Day 11

Morning Review. Are you having trouble finding enough time for your Success Ingredients? If you are on track or ahead of schedule, good for you! If not, here are some strategies to help:

1. Give something away. What other tasks are currently on your to-do list? Is there anything you can hand off to someone else? If you can’t unload an entire project, are there some pieces you could ask another person to do? If you are unaccustomed to delegating, you may need to expand your vision of what it looks like. You don’t necessarily need an administrative assistant in order to delegate; you can delegate to a co-worker, a colleague, a friend, your spouse or partner, your children, your siblings, another committee member, or a hired professional. What are you doing that someone else could do instead? Can you ask someone else? Can you pay someone else? If it enabled you to spend an extra hour a day on marketing, could you afford to pay someone to handle some of your other responsibilities?

2. Put something off. What on your list can be done later? If you have a habit of planning more things than you can possibly do, you are already putting some things off by default. Why not choose up front what those things will be? Think in terms of your overall priorities. What is more important than marketing? There will certainly be a few things, such as serving your current clients or spending some time with your family, but it’s unlikely that everything on your agenda is more important than marketing right now. Find some tasks that you can defer for the next seventeen days.

3. Let something go. If you have had a task on your list for several weeks and not gotten it done, does it truly require doing? If you haven’t made time for it in this long, how important can it be? Try this: cross it off the list for one week, and see if it comes back to haunt you. If you can forget about it, that’s one less thing to do. If you can’t let it drop, revisit the first two options above.

Daily Scores. Did you make more headway on Success Ingredients today? What will be your target scores for tomorrow?

Thought for the day: Studies estimate that the typical urban citizen is exposed to thousands of marketing messages per day. Remember that when you’re wondering if it’s too soon to follow up with someone who has heard from you before.