If you want to increase your business results and income while expanding your time for rest and family, you will need to eliminate demands, obligations, and tasks that steal time and do not yield sufficient returns.
You will need to structure your business so that you direct your time, energy, and abilities only to projects, opportunities, and people that bring you the desired results for all your efforts. To successfully achieve your goals and be able to shape the lifestyle you want, you will need to become excellent at rejecting all things and people that distract you and pull you away from what is important to you.
Either you will manage your time, or it will manage you. It is a matter of personal choice. One of the best ways to regain control over your time is to learn to say no. Successful people know how to say no without feeling guilty. Most entrepreneurs are overwhelmed with all sorts of work, both that which yields results and even more that which must be done but does not bring profit. They are active but not focused. Every day requires more concentration to perform daily tasks and to deal with short-term and long-term goals.
With the advancement of communication technology, which should make our daily business and private lives easier, we sometimes feel that it complicates our lives even more. We are more accessible to an increasing number of people. They contact us by phone, mobile, pager, fax, regular mail, express mail, and email. We receive a pile of emails on our computers, laptops, and mobile phones. They leave us messages on our answering machines or voicemail. The sound of the phone, messages, or emails interrupts us in whatever we are doing. Think about how much time and concentration it takes you to return to what you were doing after a conversation. Daily, many spend a few hours just responding to messages, emails, and mail. Some cannot even go on vacation, dinner, or visit friends without their mobile ringing.
Sometimes it seems that everyone wants something from you. Business associates want your opinion on projects for which you are not responsible, clients ask you to finish the proposal you agreed on for next week today, your employees ask for your help with a report that should have already been completed, your sister calls you about your mother’s birthday celebration, your children nag you to take them to the amusement park, your best friend calls you for a beer, your neighbor asks to borrow your van to transport something, an endless stream of telemarketers asks for something from you….. You are bursting at the seams. Imagine how much more time and control you would have over your own life if you did not have to react to all unnecessary messages, read dozens or more irrelevant emails, and simply said no.
