on and the steps you can take to either learn more or outsource to someone else. You don’t have to do everything in your business alone, and it’s okay to get help for the stuff you need to learn.
Impostor syndrome
Have you ever said to yourself, “I really don’t know what I’m doing. I was just lucky to get this far. Why would anyone listen to what I have to say?”
Are you thinking this in spite of the fact that you’ve got years of experience?
This is another form of negative thinking that a lot of bloggers and other entrepreneurs experience. It’s called impostor syndrome.
It’s the feeling that even though you actually do know what you’re talking about, you still don’t know enough. That your achievements are only due to luck or being in the right place at the right time. That people are going to find out you’re the “fraud” you think you are.
Solution: Recognize your achievements and how you got them. Think about the work you did to get where you are now.
You have valuable experience that people want. This why they hire you. It’s why they buy your courses, and it’s why they consume content through your blog/podcast/video/whatever.
Understand that you don’t have to perfect or the top #1 expert to provide value to someone. As long as you’re at least one step ahead of someone, you can help them!
Quitting
Finally, we have the ultimate self-sabotage behavior: quitting! You can’t achieve anything if you quit before you’ve had a chance to become successful.
Many people have a habit of quitting right before achieving success. They probably don’t know that they’re at the tipping point, but it happens a lot.
I can think of quite a few times when I realize now, looking back, that if I’d kept going, I could have found an entirely new level of success.
Solution: Develop the habit of finishing what you start. Avoid caving into the fear that crops up when you’re about to find out if you were successful or not.
Remember that you can always try again, regardless of the outcome. Many entrepreneurs go through lots of failures before finally finding that success that they crave.
Let’s Recap: 9 Ways You Self-Sabotage Your Success
Relatively, self-sabotage is actually a great problem to have. That might sound backward but think about it. If your success is out of your reach due to one of these reasons…
Indulging in distractions
Procrastinating
Failing to make decisions
Fearing success
Focusing on the wrong tasks
Listening to negative self-talk
Having a fixed mindset
Falling to impostor syndrome
Quitting before you can achieve success
…then your problem isn’t your business, it’s something you’re doing.
If the biggest problem in your business is yourself, then that’s much easier to deal with than trying to change anyone else. The person responsible for your success is staring at you in the mirror each day.
The entire issue is your own responsibility. This might sound disheartening, but it’s easier to change yourself than it is to change someone else.
Keep the tips this post in mind as you go through your day and soon, you’ll find yourself enjoying your successes instead of bemoaning your failures!
It’s not enough to dream of success. It’s not even enough to set goals.
The only way to truly achieve your dreams and build the business you’re meant to build is to sit down and just do it. You have to take action!
That’s where many of us “fail.” Fail is a strong word, but that’s the reality of it. If you don’t take action, you’ll never achieve your goals.
And yet, it’s the whole “taking action” part that usually trips most of us up.
We overbook our calendars until today’s to-dos become next week’s past dues.
We procrastinate on the things that are most important while attending to things that are merely “nice to do.” (I’m super guilty of this one.)
And sometimes we simply take on too much—even when we know better.
And then what do we say? That we “don’t have time” to grow our businesses, to find new clients, or to write new blog posts.
The truth is, you do have the time. You have the same amount of time that other successful people have. You just need to learn how to be more productive.
The problem is that you’re bad at managing that time. You waste time in ways that you don’t even realize yet.
So what do you do? Embrace these five productivity hacks that even top coaches use to get more done in less time.
Create routines and habits
Simply put, a ritual or habit is a consistent way of doing something. You may have:
a morning ritual—wake up, brush your teeth, work out, shower, and head to your office);
an evening ritual—check homework, tuck the kids in, watch the evening news, and hit the sack;
a weekend ritual—sleep late, mow the lawn, catch a movie, visit your mom;
or many others for different types of situations.
However, if you’re not careful with your rituals, they can turn into productivity killers. Is checking Facebook or email a part of your morning ritual? Is turning on Slack a part of your at-work ritual? Distractions such as these can turn even your best intentions into hours of wasted time.
Take a good look at your rituals. What are you doing that you shouldn’t be or that should be moved to another part of your day? Make your rituals more efficient and you’ll automatically get more done.
Fill in all your client calls, your business administrative tasks, time for meals and breaks, outside appointments, and everything else you’re committed to.
The time that’s left might just shock you.
Make it a habit to block time in your calendar for every commitment, and you’ll never again over-promise or over-commit.
Learn to let go
This just in: you do not have to do everything in your business. You can (and should) hand off those low-level tasks to someone else.
Hire a VA to create your documents and manage your calendar.
Let your tech support person manage your blog and email.
Turn over your bookkeeping to an accountant.
Business productivity is all about delegating the tasks you don’t have to do or simply don’t want to do. The time you free up will allow you to work on what’s truly important—and that only you can do.
Work hard, play harder
You are not a machine.
You can’t work all day every day and hope to be at your best all the time. Take a day off! You need it.
