You know what they say about the cobbler’s children needing shoes, or the plumber’s wife calling a plumber – we seem to have a tendency to know how to mentor to others, but we have a hard time living our teachings. Well, today I got a reminder from one of my networking buddies and it made me realize, if we don’t live our teachings, how can we expect those we are teaching to believe us? How can we expect to affect change in their lives when we can’t be trusted to do as we teach? I for one want to be remembered as someone who not only mentored those around her, she walked her walk.
Here is the article from the amazing Adam Urbanski. I hope it speaks to you. I’d love to hear from you.
“Two things that happened recently made me take another look (again) where I invest – or waste – my time on regular basis. Last week my two “little” girls went to their first Winter Formal Dance. When they both told me they were asked to the dance, I knew that my “babies” aren’t babies any more.
And my secret hopes that maybe that will want to hang onto their childhood days a while longer where totally crushed when I saw them all decked out the evening of the dance. And I thought, “Where did the time go?” Then, someone congratulated me on my 20,000th tweet on Twitter. Well, it turned out it was a system glitch – I really only wrote 6700 tweets so far. But the message made me think…
If each tweet takes on average about 30 seconds to write (I was being optimistic), and I wrote 20,000 messages… That’s 167 hours! That’s a full month of working 40 hours a week just tweeting! Now, as I said, I don’t have 20,000 tweets – but many of my friends have that many and more!
So what’s my point here? You see, those two unrelated events made me take inventory of how I use my time and, once again, see if I can weed out any time wasting activities.
I already eliminated most of my emails (only very few people can contact me directly by email) and I keep my email closed when I work. And in general I’m pretty good about keeping the small stuff from distracting me.
How about you? How are you doing with reaching some of the goals you set for your self for this year? Are you on track? Are you as productive as you’d like to be? How much of your time is invisibly wasted on the “small stuff” – like tweets, emails, and just shuffling papers?
Fact is, we all do it. The trick is to do less of it. Because if you are busy majoring in the minor stuff, you’ll never find time to do what really matters.
This weekend think about your daily work habits. I’m sure you’ll find a few opportunities to weed out small, but deadly, time zappers! I hope you find these tips helpful and put them into action to make yourself more productive, and your business more profitable in 2010 and beyond.
Until next week, here is to your outrageous success… Cheers!”
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© 2000-2009 Marketing Mentors Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The author, Adam Urbanski, helps service professionals and business owners how to
attract all the new clients they want, and how to develop marketing
strategies to increase sales and profits. His website offers more how-to
articles and free tips to create a winning
marketing action plan at www.themarketingmentors.com.
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