About four years ago I had the pleasure of seeing an interview with Carnegie Mellon Professor, Dr Randy Pausch. I instantly had so much admiration for this man and found him to be incredibly inspirational, wise and entertaining all at the same time.
Sadly, he has since passed away from pancreatic cancer.
This video is his last lecture – Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. I realise that at just over an hour it’s a bit long for busy business people, but it’s really is worth making the time to watch this. When this lecture was given, Randy was terminally ill … but if he didn’t make mention of it at the start of his presentation, you’d probably never know. He truly is an amazing man.
So if you need a boost, motivation or an excuse for some time out, do yourself a favour and watch this.
No matter how well organised you are there are always going to be times when things go wrong, take longer than planned or the unexpected crops up. Sometimes – especially if this happens over two or more consecutive days – it can start to overwhelm you. This is when you start to realise that there’s no way any human can do everything that needs to be do at the moment (e.g. today, this week, before a deadline) and you start to worry, stress and perhaps even panic.
I had 3 consecutive days like that last week. On the first day, where an unexpected technical issue cost me 7 hours from my day, I just rearranged the rest of the week to make up for this. Then some extra, urgent work cropped up the following day – a day where I was already overloaded trying to catch up from the day before. Then on day 3, another unexpected ‘challenge’ occurred and I was starting to stress.
Day 3 was last Thursday. Although I made up for lost time, I also realised that I was now way behind schedule with what I wanted to achieve that week and it was time to take drastic action if I was to avoid a breakdown before the end of the day.
Here’s what I did to ensure I caught up on Friday – even finding time for an impromptu interview with a national newspaper. Hopefully these tips can help save your sanity too.
1. Make a cuppa. I know this sounds crazy to some people, but when you’re feeling overwhelmed with the amount of things you need to get through, the first thing to do is to ask yourself, “What is the best thing I can do right now?” And if you’re particularly stressed, it may be that by taking some time out for yourself first, you’ll actually function better throughout the rest of the day.
So in my case, I made a cuppa and sat down with a pen and paper and my to-do list and started planning how I was going to handle everything.
2. Next, make a list of everything you need to do today (or this week or by your deadline) – this is what I did while enjoying my cuppa
3. Go through that list and cross off or reschedule anything that can wait until later.
4. Then decide if there’s anything you can delegate. In my case, I called in the pros:
My darling son took over cooking, cleaning, pet care and all ‘house’ duties for the next couple of days – is there anyone else in your home who can look after these tasks … or at the very least help you with them? That freed up more of my time so I could focus on the things that only I could do.
I called my assistant and offered her some extra work helping with general admin type duties, not just for the business but also some personal paperwork and phone calls that needed taking care of. If you aren’t blessed with a wonderful assistant like I am, look at hiring a Virtual Assistant (VA) for a few hours or a couple of days. They will really help to take the pressure off. Or if you’re in Brisbane, give Kay at Hectic Helpers a call (just program her number into your phone as ‘HELP!’) Kay loves doing all your running around for you
Look for other areas you can save some running around. In my case, I had to do some grocery shopping as my hectic week meant I hadn’t had a chance to shop for ages! So I went to Coles Online and ordered our groceries in about 10 minutes. They were delivered the following morning. Next, I went to Officeworks and ordered my office supplies … again, all delivered the next day.
By now you should really be getting used to delegating, outsourcing and finding ways to save some time.
Okay, so next – after all this re-organising, delegating, saving running around, etc – you should have a much shorter to-do list with a greater chance of completing your tasks. So now, wherever possible, estimate how long each task is going to take. Then allocate chunks of the time you have available to the various tasks to be come.
This next step isn’t always as easy as it sounds, yet it’s extremely important. During those allocated time chunks … FOCUS on the task at hand. If you’ve allowed 1 hour to catch up on emails, start with the most urgent and get through them without letting yourself be distracted. If an email is going to require more time to research or consider your reply, where possible, you may be able to reply just to let the sender know you’ve received their message and that you’ll reply in detail on Monday (or whenever you feel you can reasonable allocate more time to this).
By the end of the day hopefully you’ll be in a much better place – you will have achieved so much, but also be more relaxed knowing that everything is being managed and under control.
Now the last step in this process … grab a nice cold drink and sit back and relax
There are many reasons why you might need a solicitor, lawyer or professional legal representative during the course of business. You may need these services for advice on how to structure your business, to draw up contracts and legally binding documents, to help form business partnerships, or to resolve issues with clients and/or government agencies.
Whatever your reason for needing one, it’s important to choose the right one.
