What Are Your Highest Payoff Activities?

What Are Your Highest Payoff Activities?What are your highest payoff activities? Sad to say for many people it may be easier to answer this question: What are your lowest payoff activities?

Either one – it is your choice – take a few minutes and write down – yes write like with a pen – your answers. Start out with three for each question. Feel free to return later to add in more onto your list. Want to see the value? Once you complete these go right to the bottom of this article where noted.

My Highest Payoff Activities Are: 

  1. _______________________________________
  2. _______________________________________
  3. _______________________________________

My Lowest Payoff Activities Are: 

  1. _______________________________________
  2. _______________________________________
  3. _______________________________________

 

Now that you have this information here is what you need to – no correct that – MUST DO! Schedule to spend more time on your high payoff activities. Schedule, hire in or eliminate your time spent on low payoff activities. No two people are going to be alike. There will be a few common threads.

Typically a high payoff activity will be in one of your main areas of focus. For your business this may mean sales calls, closing the sale, delivery of your product or service and accepting payment. In your personal life this may mean a date with your spouse each week on date night. Keeping your relationship alive and thriving. In your spiritual or faith area this may mean attending church or leading a bible study class or both. In your community maybe you volunteer serving meals in a shelter a few hours a week or a month. These may be high payoff activities for someone.

For the low payoff activities it is easiest to spend a week or two writing down how you are spending every fifteen minutes from the time you wake up until the time you go to bed. You may find the amount of time spent in front of the TV to be on the top of your list. The amount of time on the internet without a purpose or a plan may be a close one to the TV depending upon your age. Include time on social media and this includes utilizing your smart phone and this will easily come into first place. There is nothing wrong with spending time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media as long as there is a reason, a purpose and a plan. Otherwise schedule to limit the amount of time you are willing to spend in this arena. Three hours goes by very quickly and these hours never come back.

***RIGHT HERE***

Now calculate the value of your time! Every hour you are spending in the low payoff activities is like you are robbing yourself! Do you fully understand? Go back now and read the article if you skipped that part.

Mitch Tublin is an advanced, certified coach, business consultant and speaker based in Stamford, CT.

Would you ready to work with Mitch to identify your high payoff and low payoff activities and how to leverage yourself and manage your time more effectively CLICK HERE.

Are You In Costume Everyday of Your Life?

Are You In Costume Everyday of Your LifeAre you in costume everyday of your life?  At work and at home are you who you really are, or are you role playing all the time and you have lost track of who you really are?

Are you really you when you are working with your clients and customers?

The point of this question is do you assume a role? Essentially are you in costume when you show up to work with clients, customers or are out networking.? Is this what you do?

In addition, do you have MVS syndrome? This stands for Multiple Value Systems. There is the value system you ask your family to live by. The one you live by in your place of worship. Then there is the value system you utilize at work and with your employees, your clients and your customers. Maybe you cut corners. Maybe you do not treat all of your employees as real people with a real life outside of the workplace. Do you have MVS?

Allow me to apologize if anyone is feeling attacked. As you will see these are questions meant to have you reflect on yourself for a few moments. Let’s take a quick timeout.

In case the calendar has slipped your mind, this is the end of October! Which means it is time to conduct a few activities for next year. A few of these might include:

  1. Strategy for next year
  2. Goals for next year
  3. Monthly plan for next year
  4. Events you are attending/hosting next year
  5. Vacations you are taking next year

There is more. Where you are able to add in dates, timelines and due dates put these in place as well.

Okay, back to the main article.

People know a fake a mile away. Why does anyone even go there? Why not be yourself? Why not be honest about who you are and what you value and care about?

More often than you might imagine the answer is fear. There is a fear of failure. By acting as someone else, there is a feeling that you will not be the failure it will belong to this ‘other’ person and not you. This is not the only answer or reason. It is one possibility.

Another is a lack of confidence. Again by ‘playing’ another role it is like putting on the Superman outfit. My suggestion is to be yourself all the time. If wearing the Superman outfit makes you feel better, fine. Wear it all the time then!

Mitch Tublin is an advanced certified executive and personal coach who resides in Stamford, CT.

 

May I Buy Some Time Please?

buytimepleaseIf your printer runs out of ink or paper you or someone who works for you can just head over to the nearest STAPLES store and buy ink cartridges or paper.  When these are put into the printer you are back in action. The ink and the paper are commodities you use them and you just go and buy more.

On the other hand, time cannot be purchased. If you take an hour to work with a client who was booked for thirty minutes, the extra thirty minutes is lost forever.  If you are working on a marketing plan and had planned and scheduled to work on it for two hours and instead you work on it for six hours, the now lost four hours will never return, they are gone forever.