Get some rest, or relax on a long, slow hike. Take a friend out to lunch. Go shopping with your kids. See a movie or a play. Do something—anything—other than work.
Not only will you return to your home office feeling much more refreshed, but you’ll find yourself more creative and productive than before as well.
Feeling stuck? Take a break. You know the saying: fresh eyes help, and all.
Build your focus
True multi-tasking is impossible. You cannot efficiently create a new product while you’re simultaneously surfing Facebook, keeping an eye on the kids, and answering the phone every time it rings.
Instead, use your calendar to block time off for important tasks, then turn everything else off so you can focus.
Let people know that you have set work hours, even if you are at home. The benefit of working at home is that you get to set when those hours are and that you’re available for emergencies.
Other than that, no phone, no Facebook, no kids or husbands or neighbors or pets demanding “just a minute” of your time. Tune everything out, and you’ll find your work getting done much faster, which in turn means more time to actually focus on those things and people that you love.
Recap: Top Productivity Tips for Entrepreneurs
Managing your time and turning up your productivity isn’t something that comes naturally to most people but you can always get more practice. When you learn to master this skill, you’ll find your business grows right along with you.
Remember these 5 productivity tips…
Create routines and habits
Calendar management
Learn to let go
Work hard, play harder
Build your focus
…and you’ll be on your way to getting more done and living the life you dream of building with your business.
Are you ready to take your online business to the next level and watch some explosive growth unfold over the coming months?
Of course you are!
But before you start to plot and plan what you want to do to make that happen, it’s important to stop and look at where you are right now so you know what you need to work on.
For example, let’s say you want to increase your income. If you know your offer is converting at a high rate, but see that you don’t get much traffic to that offer, you’ll know you should focus on building traffic rather than trying to create more products.
Business planning for future success is all about data. You can work most efficiently and spend your time and money most effectively if you know exactly where you’re starting from.
By recording data, you can start to see what’s working, what isn’t, and what trends are starting to play out. It all starts with keeping a record of where you are right now.
Before you dive in, you should decide how you want to record this information. You can write it down by hand in a notebook, open up a Word document to do it digitally, or use a spreadsheet.
I like to use a spreadsheet I created in Airtable because I have the option to have it calculate fun additional information like weekly and monthly averages and even map it all out in graphics to help me get a clearer picture.
Pick a method that you can stick to and that what feels best for you. While I love spreadsheets, you may prefer to write everything down on planner pages.
Whatever you choose, remember to keep your records organized so you can easily go back to them and check your numbers.
What to Track
Let’s take a look at some of the things you’ll want to keep track of.
While I realize that you could just look at most of this data in various different places like Google Analytics, your shopping cart, and your autoresponder service, it’s important to have it all in one place.
This makes it much easier to connect the dots and see the relationships between the different sets of numbers. Plus you don’t have to log in to 50 different services just to see your numbers. Keeping everything in a single place creates a nice overview.
Traffic
To grow you need to expand your reach. That means getting more traffic but also engaging the people that come to your site by encouraging them to click around and read more.
Good things to keep track of are the total visitors, unique visitors, bounce rate, and of course where the traffic is coming from.
Email List / Subscribers
Once you get people to your site, your next goal is always to get these people on your list.
Here you want to track the total number of subscribers, conversion rates for each of your opt-in forms and pages, open rates for your emails, and also unsubscribes.
As you start to collect and review this data regularly, you’ll get a much better picture of your subscribers.
Customers
Subscribers are great, customers are better!
Start by keeping track of how many total customers you have and how many purchases per day, week, and month. Other good numbers to look at are the total lifetime value of your average customer, repeat purchases, and refund rates.
Income & Expenses
Last but not least, take a look at your bottom line. This is your typical accounting data.
You want to keep track of your income as well as your expenses. With those two sets of numbers, you can easily calculate your overall profit. I find it helpful to look at your profit for the month, but track income on a daily basis.
Update Regularly
Now that you have your initial data collection set up, make it a habit to update the numbers regularly. This makes it easy to see what’s working, what isn’t, and how much you’re growing as you move through the coming months and years.
Whether your business experiences growth, stagnation, or a regression, make a note of what happened that month to cause that result. You’ll be able to track why you had this experience so you can plan appropriately for future attempts.
For example, if you see a dip in website traffic, it will be easy to attribute to how you spent less time promoting your content than you did the month before. That should be motivation enough to get you to work harder on promotion for the next month.
Or on the other hand, maybe you have a huge boost in email subscribers during one month, but only half as many the next month. Rather than feel like you’re failing to continue to grow, you’ll know that spike in growth was due to a contest you held and you won’t see that level of growth continuously.
At least not yet! You’ll get there if you keep it up. Good luck!
Do you set aside time regularly to plan what you want to do in your business?
Or do you just kind of go with the flow and do things as you feel like it?
If making a plan isn’t something you regularly do, I strongly encourage you to embrace it!
