How to Stay Focused & Work Less
Have you ever felt like you are constantly being distracted in your business? Like every time you read somebody’s newsletter, you want to try a different marketing strategy? Keep readying to learn how our Breakthrough Planner can help!
Perhaps there are people in your community who are doing other businesses, like selling supplements or essential oils. And it feels like maybe if you did that business, it would just be easier.
And then you get to the end of a quarter or a month, and, yet again, you still haven’t reached your goals and it feels like you’re still not doing the right things.
This has happened all the time to people I talk to at events and other potential clients who are coming to work with me.
Just the other day, I had a sales conversation with a woman who said, “Monica, it just feels like I was asleep for the last two quarters. It’s already June, and I don’t know what I did, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. And it feels like I’m all over the place and off track.”
Can you relate? If you’re like most entrepreneurs, I know the answer is Yes.
Between everything that has been happening in the world over the past year, the fact that there are still family members working from home, and the fact that we’re still reeling from the emotional exhaustion of 2020, it’s hard to stay on track.
For some of us, it’s hard to even figure out what the heck the track that we’re supposed to stay on is.
I totally get it. And it’s why I created my Breakthrough Planner.
My Breakthrough Planner is not your normal planner. It’s not a planner where you write down everything that you’re supposed to do each day.
What it is, is more like a 90-day system to help you stay on track, complete with nine-to-five timing.
See, what I’ve found is that, as entrepreneurs, we are literally information collectors. We are class junkies. We love to buy programs. And because of that, we’re ingesting information all day, every day, whether we consciously mean to or not.
That information can cause confusion. It can cause overwhelm. And most importantly, it can cause distraction. We end up working for an entire day or even a week without actually hitting our goals.
It’s like we’re shooting arrows at a target, but we’ve forgotten where the bulls-eye is. So we continue to shoot arrows and maybe we’re even hitting the board. We think we’re hitting the bull’s eye, but we’re not—because we no longer know where the bulls-eye is.
So, instead, I want you to come up with three 90-day goals.
Every single quarter, the first 90-day goal should be a revenue goal—you write down how much revenue you want to generate.
The second and third 90-day goals are project goals—you choose two multi-step projects that you want to accomplish over the course of the quarter, like updating your website, hiring a new bookkeeper, consistently making videos every week, or creating a newsletter and getting it out.
Now, creating your 90-day goals is awesome, but it’s only the first step.
Most entrepreneurs completely miss the next and most crucial step—that you have to write your goals down every single day at the beginning of each day.
If you don’t, then you end up creating a daily to-do list that seems good, that makes you feel like you’re accomplishing a lot of things, but is actually not helping you hit your goals.
Whether we realize it or not, when we get in the habit of checking off our to-do lists, what can end up running the show is actually our lizard brain. And our lizard brain wants us to do things that are comfortable. Things that are safe. Things that we know how to do.
Our 90-day goals, on the other hand, are projects that take us out of our comfort zones—maybe to the point of rejection or delayed satisfaction. So by actively creating our to-do lists from these 90-day goals, we can push ourselves to do the things that are uncomfortable.
When you make your to-do list every single day, your three most important tasks for the day must come from your 90-day goals. Get in the habit of asking yourself, will this action item help me hit my 90-day goal? And if the answer is No, then don’t do it.
If you’re not sure whether the answer is Yes, then get some help. That’s a great question to ask your business coach about.
To help you stay on top of all of this, I created a daily section in the Breakthrough Planner.
Each day you can write down your 90-day goals and your three corresponding action items. Next to the action items, there’s a box that you can check to record whether each item is related to your 90-day goals or not.
It’s a three-part process: writing down those 90-day goals, making your to-do list from the goals, and checking the boxes to make sure that your action items track with your goals.
That’s a big reason why I recommend that, if you’re starting off fresh with this habit of goal-setting, you use my planner, at least for your first 90 days.
If you’d like to order a planner, you can do so at BreakthroughPlanners.com. And right now, when you order the Breakthrough Planner, you also get a Breakthrough Planner Day with me.
On Breakthrough Planner Days, we sit down and fill in the planner together—and we’re having one on June 19, which is coming up in less than three weeks.
A lot of people order a planner like this, and then let it sit on a shelf because they don’t know how to use it. Breakthrough Planner Days give you momentum – because we fill out the planners together and I show you how to use it.
No matter what you’re using as your planner, whether it’s my Breakthrough Planner or another notebook or planning system, I invite you to adopt this practice of writing down your 90-day goals every day and making sure that your to-do list comes from those goals.
Here’s to finally creating that schedule of your dreams – and still hitting your goals!