Everyone is busy, in fact, when surveyed, one of the top five items people wish they had more of is time. Every type of survey researching this question finds more time to be one of the top five most requested or wished for items. The question must be asked – if we cannot buy more time and we all want more time how do we solve this supply and demand imbalance?

The answer is we have to create more time within our day by re-allocating what each of us spends our time on. Here are three actionable steps for you to put into use right now.

The absolute number one habit to form is to create a time management system or process which you will adhere to and will work for you. In a perfect world this system would be combined with your goal tracking and action steps you may have set up. This does not have to be an electronic or digital system. It might make sense if you will be sharing the information with a number of other folks. However, the main point is that it has to work for you first.

The second habit is to stop trying to always be and look busy. Busy does not always translate into productive. Time spent being productive is one of the essential attributes we each have to have for ourselves.  Hands down regardless of the type of business you are engaged in, sales and marketing are where the majority of your time should be spent, and will be the most productive time you will spend in your business.

The third action item is grouping. The ability to group activities creates great efficiencies. A few examples would be to select an hour in the morning or the early afternoon to make your phone calls. Avoid texting and calling people up at all hours of the day.

Try out any one of these items or try out all three. Give yourself a full month or possibly two months to witness the efficiencies created.

Mitch Tublin is an advanced certified executive and personal coach who resides in Stamford, CT.

Resurrection Time For Your Purpose, Passion and Planning in Business and Life

Are you just going through the motions? You may have started your own business ten years ago, ten months ago or ten weeks ago and you now find yourself in a rut of your own creation.

businessplanningYou need to resurrect your purpose, passion and your planning in your business and life.

This means you need to take the actions necessary to bring back into practice, or to use in a sense a revival of your spirit, why you wanted to be in your own business in the first place.

A book may be written about how you find yourself in this situation. One example is you have something you are passionate about and you start a business around it. As you become successful you hire staff and personnel to work for you. Now you find yourself spending most of your time managing people and the business and not working in the area of your passion. In fact, before you never viewed this as work. Now you do.

You spend many hours each day involved in the areas of your business you do not really enjoy working on. You arrive home to your family and most days the kids are already in bed. Your relationship with your spouse resembles two ships passing in the night.

Make an appointment with yourself. Take one hour or two hours and shut down all distractions which include, but are not limited to your cell phone, iPod, laptop, TV, iPad, and anything else which talks, makes noises, music or sounds.

What is your purpose? Write.Yes use a pen or a pencil and paper. Do you know something magical happens when we write with our hand on paper? It is almost as if there is a connection formed when our hand writes, our eyes see it, and our brain looks at what we wrote down and interprets the words. Magical.

Business and Life – What is your purpose? Write.

What are you passionate about? Write.

In Business and Life – What are you passionate about?  Write.

Go back now and read aloud what you wrote. Consider if you need to add or change anything. My preference is you add more.

What is your plan? Write. Huh?

Okay we just wrote down our purpose and our passion. We already know we have moved away from these in our current daily existence. How do we get back on track?

How do we get back to living life?

Let’s develop your plan to make this happen together – right now.

Mitch Tublin is an advanced certified executive and personal coach who resides in Stamford, CT.

Thanksgiving Meal Planning May Provide Business Success Tips

One of the U.S. holidays that has absolutely no religious ties is Thanksgiving. Maybe that is why everyone really enjoys this holiday.  How do you plan for your Thanksgiving, and specifically the meal? The reason this has been brought up is to demonstrate that how you plan for this day and this meal speaks volumes about how you may or may not be planning for your business.

For example, do you make it your business to be invited somewhere and you basically bring the wine or the beer or the dessert and you are all set? This may demonstrate your willingness to outsource a good amount of your administrative and other work in your business.

Another example is, do you begin weeks before Thanksgiving trying to figure out exactly how many people will be coming over to your house and you begin to purchase goods for your recipes way in advance? Your plan is to make every single dish from scratch. This may demonstrate in your business that you are a control freak. You must handle everything. Approve everything. You are actually a roadblock to the growth of your business.

One last example, do you make a few phone calls and reserve enough seats for you and your guests at a restaurant, or do you have everything catered into your home – soup to nuts? In your business this may be the optimal utilization of your time. The one exception might be that you would opt to cook or bake at least one or two items. Similar to your business, you would still work in your area of expertise.

This is a different approach for you to step back and assess how you actually plan for this one single, special day. You would think your ability and interest in planning would be much more intense when planning for your business.

If you are ready to have an experienced, expert coach plan out your next year with you, contact Mitch Tublin right now – www.thementorguy.com.