Setting aside time to plan out what you want to do and what growth you want to achieve is crucial to your success. This is something you should do for each month, each quarter, and each year.
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.
You may already experience some of these and not even realize they’re a product of good planning, but the more you plan, the more you’ll see these occurring in your life.
Efficiency
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, think about 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 post, with a clear goal in mind and a plan for the year, it becomes easy to walk backward to create effective and efficient daily to-do lists. Work on what needs to get done each day and you’ll be able to reach your goals.
Creative Thinking
Next, setting a big goal for yourself inspires out-of-the-box thinking. If you don’t believe me, just 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 or cleaning respectively.
Stimulating Your Subconscious
Last but not least, let’s talk about your subconscious. So far, we’ve been focused on what we’re 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.
For example, you may come to a particular part of your plan and can’t think of a good solution right away. However, you just might have a spark of inspiration while you’re in the shower the next day while you’re subconsciously running through your plans for the day.
I’m sure you’ve heard someone mention that they come up with their best ideas in the shower before. Maybe you have yourself!
So what’s next?
Planning and setting goals is important because it helps your business 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.
Try making a simple daily plan for a week and see how it affects your productivity. Once you’re comfortable with that, you can start getting more detailed with your plans.
It’s easy to become overwhelmed by all the tasks of everyday life, especially if you don’t have any easy way of organizing them. Aside from a frazzled mental state, that stack of notes by the phone or stuck to the fridge could be the reason you’re late or forgot that ingredient you absolutely needed to finish dinner.
By the way, your babysitter canceled.
You forgot you volunteered for the bake sale this weekend.
Also, you promised yourself that you were going to start working out today, but the house is a mess.
So… good luck with everything life just threw at you!
Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to organize all that mental clutter keeping you from living your best life: a daily planner.
Table of Contents
How a Using Daily Planner Creates an Organized Life
When you think about a planner, you might be thinking of those things your teachers tried to make you use in grade school. And maybe it’s because they made us fill those out that planners have become so popular today.
Fortunately, planners have certainly evolved. Gone are the days of too-small spaces for your daily and weekly tasks, all in a boring little binder.
Say hello to fun prints, stickers, and to-do lists you’ll actually enjoy crossing off. You can easily customize your daily planner to keep track of whatever you want, so you can make sure you get done the things that are most important to you.
You can buy one that fits your goals, or you can find printable versions online. Some of them are even free!
When you regularly use a planner, you get to plan your months, weeks, and days in advance. There’s no wasting time trying to sort out what you should do next.
You can find that big, ugly task you’ve been avoiding and finish it first, allowing you to feel accomplished and ready to take on the rest of your day.
In the rest of this post, you’ll learn more about using a daily planner to organize your life and turn planning into a daily routine.
Why You Should Use Your Planner Everyday
Daily planners have become one of the best and most recommended ways to organize your life. There are so many benefits to using a planner every day, especially for your home and personal life.
Here are some of the top benefits of using a daily life planner:
Your life becomes more organized
While it’s not the only reason to use a daily planner, becoming more organized is definitely at the top of the list.
This is often what draws people to using a planner and what they gain the most from it. With a planner, you write just about everything down that’s happening in your life so you always know what you’re doing next and what you’ve done in the past.
In most planners, there are different calendar pages, including monthly, weekly, and daily layouts.
The monthly calendars are good for looking at your appointments and events at a glance.
Then there are the weekly calendar pages to flesh out your plans and schedule, and add tasks to be completed on certain days.
The daily planner pages offer more space for things like to-do lists and short journal entries.
By using all of these, you become more organized by not only knowing what you need to do and when, but also always having everything you need right at your fingertips.
You can set realistic goals and actually achieve them
Many people think of goals as dreams—something that would be amazing, but is farfetched and possibly unattainable.
However, a goal is something that you can definitely achieve if you put in the work. You should think of it as something you will work toward. The best types of goals are measurable and realistic, something you can keep track of in your planner.
Using daily, weekly, and monthly planners are amazing tools for setting your goals and actually reaching them. You can make lists of the goals you have, then for each one of these, make lists of what needs to be done. These are often known as task lists.
With everything right in your planner, you can check in daily, checking off any task that has been completed in order to achieve that goal. You can also easily make plans for what you want to achieve within a month and break those goals down into goals for each week with daily tasks.
You’ll see these lists whenever you are using your planner, so it further helps to motivate you. If you do your planning right, you won’t ever have to wonder about what you should be doing and when to work towards your goals.
Planners help you find clarity in your life
Are you trying to discover who you are, what motivates you, and what your biggest priorities are? Journaling is a great way to do that but you can also get these benefits from using a daily life planner.
As you start using your planner more often, you start discovering where your focus is. You might think you’re paying more attention to certain career goals, but instead, discover you have more of a passion for your creative endeavors based on your goals and aspirations.
This is a wonderful side effect of using a planner. You can gain more clarity about who you are and who you want to be.
Planners work great with daily journals
Speaking of journals, you can definitely combine them (bullet journaling is popular for having a journal and planner in one notebook) or use both as a part of your new daily routine.
