Getting enough of the right things done is challenging for any home business, particularly if you’re building your business on the side while holding down a regular job and perhaps juggling family responsibilities as well.
One thing you have to pay special attention to is your “to-do” list. These are your day to day activities that support and grow your business. These are the tasks and actions you must complete in order for your home business to be successful.
There is a stumbling block I’ve found that affects many home business builders. I’ve encountered this myself, and have worked hard to address it and streamline my daily activities.
What is that stumbling block? Most of us do a lot of things, in the name of “building our business”, that really aren’t productive. These are activities that might be enjoyable or pleasant to do, but which take valuable time and don’t do much (if anything) to grow our business.
There are only so many hours in a day. If you’re working a job and juggling other responsibilities, you may only have an hour or two in the evenings to work with. The way to grow your home business faster and more efficiently is to focus hard on doing the things that actually make it grow and prosper.
For example, if you have a network marketing home business, your best use of time is likely to be:
- communicating and following up with new prospects for your business
- training and assisting your downline team in building their business
It’s really easy to do a lot of “busy work” that you might think is productive, but it really isn’t. Some common time wasters include:
- trying to perfect your plans and strategies for building your network marketing business
- surfing on social networking sites looking for prospects but not really communicating with anyone
- posting free ads, using traffic exchanges, and other low-return advertising and promotion methods
Of course, you must have a plan for your network marketing business, but avoid the trap of spending most of your time planning and preparing instead of doing. Always ask yourself, “Is what I’m spending my valuable time on right now getting me in direct communication with a prospect for my business, or helping someone on my downline team grow their business?”
Thinking about the results of each action you take applies not only to network marketing, but to any home business. Try breaking down and examining what you actually do during your business building time, and focus more on the tasks and actions that actually move you forward and make money for you.
To Your Prosperity!
Eldon Beard
eldon@eldonbeard.com
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Hi Eldon,
Thanks for sharing this post. I totally agree with you when you said that posting free ads and surfing on traffic exchanges are time waster. If you are on a budget, I suggest using social media sites like facebook and twitter but when you log into those sites, just make sure as a marketer you are connecting and doing your business tasks and not surfing all around those sites making you unproductive. I have experienced using free classified ads and what I got were spam messages sent to my email. Also traffic exchange are not that effective these days. Thanks again for sharing.
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Hello Sonny,
I appreciate your thoughts! I know about this because I used to be pretty bad about wasting a lot of valuable time on non-productive activities. Sometime, it’s just a way to procrastinate, so you have to get a grip on it and organize your actions to focus on what’s important.
Eldon
Great post,
It is tricky for so many people to manage their time who are not full time in the business and are still in a day job. Your list of time wasters is definitely helpful.
It reminds me of what Stephen Covey says about time management “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing”.
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