When you own a business, you're both the boss and the employee. Some people love this kind of setup and achieve far more than they ever would in a traditional workplace. For others, it can spell disaster. It's important to analyze yourself regularly to ensure you're keeping on track. Are you focused on your business? This alone can throw your business into high gear or create a standstill.
It can be easy to lose focus when you work at home, as there will always be other things competing for your attention. It is okay to let the laundry wait for a few hours while you work on your business. Your laundry can't pay your bills, but those few hours you put into your business could reap you many financial rewards. It's not only important to focus on your business, it's also important to focus *in* your business.
It's easy to get sidetracked from one task by some new idea or offer. Spreading yourself out over too many projects means none of them are going to get done effectively. It's all about focus.
How productive are you? At the end of the day, do you ever feel like you worked all day and didn't accomplish a thing? Look at the tasks you're actually working on and how important they are to the success of your business. Surfing the web (even if you're reading sites related to what you're doing), chatting in forums and reading blogs are not productive - schedule time for these either after your important tasks are done, or for a set period of time at the end of the day. If your day is being chewed up by answering email, updating your websites or doing research for your next product, you might want to consider outsourcing those things to a virtual assistant.
This can free up your time to work on the most important things that only you can do. Are you reaching the goals you've set for yourself? If you're constantly missing deadlines and not reaching goals, you might want to look at them and see if they're really realistic. Create an action plan for yourself and follow it. Here's a question that might be hard to consider - would you hire yourself? Why not write out a job description for what you do and "interview" yourself to see if you're really the type of worker you would hire. If you answered "no" to the above question, take some time to write out the areas within yourself that you would like to improve. This can be a hard exercise to complete, but once you have analyzed yourself, you'll be on your way to becoming a better business owner and having a better business.
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