Journaling—where you write down your memories, experiences, thoughts, and any ambitions you have—is also good to do every day. The planner is great for schedules and lists, while the journal can be for when you have more to say.
You’re able to improve your focus and productivity
Planners are often for personal and home life, but you can also use them for work and any area of your life where you need to be productive.
Perhaps you have a lot of stress in your life because your work has your stomach so tied in knots. You don’t have the time or energy to focus on family or your home upkeep.
This is where your planner comes in.
It not only helps you to manage your time better, but it will also help you to improve your focus and productivity, which in turn allows you to reduce some of that work stress. The benefits keep overflowing into other areas of your life as well.
Stress relief leads to a happier and more fulfilling life
Stress relief is a major health benefit of using a planner daily. Keeping your days organized leads to less stress because you’re no longer running around frantically because you forgot about a big project or that event you promised your friend you’d attend.
This can reduce triggers for anxiety and depression, help you relax more often, and is wonderful for self-care.
What to Track in Your Daily Planner
So what can you track in your planner? Pretty much anything. A simple online search can show you a treasure trove of all the pages you can add to your planner.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for in a daily, weekly, or monthly calendar template, find a blank template and customize it. A basic page set up can get you going if you’re not sure where to start.
Aside from daily tasks, you might want to track cleaning, shopping lists, to-do lists, vacation planning, child care, organizing, and exercise/health. Let’s go over how you can track a few of these.
Cleaning
Instead of looking at the clutter or dust in your home with dismay, schedule all the different things that need cleaning. You can pick a specific day to do it all, or pick one room or area that absolutely must get some TLC for each day of the week.
Your daily planner is also perfect for keeping track of more daunting tasks like spring cleaning or deep cleaning. Maybe one or two days a year can be dedicated specifically to donating the things you don’t use often.
Planners also don’t have to be all about what you still need to do. You can also make notes about some new cleaning methods or recipes you want to try.
For example, you could document how that window cleaner you’ve been using just isn’t working as well as it once did or that those homemade laundry detergent tablets made your sheets smell amazing.
Shopping Lists
If you dedicate one space to your shopping lists, ideally you won’t lose it or forget anything.
You can keep even more organized by separating your list by store or section of a store you plan to visit. That way you’ll remember to stop by the meat sale at the local grocery store, but head to the bigger store for canned goods.
You can make lists for
Back to school shopping
Movies you’re dying to see
Books you want to preorder or check out of the library
What summer clothes are going on sale soon
To-Do Lists
To-do lists are a staple of planners. There’s something calming about writing all your tasks down in one place. It’s like taking all the noise out of your head and placing it neatly down on the page.
Much like planning your day, planning your to-do list can help you sort your priorities and admit that some of those things weren’t as important as your brain insisted they were.
It’s extremely satisfying to be able to cross something off and watch your list shrink. Just be careful though—if you keep adding simple tasks just for the sake of crossing them off, you probably aren’t being your most productive.
Vacation Planning
This is one section where your imagination can run wild. You can start by making some lists of places you want to go and what you want to do. Add some pictures of beaches or museums you’re dying to visit.
Once you’ve settled on a goal, list some specifics:
What travel companies could you use or would you rather plan your trip yourself?
What are the things you absolutely must see or do and what would be a nice bonus?
What airlines are you considering?
Can you find any discounts?
What’s a realistic budget and how will you stick to it?
Every time you flip through your planner, you’ll be reminded of that dream trip and be more inspired than ever to make it happen.
Child Care
Raising children is hectic and your planner is the perfect place to organize all the things you need to do for them or get them to do. Keep up with appointments, plan chores for the kids, and keep up with due dates or field trips.
You can keep track of child care in your planner, such as for daycare, a nanny, or a babysitter.
If you drop your kids off every day, you can keep a list of important information like phone numbers, addresses, pick up times, snack regulations, or any other things you need to know.
If you have a rotating roster of babysitters, you can list their numbers and rates and keep a calendar tracking availability or when you’d like to plan a date night.
You can also use printable pages to write down important info to give to the babysitters. If you keep a base copy in your planner, you’ll never accidentally forget to mention something important.
Organizing
I’m sure you realize planners are good for organizing, but the first thing that comes to mind is probably simply taking what’s going on in your life in terms of schedules and appointments. If there’s only one thing you get from this post, I hope it’s that your planner can organize much more than that.
Think about what being organized means to you. This could mean having a place for all the miscellaneous stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere or it could be a place for organizing your thoughts or aspirations.
Maybe you need somewhere to keep track of projects or draft workflows and systems for your business. The possibilities for using your planner are endless.
Try journaling, meditation, or some ideas about how you want to organize the various areas of your house or life. Add in some DIY projects you can’t wait to get to or list the things you want to change in various areas of your life.
Exercise/Health
A daily planner is perfect when you’re struggling to keep track of healthy habits. Set up a meal plan, complete with a grocery list, and set up an exercise schedule. Maybe you want to keep track of your sleep schedule or make sure you take your vitamins.
