Have so much you want to do, but end up doing nothing? 8 Lessons in Productivity

You are that creative, the one who have a million of ideas and/or things to do but get so overwhelmed, that you end up doing NOTHING! Here are 8 ACTIONABLE tips to get you out of that rut and into a more productive work day.

1. Goal Planning: You run a business, and just like the corporate world, you need to

think about the goals that you wish to achieve in a year or may be in 6 months. No only it is

important to do so to regroup yourself but it quite necessary to evaluate your performance at

the end of the year. You might find goal planning as a daunting task, and in fact you are

right! However, you (the heart and soul of your business) must tackle all tasks, whether

intimidating or exciting; after all, we can not afford to spend our days in pajamas playing with

glitter! How do I do my goal planning you asked? I have developed a roadmap: Goal

Planning Worksheet and I just stick to it. Towards the end of every year, I have a good long

meeting with myself where I think about where I want to take my business and what I wish to

achieve. Guess what? I am going to share this sheet with you. I will not hold your hand all the

way, because you frankly need to do these things on your own, but I can provide you with

some tools that you will help you focus your energy on mapping your goals rather than

reinventing the wheels and coming up with a sheet. Not only I provide you with the

worksheet, I also assist you with the brainstorming process. Act now and start planning your

goals. Click on this link http://www.etsysellermastermind.com/#!tools/y86zp and download

the sheet.

2. Make a To-Do-List: this list is will be a by product of your goal planning work. Once

a goal is defined, you will need to a accomplish certain tasks to achieve the goal. For example,

you are in the jewelry making business and you have set a goal to create a new line of

necklaces. Your tasks might include: Doing some research, designing your product, coming

up with a prototype, pricing the products, working on the package, taking pictures, working

on the listing...etc Thus you first task is to research your product, so you break this task into a

to do list. What do you need to do to research your product. Research the internet to pick up

on trends? google, pinterest, instagram? Go to the library to get books that might open your

eyes on your techniques? Check out what other sellers are making? Look at what Accessories

Designers of major high fashion brands are working on? You now have a to-do-list that directly

links to one of your yearly goals. You should have 2 or 3 items on your to-do-list that focus on the big goals that you have mapped out in the goal planning worksheet.

3. When Life Gets in The Way, Include It: naturally we all have daily tasks that we

need to accomplish that may or may not have to do with our business. Such as cleaning your

home, depositing checks, grocery shopping, buying presents for birthday parties. Include

those in a different section of your to do list, under Household Management, Kids, family

etc..

4. Attack Your Daily Tasks One at a Time: You are probably overwhelmed by the

number of tasks that you have to do and honestly, some of them are nor attractive neither fun

to do. However, you just have to do them, one by one, break big jobs into manageable pieces. Look straight into its eyes (ok, imaginary eyes) and just do it. There is no other way around it, no magic pill, no secret recipe. Hard work is the way to do it, whether good, bad or ugly. Ok

people, I want you to listen..yes listen to me and by listening I mean act upon it and do it. Let

us go back to the jewelry example. Let us pretend that you have a 1000 listings that need

SEO updates. Yes, 1000 listings seem to be a humongous task that is quite scary. How about

100 SEO a week? not so scary, right? that puts you around 15 SEO a day, and in three and a

half months span you will find yourself scratching that huge scary monstrous item off of your

list! or may be break them down by pages, or categories...find a way that works for you and

tackle the task. This strategy will help you get the ball rolling and not getting overwhelmed. Honestly I use this strategy in my daily non business life. I clean bathrooms on one day, the laundry on another, vacuum on another day and so on, simply because cleaning the entire house in one day is too unattractive and a time guzzler.

5. Checking Things Off of Your List: Once you have accomplished a task, check it

off of your to-do-list. This is one of my joys in life, the feeling that you accomplished something and the least favorite tasks yield to higher satisfaction because you really pushed yourself and

managed to finish something that could easily kept you procrastinating, accomplishing

nothing...nada and then feeling awful and guilty because you still have not done anything

about it yet you have less time to do it.

6. Visualize the progress: it is important for you to understand the end result of all this

hard work, because it will help you first to break this huge tasks into manageable pieces and

visualize the big prize at the end.

7. No One Is at an Advantage: everybody is busy, everybody has many things on their

plates. You will gain nothing by lamenting over your situation and thinking that it is so huge that you can not do it and wishing you have more time or more money to hire someone else to do it. Be in control of your situation and do what needs to be done. There is no way of sugar coating this.

8. Modify Your Goals When Necessary but Stay focused: So this is meant for the

creative people who come up with brilliant ideas every half an hour. Yes, you are awesome at

coming up with ideas, yes this is fantastic but it is also very distracting. Add those ideas to

your goal list under ideas for the future and go back to your task at hand. Sometimes writing

these ideas down will help the brain to calm down and focus. I call it the “Flushing Process”.

It helps you to feel safe that these ideas are documented somewhere and will not get lost. Now

you can focus on your specific task at hand. However, do so when you have time, not when

you have a deadline over your head and you need utterly no distractions at all. Push things that

take yo away from achieving your goals.

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Here's to a more productive work day!

Dalia Abdalla