When you think about growing your business, you need to handle sales, marketing, and time management. You want to attract the clients you want to work with, offer your service or product and have them buy and then, manage your self within the context of time so you stay on track to realize your goals.
Here is a roadmap for thinking about these tasks:
1. Vision
You always want to know what result you want. You want to keep a vision of yourself in the future – how you want your business and your life to look. Visioning works best when you create a very specific picture of the result you want.
2. Strategy
Strategy is the roadmap to fulfilling your vision. How are you going to get there? If you are visual and you like the idea of having a visual representation of your plan, I highly recommend mind mapping. I use it all the time and I find it to be an easy and effective way of organizing my thoughts. I use Simple Mind and I find it easy and intuitive to use. I don’t get any fees for recommending it – I just think it’s a great program and it works on your desktop, smartphone and tablet. (FYI, the apps are free and the desktop version is available for a fee.)
3. Tasks
Once you know what your strategy is, you must break it down to the next level. What are the actually tasks/activities to fulfill the plan? What are the deadlines? Who will do them?
4. Mindset
Sometimes we totally ignore this part, and then we abandon our goals before we get there. You need strategies and regular check ins to make sure your mindset is helping you and not hindering you.
In the weeks and months to come, we will thoroughly explore each of these pieces of the roadmap. I want to reiterate – it doesn’t matter where you are in your personal journey to success – this productivity roadmap will help you get where you’re going quicker.