You also keep track of gym days and rest days. Even if you have a gym membership, there are so many free resources online to use in your planner to create at-home workouts.
Here are a few more ways you can use your planner for better health:
How often you eat out
Track fruits and vegetable servings
Recipes you want to try
Workout videos or classes that look like fun
You don’t have to be perfect at everything all at once. You could start with drinking more water and walking for thirty minutes a few times a week and then add on more habits as these become easier.
As you gradually build up your habits, your planner is physical evidence of how far you’ve come.
Now that you understand a little more about why you should use a planner and what you can potentially include in it, let’s talk about having a daily planning routine.
Why a Daily Routine?
Building a routine will serve multiple purposes. The routine first motivates you to use your planner on a daily basis. It’s not uncommon to be excited about getting your planner set up, but then fall behind on it.
Your planner is most beneficial when you can use it on a regular basis, preferably every day.
This not only allows you to add more to your planner pages but to also check-in and look at the progress you have made so far. It really encourages you to stay productive and get more done, not to mention how much more organized your life will be.
Eventually, you won’t even have to remember to start practicing your routine. It’ll become something you instinctively perform.
Use Your Routine for Self-Care
Starting a daily routine with the planner can also become part of your self-care routine. Maybe you use the planner in the morning when having a cup of coffee or tea, or you meditate or do yoga before or after using your planner.
Through using your planner, you can create a daily routine that is better for your physical, mental, and emotional health.
Creating Your Daily Planner Routine
The first step to starting the daily routine is choosing what time of the day works best for you.
Ask yourself when you have a few spare minutes or when it would be most effective for you. If you’re writing to-do lists for each day of the week, then that’s naturally a good thing to get done first thing in the morning.
On the other hand, if you have more free time in the afternoon or in the evening, do what works for you.
Once you know when you want to do your planning, you can then decide if you’d like to include other activities in your planning routine. This might be writing in a journal, doing some creative activities, or maybe meditating and practicing mindfulness before you start your planner routine.
More tips to help you fit planning into your busy schedule and create a planning-friendly morning or evening routine can be found in my mini-course Creating a Planning Routine.
Tips for Setting Up Your First Daily Planner
If you’re working on your first planner, you might be a little intimidated and are not sure where to start. Luckily, planners are pretty easy to use and you’re free to use them however you like.
Once you have decided on the type of planner you want—whether it’s a store-bought planner or you’re using printable planner pages for a binder—you’re ready to start with the basics.
Fill Out the Calendar Pages
The first step to using any life planner is filling out the calendar pages. Start with the monthly calendar—input dates like birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays. You can then follow that up with any appointments or events you know about right now.
The monthly calendar helps you fill in the weekly calendar pages. Those are good for adding tasks of what to do each day of the week or expanding on appointments or important dates coming up.
You can then fill out some of the other more specific pages, such as daily planner pages for organizing your home or planning parties.
Write Down Some Goals
This is also a good time to write down some of your goals. Keep them simple and realistic, with just a few goals to start with.
After writing down each goal, come up with a broad list of tasks that needs to be done to achieve them. You can then narrow down these broader tasks to more specific ones and add them to different days and weeks of your planner.
Now you’re ready to get started with your planning routine! All that’s left to do is to use your planner daily.
Ready to start your first planner?
Even with all these suggestions, this is really just the beginning of all the things you could do with a daily planner. This is a truly customizable tool that you can use in any way that best suits your needs and lifestyle.
If you use a binder style planner, you have even more opportunity to customize to your needs. You can add or remove pages as your tastes change. Or maybe you want to try different page layouts until you find the ones that work best for you.
How you use your planner is up to you, but by tracking the different areas of your life, you can achieve a more organized and mentally calm state of daily living.
If you’re like me, you can plan out the perfect day in the morning, but then your plans go awry once it’s finally time to execute them. The reason for this is that we try to make decisions on the fly, and we’re too influenced by what feels good in the moment.
Nighttime is great time to make plans for the next day. Consider these ideas for effective planning at night and then following through with those plans.
What do you want to accomplish? You can’t make effective plans until you know what you’re trying to do. If you don’t know what your goals are in the short and long term, now is the time to set them.
Set aside time each night to plan the next day
Each evening, at a certain time, plan out what you’re going to do the following day. Do this with the same regularity as brushing your teeth.
Be ruthless with prioritization
Make sure to prioritize any scheduled activities. You only have so much time, so it’s important to make the most of it. Since there’s a hard limit to how much you can accomplish each day, work on the most important things first. You can determine the priority based upon your goals.
Ideally, your list will be pretty short. If you have 10 things on your list, that might be a little much. Stick to the most important 3-5 things. Can you imagine if you actually got 3 vital tasks completed each day instead of trying to float around the 50 things you need to do to achieve a big goal?
Once your biggest priorities are set, you can create another list for things that can be done after the items on the priority list are accomplished.
