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What you can expect from this best practice:

 

• Identify your personal motivation for making changes to your business

• Establish a process to regularly review your personal and business objectives

• Ensure that you are using your time effectively and efficiently

• Adopt a professional business model such as a lawyer, dentist, doctor or accountant

• Make conscious choices about how you spend your time

• Establish set hours of availability

• Increase business productivity through focused time allocation

• Create a structured approach to ongoing team communication

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Your Vision

 

1. You can use a hard or digital copy of the Your Vision Worksheet to begin capturing your Vision. 

   • Begin by carefully thinking about What Is Important to You as outlined on the first two pages of the worksheet.

   • Next identify the specific goals that will help you Achieve Your Vision as outlined on the last two pages 4 of the worksheet.

2. You may want to use the Effective Goal Setting: Be SMART to help you clearly articulate your goals.

3. Create a reminder in your calendar NOW to review Your Vision Worksheet three months from now – this will help you stay focused and on track.

4. It is important you discuss and share goals directly related to the business with your team as they will be an integral part of achieving them.

5. It is encouraged that all team members participate and complete this Best Practice independently. Furthermore, we recommend they share with you their professional goals. 

 

Allocating Your Time

 

Once you’ve clearly identified what matters most to you, it is time to Allocate Your Time in a way that supports achieving them.

 

1. Use the Weekly Schedule of Success and based on the work just completed, begin to allocate your: Personal Time and Professional Time. 

2. When allocating your PERSONAL TIME, do so in a way that allows you to achieve what matters most to you in regards to: Personal Relationships, Health & Well Being, Personal Enlightenment, Recreation and Fun, Anything and everything else that matters to you.

3. To accurately reflect your available PROFESSIONAL TIME (and true capacity), we recommend you block all time off for vacation and conferences in your calendar immediately.

4. Create structure weekly by defining specific purposes to each day of your work week:

   • Planning & Preparation

   • Client & Prospective Client Meetings

   • Follow Up, Research & Clean Up

5. Once you've established some weekly structure, you can then begin to work on creating daily structure.

   • Refer to Proactive Time Allocation and the Client Meeting Scheduling Protocol for more guidelines on how to make this happen.

6. Once you’ve gotten your Weekly Schedule of Success to a place where you are ready to put it into action, you can improve your probability of success by: Reviewing it carefully with your team and answering any of their questions. Transferring the ‘plan’ from paper to actual time blocking on the calendar you use. Ensure you have a Weekly Team Meeting to keep everything on track. 

7. Be diligent about keeping your time commitments.

8. Encourage your team members to proactively allocate their time in a way that supports their priority activities. 

 

Reducing Interruptions

 

1. Review and customize the Telephone Answering Protocol to reduce telephone interruptions.

2. Check your email at regular intervals (morning and afternoon) instead of living and responding to emails in real time.

3. Have a regular Weekly Team Meeting to discuss non-urgent matters.

4. Close your door when working on things require your focus and attention to reduce.

 

Weekly Team Communication

 

1. Follow the implementation instructions outlined in the Weekly Team Meeting Guidelines to either initiate or improve your ongoing team communication.

2. Print a copy of the Weekly Team Meeting Agenda.

3. Customize the Agenda where required.

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Recommended Reading

 

Give me a Break, by Hugh Culver.