Entrepreneurs often tell me they are overwhelmed, but with everything you have on your plate, your incredibly active brain is juggling all your To Do’s along with hundreds of great ideas. No wonder it’s difficult to maintain focus!

When you’re unfocused, at the end of the day, you’ve started a dozen projects you’ll never complete and you’ve done none of the things critical to making progress in your business. In today’s competitive environment, it’s more than frustrating to chase your tail; you need to be focused and productive.

Most entrepreneurs start their business as a solopreneur. You create the vision for the business, formulate the marketing plan, execute it, sell, deliver products and services, execute the marketing plan and, in your spare time, network! Oh, and let’s not forget the paper chase: preparing proposals, contracts and invoices as well as chasing payments and making payments! Yes, there’s more, but I’m tired just listing them!

Of course, you also have personal and home responsibilities. Staying healthy and well rested is essential. And keeping the people in your life, your spouse, your children, happy provides a support system (or at least prevents a divorce from taking time and focus away from your business!)

No wonder you’re overwhelmed! Is it possible to run a business and your life without letting anything slip? Yes. How?

You adopt strong entrepreneur productivity practices. Productivity is not only about work performance. True productivity lets you honor all the commitments you make to others, to yourself, and to all the things that support you: your health, work-life balance and financial health. You just need to master self-management.

Neglect your self-management and you’ll soon find yourself overwhelmed, possibly in divorce court and procrastinating on your invoicing or sales calls. But you won’t have to worry about that for long… once your business and marriage fail, you can console yourself that at least you’re not dead. Unless, of course, you are.

Overwhelmed? Frustrated by your inability to focus? Improve your productivity.

Numerous requests have prompted me to launch an “Entrepreneur Exclusive” version of The Maximum Productivity Makeover for Creative Geniuses. To learn more, complete the Request for Complimentary Session or call 514-807-5008.

Commitment is essential to progress. If you can’t commit… if you can’t keep your promises, it will be impossible to achieve your goals. We all think, of course I keep my promises; when I promise someone I’ll do something, then I always do it. Can you say the same thing about promises you make to yourself? All progress comes from change and change requires you to commit to moving out of your comfort zone.

I just finished the first draft and first revision of my new book (working title, The Maximum Productivity Makeover for Creative Geniuses). I set a goal to write a book in 2010, but I knew I had to start long before December or it wasn’t going to happen.

Of course, as an entrepreneur, things come up. Emergencies happen and life gets in the way. After one month and then another zipped by with no progress made on my book, I realized I needed to buckle down.

I intended to honor my commitment to myself, but when I spotted an opportunity to reinforce my commitment by adding some external accountability, I jumped at it. Accountability is an extremely powerful tool to help you focus and take action. I enrolled in a coaching program where a group of potential authors gets together offer instruction, tips and encouragement to each other with the objective being for each participant to write a book in a weekend!

I didn’t really expect to complete my book in a weekend, but I thought that with that kind of rocket launch start to writing my book, I could finish the first draft within a month. Did I need to pay an $800 enrollment fee for a program to get this done? Probably not! So why did I?

Commitment is a powerful energizer, especially if you’ve invested heart and pocketbook! The program included four group-coaching sessions by phone during the weekend, a follow-up session a month later and 24 pages of information you need to know to become a published author.

Even the most successful people don’t have money to throw away so my $800 payment guaranteed I’d make space in my agenda to work through the program. I canceled everything for the long weekend, prepared meals in advance and made sure I accumulated enough sleep and exercise ahead of time so I’d be prepared to take full advantage of this weekend as a springboard for my writing project. And it worked!

Using the momentum I created that weekend, I continued to make space in my agenda to complete the book. More than 250 pages and one month later, the first draft is finished! Yes, it was an intense month, but I stayed focused because I wanted the investment to pay off.

That’s the power of commitment. And just a small sample of what you can accomplish when you honor your most important commitments, the promises you make to yourself.

How can you solidify your commitment to yourself?

What do you need to do to carve out time to complete that long-delayed strategic project?

In the comments, I’d love to hear the strategies you use to keep your commitments to yourself.

If you’d like to start keep your commitment to yourself and double your productivity, join The Maximum Productivity Makeover for Entrepreneurs!. It starts in May.

If you want to increase your productivity, spend more time thinking than doing.  And when you’re thinking, think about what not to do!

We must focus to succeed, as an entrepreneur, or in any endeavor, and the easiest way to focus is to eliminate all distractions.  There will always be more to do than the time available, so that’s what draws our attention.  We ask, “Ok, what do I do?  What do I do first?  And what do I do after that?  Then what?”