Make your evening decisions count
At night, it’s easy to decide that you’re going to go to the gym the following day. It’s easy to decide that you’re going to eat in a healthy manner. It’s during the day that you struggle to make wise decisions.
How many times have you planned on going to the gym at certain time, only to talk yourself out of it when the time came?
The solution is to make as few decisions as possible during the day. Make your decisions at night and then just focus your energy on executing during the day. Avoid giving yourself the opportunity to change your mind. Just believe that you made the right choice the night before.
You can defeat procrastination
You made good decisions last night, so there’s no reason to delay beginning your day. When you prioritize your activities, you can be confident that you’re spending your time well.
Your decisions when you’re decision-making powers are at their best at night. It’s obvious what you should eat tomorrow to be at your best. It’s obvious that you should go to the gym, read a chapter of a certain book, or meditate for 20 minutes. It’s much harder to follow through on them when that time comes.
Make your plan at night and then focus on executing it the next day. Avoid allowing yourself to make decisions regarding those items during the day. You already thought about them and made your decisions. There’s no reason to re-negotiate them.
Sit down and make a plan each night for the following day. Fight like mad to stick to the plan the next day. You’ll love the results!
Here’s a little business secret any serious entrepreneur knows (or at least learns after doing it the hard way for way too long).
The key to running a successful online business without running yourself ragged is to have systems in place for everything. You’ll be surprised how much time you’ll save each week and how much more productive you’ll be once you have a specific process for completing tasks you perform regularly.
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
—W. Edwards Deming
Let’s take a look at a couple of different types of systems you may want to implement.
Don’t forget to document your systems and create checklists for them as you start to create them. They will come in handy over the coming months and years, especially if you start to build a team or outsource tasks to freelancers.
Product Creation
Your systems for product creating will depend on what your products are and how you will deliver them, but some of the things you may want to document in the form of a check list are:
Topic Research
Creating An Outline
Writing or Recording the Info Product
Editing and Formatting
Uploading It To Your Site
Creating Sales and Download Pages
Creating Marketing Materials
In addition, it’s a good idea to create a template you can use for all your short reports and ebooks to make sure they look consistent across the board. This will also make your job a lot easier when it comes time to format your product.
Content Creation
Templates and calendars will make your life so much easier when it comes to content creation.
Spend a little time each month creating an editorial calendar for your blog. Figure out how often you want to blog and what topics you want to cover. With that in place you’ll never sit down at your desk with no idea what to write about.
Having templates in place is also helpful. Look at what content you create on a regular basis. Is it a newsletter, short reports and eBooks? Make templates for them. Most of your formatting will be taken care of and you don’t have to start with a blank page.
Social Media
Make your social media interactions faster with a system in place. Figure out how often you want to post and during what times—when will you post your own content, when will you ask a question or make an observation, and when will you share other people’s posts?
Having a schedule in place allows you to work ahead when you need to and just like the blog schedule it helps you get things done faster if you know what you’re writing or sharing ahead of time.
Website Maintenance And Security
Here’s a big one that should not go overlooked. Ae you keeping your site safe, updated, and secure?
If you’re using a CMS like WordPress to run your site, you want to make sure it’s updated regularly. Make sure any plugins and themes you use are up-to-date as well.
Backups are also a must. Schedule them on a monthly basis, at least, and review your sites regularly to make sure everything is safe and secure. Set an alert on your phone or add the task to your calendar each month so you don’t forget.
Customer Service
Customer service is an excellent place to use business systems. You’re likely to have questions that get asked over and over again or get support requests for solutions the same types of problems.
Having a page with Frequently Asked Questions (and your responses of course) is always helpful. You’ll be able to point customers to the page and be done for most questions.
A list of “canned “responses to common questions will also save you a lot of time. Personalize them as needed, but have the bulk of it ready to copy and paste. This will also come in handy if and when you hire extra help to manage your customer service.
“In order for any business to succeed, it must first become a system so that the business functions exactly the same way every time down to the last detail.”
—Rick Harshaw
Using systems helps you run your online business more productively, and it makes it easy to outsource those portions of your business to a Virtual Assistant. As you grow and there’s more work to be done than hours in your day, you’ll appreciate having having systems in place not just for yourself, but for your team as well.
Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s so easy to tell yourself that you’re going to accomplish something new, but what happens when it takes longer than you originally thought? Like most of us, you’ll probably find that your motivation starts to disappear.
Eventually, you might even give up on the idea altogether.
This is what makes keeping your motivation up as an entrepreneur so important, especially when you’re first starting out.
I want to share with you why motivation is important, what causes you to feel unmotivated and give you some tips on how to keep yourself motivated. Yes, I’ll be talking about entrepreneurs a lot, but this info can work for anyone in any situation, not just for business owners.
Unlike typical 9-5 jobs, entrepreneurs often find themselves performing roles that are usually carried out by multiple people—such as accounting, marketing, and handling customer service. Plus you still have to perform your services or create new products.
