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Setting A Schedule Part 3 - The Importance Of Discipline

By: Martin Lightbowne

There are quite a few areas of discipline that I want to talk about in this chapter. Some are good, some are bad, but all of them are essential for the success of your business.

The first one I want to talk about is the discipline of target setting. Firstly note that I said target setting not goal setting. With goals your brain interprets them as just that – goals which are nice to haves. With targets it interprets them as things it must do. That difference is important. Your brain and subconscious will work together to help you find ways of hitting the centre of the target, if you just show it where it should be shooting.

So what do I mean by the discipline of target setting. People tend to fall into two camps here and it depends which hat they prefer to wear the most. Those who really love the employee hat will generally over estimate the time it will take to complete their target tasks and short change their business. Those who prefer to wear the employers hat most will tend to be very aggressive when estimating the time needed to complete a target.

Either one of these are dangerous by themselves. If you think back to the previous article when we were discussing how you go about making a schedule we mentioned that you need to make sure that you have enough time in your schedule to complete the things that you need to do in your business in that week. If you have either of these two problems then you’ll either underestimate the time needed and not see the results you were hoping for, and that can be depressing, or you’ll completely overestimate the time, meaning that you’ll end up killing time to make sure that it took that long. Either way you’re short changing yourself and your business.

So what do I recommend ? It’s actually fairly simple. Put on your employers hat and go through and look at the task aggressively. If everything goes perfect and you do a good job how quick could you realistically complete this task ? Then put on your employees hat and go through and identify all the possible problems that you’d highlight to your boss when arguing for more time. What you now have is a best and worst case scenario and you need to decide which one is more realistic or somewhere in between. What I generally do I is err towards the side of aggressiveness in target setting, but then include several “buffer” time slots in the week to help bring hose target tasks that are falling behind back up to speed. The result is a fairly balanced schedule that achieves a lot. You need to play around with this for a few weeks until you determine for yourself just how much time is needed for your buffer slots. As you get to know yourself more and more you can fine-tune your buffer slots accordingly.

The next thing I want to talk about is the discipline of sticking to your schedule once you’ve finalised it. Often what will happen, and everyone is guilty of it, is that you’ll be working on your business, when your best friend will phone you up and invite you round for a game of cards, or a game of pool or something else that you find a lot of fun. At this point most people usually think “Oh what the heck, I can do this tomorrow”. What you should be doing is thinking of your business time as if you were at a work place where you were getting paid for working. If you were at your J.O.B, you’d turn around and say “sounds great, but I’m actually at work at the moment, can we do it another time” and then reschedule it for a free time in your weekly schedule.

You see this is a key difference in mindset when working on your business. Literally imagine that you have a clock card reader when you walk into your office and once you’re “clocked in” you’re just an employee. Behave as if you had a boss and exactly as you would if you had a J.O.B. If you’d agreed with your boss at work to have a website finished today then you’d finish it today. Start to have that mindset and your business really will start to accelerate faster than you ever though possible – I promise you.

So lets talk about what to do when you do give into temptation. When you go through your schedule for the next week, you should actually “punish” yourself. I don’t mean literally but give up one of your nice to haves such as watching a sports event on TV or something and use that time to “repay” the time you took from your business last week. This is important, as it will stop you from doing the same thing next week. You’ll start to really prioritise if something is really important before stealing time from your business.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do not want your business to become a slave driver for you. It should generate pleasure and rewards. I personally find nothing more rewarding than when I’m working on my business, creating value that I know will pay me back for years to come. Let me show you what motivates me. Every time I feel like putting things off until next week I just think back to a very powerful example that someone gave me once, and that is that delaying your business growth today can prove very, very costly in the future.

Lets demonstrate this for just a moment. If your business is 100 people at the moment, and after people dropping out you manage 25% growth a year (I know its low but its just an example). For the sake of arguments lets say that each distributor generates $10 income for you each month.

If you start RIGHT NOW then in 20 years time your monthly income would be $86730. If you delayed though until just next month then your income would only be $85300 a month. That delay of one month costs you nearly $17500 a year in income. At 50% growth then the difference would be over $110K a year less. Still feel like missing your work session today ?

That is possibly the most expensive business mistake you could ever make and is one of the things that keeps me pushing so hard whenever I want to give up. I just look at it and say “is it worth $10K a month to you to not get this done today ?”. All of a sudden most decisions seem very easy to make. Going round to a friends to play poker for example may be great fun, and is something you should definitely do on your time away from your business, but sacrificing business work hours for it could make it the most expensive game of poker you’ve ever played in your life.

So what I’m basically trying to say is that you and you alone are responsible for business performance. If you do the things we’ve talked about then you stand a great chance of achieving everything that you’ve set out for yourself. If you give in to temptation and don’t use the discipline techniques outlined above then you are literally depriving your business of thousands and thousands of dollars, not just now but in the long term. Dollars that you could use to either grow your business faster or allow you to live the dreams you want to.

Article Source: http://www.bluearticles.com


Martin Lightbowne is a respected graduate in the Art and Science of Marketing, working with Network Marketers from all over the globe to explode their businesses. He can be contacted by either email on martin@explosivemlm.com or call the MLM Helpline on 623-748-1394. Website www.ExplosiveMLM.com

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