Staring at a crowded agenda and ever-growing To Do list (book?!), trying to spot the commitments and tasks that are most likely to help grow your business right now is challenging at best.  You “can’t see the forest for the trees,” and you end up constantly busy but not making significant progress toward your goals.

Productivity isn’t just a question of efficiency.  It’s a question of effectiveness.  Is what you’re doing making a difference?  The Pareto Principle states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort.  It’s great to be efficient, getting things done quickly and with the minimum expended effort, but that’s only useful if you’re doing things than advance you toward your goals.

When you have overwhelming demands on your time, it’s very difficult to target the 20% of activities that will result in 80% of your progress.  Strategic, deep thinking demands both time and energy.  For entrepreneurs, your time and your energy are very limited resources.  Depleting your resources in the trenches is not effective.

To improve your focus, clear some trees.  When you sit down to plan your week and decide which of your many To Do list tasks you will assign to a precious spot in your agenda, make a habit of eliminating at least one item from your To Do list each time.  That is, take it off your To Do list and DON’T schedule it in your agenda.

We’ll look at options for those tasks in future articles.  For now, however, you can save a lot of time by eliminating tasks that don’t contribute to your goals (your goals have changed or you shouldn’t have accepted the tasks in the first place).  If you’re feeling ambitious, delegate tasks that someone else can do almost as well as you can and outsource tasks you’ve been “too cheap” to pay someone to do.

What tasks did you find hiding on your To Do list, adding to your stress without contributing to your bottom line?  What was the most surprising task you found?  What was the most creative solution you found for eliminating a task?

If It Was Easier to Succeed Than It Was Fail…

Getting something done is a three-step process. You can boost your productivity by taking the right three steps.

Let’s say you need to go to the post office. First step, “I can’t forget to go to the post office this afternoon.” Second step, get distracted because you got involved in something more important than going to the post office (I know it’s hard to imagine, but…). The third step? Beat yourself up! “I can’t believe I forgot to go to the post office… again!”

Everyone forgets.  You’re an entrepreneur so you have a lot of your plate, many demands on your time and numerous distractions vying for your attention.  You will forget things.  Forgetting an errand isn’t a sign of Alzheimer’s or that you’re getting old.

A slight adjustment in your three-step process can really pump up your performance.  Instead of worrying that you “should” be able to remember to do things, just adopt a systematic approach to your errands.  The benefits of systemizing your business are legend (as outlined in The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber, required reading for every entrepreneur), but we often neglect to apply this same idea to our daily lives.

First step, “I can’t forget to go to the post office this afternoon.”  Second step?  Set yourself up for success; imagine you have scheduled a meeting agenda from 2 to 3 pm.  After the meeting, you know you’ll be tied up following up with other attendees and then you’ll at your office, you’ll be bombarded with the phone messages, emails and other emergencies.  To have any chance to get to the post office, you have to go before the meeting.  Note the 10 minute post office trip in your agenda and set a reminder in your cell phone/personal digital assistant 15 minutes before the meeting.

When your alarm goes off at 1:45 pm, you can easily excuse yourself from anything you’re doing because “you have a meeting to go to.”  There’s no point starting anything else since you only have 15 minutes free before the meeting; it’s the perfect time to go to the post office (and you’ll get to check it off your To Do list!)

Third step, pat yourself on the back!  Adjust the timing to your own situation, but you can see how, by thinking systematically, you can find ways in almost any situation to make it easier to succeed than to fail.

You can apply this approach in numerous situations.  Want to exercise more?  You could rely on willpower, but what if you signed up for a class… with a friend?  Now it’s hard to fail because you’d be letting your friend down.  It’s easier just to go (and succeed!)

So that’s the key.  When you can make it easier to succeed than to fail, make it easier to do what you want to do than to avoid it, your productivity will soar and you’ll move toward your goals, not by inches but by leaps and bounds.

What strategies do you use to make it easier to succeed than to fail?

By Linda Walker

Entrepreneurs are visionary, creative thinkers who hate being “boxed in.” Systems are certain to reduce your workload, and yet every entrepreneur resists them vehemently, believing they are synonymous with bureaucracy, lack of creativity and the loss of their dearly held freedom.  Would it surprise you to learn they’re liberating?  Here’s how:

1. Systems streamline boring or complicated processes and minimize mistakes, freeing you to do more creative and interesting activities.
   
2. Once your system is foolproof, you can delegate work while maintaining control.
   
3. Systems free you to tackle the next exciting opportunity, making it possible to run your business part-time or increasing its value should you decide to sell.

Systems release you from the daily grind and unleash your brilliant and creative mind to imagine the new heights to which you can bring your business.  Imagine!  In the end, systems don’t box you in, they set you free.