All of these are things that would normally be carried out by different people or at scale, whole departments. Once you realize just how many jobs you’re doing, things can get overwhelming really quickly. This leads to many would-be entrepreneurs losing the motivation to continue.
Entrepreneurship and proper motivation typically hand in hand. You’ll find it really difficult to focus on all the things you have to do if you don’t have the right level of motivation.
Below are some reasons why you should focus on improving your motivation to increase your chances of success.
Motivation encourages positivity
When you’re motivated, you’ll find your mindset is positive. You’re geared up to work on your goals and improve your life. The more motivated you become, the more susceptible you are to changes you need to make.
Motivation focuses on the present and the future. It doesn’t dwell in the past or allow room for any negativity. Without it, you could find yourself stuck in a negative spiral which is really hard to get out of.
Motivation keeps you focused
Staying focused on your goals isn’t always easy. However, motivation helps enormously. It causes you to focus solely on the goal you’re working towards. Provided you’ve set realistic goals, you’ll stay consistently motivated and therefore more likely to achieve success.
It’s up to you to figure out what it is that keeps you motivated, but it can help to have something external to focus on. A picture or a dream map/vision board of what you want to achieve can prove especially effective.
Motivation encourages more effort
You’ll notice that when you’re motivated, you put a lot more effort into achieving your goals. The most effective motivation comes from working towards something you’re passionate about.
The more passionate you are about your business, the more motivated you’ll become and the more effort you’ll put into achieving your business goals.
Motivation helps you think outside the box
With the right motivation, you’ll be able to come up with new, creative ways to achieve your business goals when you need to. Without it, it’s easy to give up when you reach obstacles along the way.
Though there will always be some tried and tested methods of conducting business, being able to embrace new ideas and ways of thinking is sometimes necessary. Motivation can help you to keep moving forward rather than doing the same things over and over again.
Why It’s Hard to Stay Motivated
For many of us, we experience a huge burst of motivation at the start of project, but it slowly or suddenly fades away, sometimes within just a few days.
It’s easy to lose motivation after the initial excitement wears off. But if you want to be successful, it’s important to keep going. The work isn’t going to get done itself.
Read the seven reasons for demotivation below and think about which ones apply most to you. Are there any other reasons you can think of? You may want to write them down and think about how you can avoid your reasons or improve how you handle them.
(Or you can tell us about them in the comments, as well!)
The planning phase is more fun than the execution phase
Sitting alone at night and making plans for the future can be an exciting time. Everything seems possible, because you’re only limited by your imagination at that point.
However, when the sun comes up in the morning, it’s time to actually get busy. It all seems a little more daunting and less enjoyable when it’s time for the rubber to hit the road.
Obstacles are things a person sees when he takes his eyes off his goal.
― E. Joseph Cossman
You lose track of the end result
Remind yourself of the prize at the end of your journey. Visualize how it’s all going to be when you’ve reached your goal. You should feel an immediate boost of motivation.
Having actual visuals of your goal may help too. Try creating a vision board filled with inspiring photos, affirmations, and quotes; or make your phone or computer desktop backgrounds a representation of your life after completing your goals.
Your goal doesn’t suit you
Many of us choose goals that are acceptable to the world at large. It might be buying a huge house or a fancy car. Is this really what will make you feel fulfilled?
Maybe your goal is totally mismatched to your real desires or temperament. Ensure that you’ve chosen goals that match your interests and abilities. Don’t feel pressured to take on extravagant goals if that’s not who you are.
You’re taking on too much at once
It’s easy to feel up to completing a single task or two, but when you have lots of different things to work on, you can easily become overwhelmed. You may find yourself switching between several different tasks or worse, you never get started because you don’t know where to start.
Practice creating lists of tasks to complete your goals. List your tasks in the right order so you always a clear path for what you need to it. You can make your lists be from most to least important, based on deadlines you need to meet, or a step-by-step start-to-finish order.
You feel uncomfortable and aren’t dealing with it effectively
It’s normal to feel uncomfortable when you need to do something new. Whether it’s creating a new income stream, beginning a workout routine, or a new diet, it’s going to be uncomfortable.
It’s important to deal with this discomfort effectively. Expect to feel uncomfortable and have a plan for working through it.
You have too many negative thoughts
Negative thoughts are paralyzing. They’ll make you rationalize all the reasons you feel that you should quit.
Though it doesn’t always feel like you have control over your thoughts, you do. You can choose what you want to think about.
Take control of your thoughts. Catch yourself early in the process of thinking negative thoughts and redirect your focus to something more positive.
Though it takes time to master this ability, the key is to notice quickly that your thoughts are going off the rails.
You’re stuck in your old habits and routines
The older you are, the more challenging it can be to break out of your old patterns. We find comfort in our old routines, and our brains become hardwired to repeat them. You’ll need to create new habits and routines if you want to change your behavior and your results.
Identify one habit that is getting in your way and one habit you need to create to attain your goals. Put your time and energy into dealing with these two items. When you’re successful, tackle two more.
