#8 lunch and learn: Make March a marvellous month – start it on the 31st

What it is:

We’re nearly at the end of February – that’s 16% of the year gone already – and hasn’t it flown by? This tip is to help you get stuff done in March (and every month thereafter) so that in ten months time you can be proud of 2012.

Why it works:

The human brain loves a deadline and goals, and this tip makes the best use of that.

What you do:

The idea here is that you articulate the things that you want to get done by the end of next month, 31 March.

This not about the outcomes (for example sales of $20,000) but about the activities you are going to do to achieve those outcomes (for example make 50 calls to past customers)

So what you do, which is really very easy, is:

1. List the various parts of the business that you are going to work on next month. It could be everything (sales, marketing, product development, cash collection, delivery, …..) but most likely you have some key areas you really want to improve – in which case just list these focus areas.
2. Pick each focus area as a heading and then list the activities* you are going to do between 1 and 31 March.
3. Make sure all activities are measurable so that you can both track your progress and honestly do them.

I put a little * by the list of activities because this is where you need to put some thinking time. And this is what you need to do, over the weekend maybe,  to think…..

1. Take the list of activities you would like to do in March
2. Give them each a score of between 1 and 5 where 5 is a vital activity which must be done in March and 1 is an important activity that can wait until April if need be.
3. Re write the activities in order starting with ‘absolutely-must-be-done-in-March’ and descending through to those which can wait
4. Put a rough time estimate next to each activity
5. Calculate how much time you can make available to do your March activities
6. Do the maths – which activities can you fit into the time available in March!

Yes I know this sounds so obvious but we are all such hopeless optimists; and that’s why we get to the end of the month feeling a little deflated. We set off hoping to accomplish so much but we never have as much time as we’d like and then, when we are also a little undisciplined about how we spend that time, we fall in a heap.

So start with the end of March in mind, do a few key activities and feel great when you make real progress

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