I’d like to pick up where I left off yesterday and get a little more specific about staying focused.

We talked about the power of your subconscious mind staying focused on the things you need to do by programming it with a specific objective you’re trying to reach.

Napoleon Hill called it your Major Definite Purpose, in “Think and Grow Rich”.

In the 2nd part of this post, I’d like to share with you what helps me stay even more focused.

There’s Pareto Principle of 80/20, that states that in life we get 80% of the results from 20% of the efforts.  It can be applied in other areas, like 80% of your sales come from 20% of the sales people.  Or 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers, and so forth.

As it relates to our topic, I’d like to point out, that we get 80% of productivity from the 20% of the activities that we do.

So to help stay focused on the specific things that you need to do, it’s good to also prioritize your activities.  I make a list of things that need to get done, and then circle the ones that I personally need to do and that are the most important.

In my case, it would be marketing and promotion.  The other things still need to get done, but they’re not as important, and also some could be delegated or outsourced for someone else to do.

It also helps to keep a list of things in front of you.  For example.  If you’re marketing with writing articles online as part of your strategy, then it’s good to keep a list of all these directories on top, in one place, so you don’t have to search for them, as it could get extremely time consuming.  Or if you’re doing social networking, and you have a bunch of sites you need to go to, you can do the same.

Copywriters also keep a swipe file of letters and ads near the top of their pile, so they can refer to it easily.

The point is, that whatever your most important activities are, get a little organized and keep everything in one place.

I know that it may not seem like a big deal, but trust me, it’s a HUGE time saver and it also helps you stay focused on the project you’re doing, instead of focusing your energy on constantly looking for all the things you need.

Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas on what you do to stay focused.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 9:23 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Tagged: Marketing, marketing tools, small business marketing