Solicitors, lawyers and attorneys are highly specialised professionals. The laws of the modern world are so complex that it is difficult for one person to see to all legal matters, and so they normally will choose one area of law to focus on. A solicitor might specialise in family law, business, criminal law, or any of a number of other areas of specialty.
So for your business you need to find a legal professional who is an expert in business law. Even then, you may find some professionals that specialise in various areas within business law, such as patent or intellectual property protection.
The first step to choosing the right professional is in narrowing the list down by their specialty.
That short list still will be quite long though, and so you will need a way to really close the field. For this, determine your specific needs and the type of solicitor you want representing you.
Consider factors such as:
Expertise
Experience
Personality
Philosophy
Legal interpretation
In addition, it’s a good idea to:
Ask other business associates for referrals
Check with legal societies
Ask for referrals from trade, commerce or industry associations you belong to
Once you’ve narrowed this down to a few prospective representatives, it’s time to ask for some specific details, such as:
Their area of expertise and experience dealing with cases such as yours
Quotes, rates and additional service fees
What is and isn’t included in quotes provided, and how the cost may alter depending on various factors
By now, you should have one or more prospectives that you feel comfortable working with; if not, continue your search until you do.
One thing I noticed when starting this business back in 1998 was that when you’re shopping around to find the best bank account for your business, as soon as you mention ‘business’ most of the fees suddenly increase. It doesn’t seem to matter whether you’re a sole operator with less business transactions than some personal accounts or a major company with numerous daily transactions. As soon as you mention ‘business’, that indicates more money for the banks.
So in choosing the best business bank account it’s extremely important that you shop around with various banks and credit unions. In addition to your current requirements, consider your plans for business growth and how they may affect your future banking needs. It’s much easier to set up the right banking structure now rather than changing in a year or two.
For example, you may not need a merchant account to allow you to accept credit card payments now, but you may want to add this service later. If so, make sure you consider merchant account provisions, costs and requirements when making the initial decision on which bank to choose.
What about convenience … much of today’s banking can be done online but there may be times when you need to visit the branch. Do they have a branch that’s convenient for you to get to?
What’s their service like? This includes general teller service, online service (e.g. site security, ease of navigation around their site and reliability). Can you easily make an appointment to speak with the bank manager or business manager if required?
Over on the Habit Breaking Facts blog, Andrea Jordan shares 17 Everyday Tips For Saving On Bank Fees. There are some great suggestions that are sure to help you manage fees on your personal bank account as well as your business bank account.
Most importantly, compare different accounts with different banks and don’t be afraid to ask questions. The time you spend doing this now will no doubt save you a lot of time, hassle and fees over the years to come.
While many people – hopefully most business owners – realise the importance of backing up computer data and doing it regularly, many people don’t realise that some files, such as emails, may require a different back up technique.
If you needed to install a new email program and wanted to still have access to the emails in your existing in-box, sent items, drafts, etc, would you know how to transfer these files over? And your contacts?
Or if your computer died and you had to rely on your backups, would you know how to restore your backed-up emails?
Truly, I’ve lost count of the number of times clients and friends have phoned me because they can’t find or can’t restore their emails. Please don’t leave it until you NEED to do these tasks before figuring it all out. If you don’t already have this figured out, I encourage you to allocate 30 minutes or so this week to ensure your email backups are in order.
The method used varies a little depending on which program you use to access your emails.
Here are some sites that provide a good, detailed run down on how to export emails and contacts from three of the most common email programs:
Brett McFall is an Australian marketing expert who has a particular skill for using a simple 10 minute process to help turn businesses around.
In this video you’ll see Brett demonstrate this process – one he performs all around the world, getting the end result he’s looking for every single time … without fail.
It truly is amazing to watch as the process evolves.
Last year I came across a HTML editor that’s really easy to use either for creating web pages from scratch or editing existing HTML pages, such as website templates.
I’ve been ‘playing’ with PageBreeze for a while and have been quite impressed by how easy it is to use. You can create and edit pages in [...]
I get a lot of people asking me how they can watch online videos without them stopping and starting all the time.
First, it helps to understand why they stop and start. Depending on various factors, including your internet speed, it can take a while for videos to download. Often you’ll start to watch a video [...]
If you’re anything like me, life just seems to get busier every year. Yes, you could slow down a bit… do less… be less involved in your various activities, business groups, children’s sports or whatever, but do you really want to cut back?
I lead an extremely busy life but in all honesty, that’s the way [...]
If so, it’s time to organise your email system before it takes over your life!
Email is an extremely convenient mode of communication; perhaps too easy, as it seems to invite people to contact you for sometimes barely any reason at all. With all that email coming in needing attention, it can be hard to get [...]
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