Want to start making more progress toward your goals or business targets? If you do, here is a simple process, which is guaranteed to work for you so long as you use it. It’s based on a weekly, 3 step process of; reviewing, learning and actioning. Although the focus is on weekly progress, by making each week an improvement on the previous week, you also make each month and year better too.
Here is how it works:
1. Do a review of last week
Start off by doing a review of last week. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- Who did I connect with?
- What measurable progress did I make?
- What went less well for me?
- What ate into my time, with little return?
- Where did my best results come from?
Write your answers down and get them ready for the next step.
2. What did I learn from last week?
Reviewing your answers from the previous step, what lessons are there?
The way you invest your time, is directly linked to your success or otherwise. This is why it’s important for you to identify the activities that sucked your time up, without providing you with some kind of measurable progress. Equally, you need to determine what activities were most profitable for you.
Write down as many lessons from last week as you can. Look for the gold dust and also the dross.
3. What will I do to make this week better?
If a commercial activity was not working for you last week, you need to either fix it or remove it from your work-flow. Many small business owners repeat things that don’t work, purely because they are comfortable with them. They hope that their results will “just get better”, yet as Einstein assured us:
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results!
The week ahead can either be a chance for you to get a week better or a chance for you to relive the same frustrations again. The reason most people simply get a year older each year, rather than a year better each year, is that they allow themselves to get into an unproductive rut. They work hard, but mistake movement, for progress.
This final step is what separates the winners from the masses of frustrated business owners who make little if any progress. Great intentions are not enough. The world is full of people with great intentions, yet very few people action those great intentions. You need to be smarter than that, if you want to make real, measurable progress.
Identify the changes you need to make and then motivate yourself to take the action required. This is the cornerstone of all progress and the end to a life of frustration.
I’d really love to know what issues you are working with right now, so share your thoughts.
UPDATE: Following a problem with the blog’s database, the comments for this post that were left on the date of the post, have been lost. However, everything is working fine now, if you would like to share your feedback on the post.