Good habits are the key to all success. Bad habits are the unlocked door to failure.
― Og Mandino
Expect that your motivation will falter and be prepared to deal with it. Focus on creating habits that will take you to your goals, because habits reduce the need for motivation and willpower.
Now that we’ve talked about the reasons why you might lose motivation and what to do about them, let’s talk about how to keep yourself motivated!
How to Keep Yourself Motivated
Gaining motivation is often a lot easier than actually maintaining it. You’re eventually going to have to deal with plateaus, setbacks, or relapses, which are completely normal when it comes to life-changing goals.
The important thing is to keep pushing through even when things get tough. Try following the tips below to keep up your motivation consistently.
Take action daily
This is the single best step you can take in order to further your momentum. Taking action ensures that you’re making progress, no matter how small. Even if you don’t know exactly what action you’ll be taking, just do something, anything, to further yourself.
For example, If you want to lose weight, it’s important to burn more calories than you take in each day. If you want to grow your business, review business growth materials.
Find motivational nuggets
Take a few minutes each day to read something inspiring, whether it’s motivational quotes or affirmations to keep your confidence going. Motivational quotes or affirmations that inspire you can help transcend your mindset away from the daily grind and onto things that are bigger than yourself.
We have a lot of these within our articles here on Stay Goal’d! Check out our Pinterest account, too.
Check your progress
Write down your goals and check in on your progress each day. If you’re feeling stuck or like you’re not moving forward, review the goal that you’re trying to accomplish.
Think positively about how close you are to the goalpost rather than how far you are from it.
Talk to another
Find another person who has already achieved goals similar to the ones you’re working on.
If you’re goal is to get physically fit, for example, find a bodybuilder, runner, athlete or other like-minded individual whose been in your shoes.
Extract all the wisdom, advice and helpful tidbits that you can from their story.
Plan ahead
Scheduling time to work on things related to your goals is critical. We use schedules for everything else in our lives, so there’s no reason that time devoted to working on personal goals cannot be included as well.
Invest in a personal planner, use printable planner pages, or use an app on your computer or phone. Maybe try a combination, with one handling your daily plans and another your monthly or long-term goals.
If you don’t know exactly where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
Reward yourself
Small rewards have been shown to motivate everyone from kids to older adults. Rewards act as a positive reinforcement, and even affirmation of a job well done.
When we’re being rewarded, we tend to continue pressing on towards our goals.
Limit all distractions
You already know that procrastination is detrimental to motivation. So, if you’re looking to maintain your motivation, you’re going to need to limit all distractions.
This includes limiting your time on social media, browsing websites or even using your phone. Whatever tends to distract you, set limits on when you can use them. You’ll be surprised how much of a difference this can make.
Make sure you’re eating right
Did you know that your diet can affect your motivation? If you regularly skip meals, or simply eat fast, unhealthy foods, you’re going to struggle to stay motivated.
This is because a poor diet zaps your energy. The less energy you have, the harder it is to stay focused and motivated. So, make sure you’re eating a healthy, balanced diet rich in Vitamin B6 and iron.
Make sure you’re not skipping meals or you have healthy snacks on hand. If you’re hungry and all you can think about is your next meal, it’s really hard to focus on whatever work you’re doing.
Surround yourself with positive people
Who we choose to surround ourselves with makes a huge difference to how motivated we remain. For example, if you find you’re mainly communicating with negative people, your motivation is going to dwindle away.
Negative people literally zap the energy right out of you. So, just like a poor diet, they’re going to leave you feeling drained and unmotivated. Positive people on the other hand, will leave you even more motivated to fulfill your goals.
Find a role model
Following on from the last point, finding a role model can do wonders for your motivation. It could be somebody you know, or it could be someone famous or maybe even a character from your favorite TV show.
If you have a role model, it gives you someone to look up to and aspire to be. This in turn really boosts motivation and keeps you focused on your goals.
Focus on short-term goals
Finally, when setting goals, it’s so important to make sure you have a plan that includes easily achievable short-term goals. While you’ll still want to have a long-term goal to strive towards, you need to split it into smaller goals so you have a plan with quicker steps to achieve.
For example, if you want to lose weight, that would be your long-term goal. However, to stay motivated you’re going to need to see progress. Your short-term goals could include the changes you want to make to your diet and starting an exercise plan.
As you consistently meet your smaller goals, it’s going to really boost your motivation.
Start each day with a positive thought and a grateful heart.
It’s definitely not easy to maintain motivation, but the tips above will help. Like anything in life, the key is to work at it and do whatever it takes to keep your motivation levels high.
spending a few minutes in quiet meditation on our goals,
or posting daily reminders.
These are just a few of the things that we can do on a regular basis to keep motivation and ensure that we’re continually making progress.
The key word here is “progress.” If you taking some action or doing even just one thing on a daily basis that furthers us along in our goals, you’ll feel better about yourself and be able to keep that momentum.
