Hello, and welcome to the limitless entrepreneur podcast, I am your host, Nicole Laino. And I am talking about a very hot topic today I am talking about productivity. So it’s the start of a new month note. And no matter what time you are listening to this, maybe you are listening a few months from now a year from now. Or maybe you are listening to this right when the episode drops at the beginning of November 2020, it doesn’t matter, you can come back to this episode and these resources that I’m going to give you to map out your 30 days to maximize your results in 30 days, you can come back to this every single month, you can come back and listen to this episode, I actually have a free guide that goes with the episode as well. So make sure you download that that is in the show notes for you. But again, the point of it is that you could download that free resource, print out a bunch of copies. And you can go through these exercises every single month. And that is what I hope that you do. Because this will start to change the way that you approach your business and will make you more productive. Now I’m not calling this productivity tips, because this is tips really are just things. And it’s really hard to implement things. This is an this whole podcast is really about changing the way that you think about things because this is the difference between feed a man a fish, give him a fish, and you feed him for a day and teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. I am teaching you to fish. In this episode, I’m teaching you how to look at your business for maximum results. So I hope that sounds good to you. So if you’re a side Hustler, a coach a solopreneur, with a lot on your plate, you probably feel overwhelmed, you probably feel like you do a lot of things. But you’re and maybe you’re even feeling burnt out from doing all the things and you are not seeing the results. It’s just not there. You’re not saying yeah, I’m working really hard and revenue is going up. And I’m signing clients and I am making sales and I’m adding people to my network marketing team, whatever it is, you are not seeing the success that you feel that you should for the amount of work that you are putting in. If that’s you, this episode is going to help you, I’m going to give you a whole new way of looking at your business. And looking at the way that you spend your time. And how you can start to flip that around where the time that you spend is generating real results in your business. So hope that sounds good to you. So everybody always asked me about time management. And I always say the same thing. Well, time management is you management, that is what it comes down to. It is managing yourself. And understanding that is particularly crucial for the solopreneur for the entrepreneur who has little to no team. So maybe you have one part time VA or something, and you’re doing most of the work yourself. The management of you, you are your main resource. If you are not managing that resource, then no wonder your business is struggling. No wonder you are struggling as a person. Because there is no actual management of it, you are just doing things, feeling excited one minute and then feeling disappointed more often than not probably the next. Because and because you feel like you’re doing so much. And there’s not a lot of return for it. So you feel like you are scattered. If you feel like you’re scattered, like you don’t know where to spend your time. Because I hear this a lot people like there’s so much to do, I don’t know how to do everything? And the answer is that you shouldn’t do everything. Now, this isn’t going to be an episode about telling you that you need to hire people, we will get into how we will actually have a whole separate episode about that. But we’ll get into how you hire and there’ll be a little bit of that. But that is not what this is about. This is about helping you do it the way that you can right now, with you and the limited resources you have. But the reason that you feel scattered and like you don’t know where to spend your time, and you have this list that just seems keeps seeming to grow. And it never seems to feel like you get ahead. And the reason for that is your failure to prioritize, and to organize. So another thing I hear from people a lot is I need to get organized. And I want to I want you to understand that organization is not just having a spreadsheet, all typed out because you’ve probably done this before and then the spreadsheet just gets filed away. You don’t come back to it. You have an Asana board or a Trello board. And that works for a little while, and then you don’t come back to that. And the reason is that you are that is an organization tool, but you are not organized. And you are not organized because you have a failure to prioritize. And that comes from a worker bee mentality. And so signs that you have a worker bee mentality is that you have a lot of things on your list to do. And you don’t know why they’re they’re not really anyway, usually, because someone told you that it should be is why they are on your list, and you are doing things just to do them and check them off the list, but not because they truly align with any concrete goal that you have set for yourself. Because you probably haven’t set a goal for a variety of reasons that can come up as well. But you haven’t set a goal, you don’t have a vision. And if you haven’t listened to episode two, where I go into alignment, and creating an aligned vision for your business, aligning with your six figure self, which means aligning with a vision for your business, that is six figures. Please go back and listen to that, because that will shed a lot of light on the goal setting process for you. But the worker bee mentality. Some of the signs for this, I hear this from a lot of people that you have courses and programs that you quote unquote, need to finish. But you don’t know why you need to finish them. You If I asked you why there is no answer there. Another thing that I hear posting on social media, I need to post on social media. I need to post every day, I need to post three times a week, I need to be in stories every day. There. There’s all of these things, however,

to produce, what is the question? So you need to post every day, okay? Why? What is that going to produce for you. And I’m not telling you that any of these things are wrong or that they should not be on your list. But you as the CEO of your business, you are also you are your number one prayer employee. But you are also the CEO, you need to wear both hats. And when we are just doing and not wearing that CEO hat. That is how you create the hamster wheel that you feel like you are on. You are running, running, running, running, running, with no end in sight. No idea where you’re going. And that is because there is no one truly mapping out the course. And that is what I want you to take away from this episode I want you to you have to be in worker bee mode. Sometimes because you are doing all the work that is just the reality of how your business is structured right now. And we want to get you out of that. But you also need to shift into CEO mode regularly. And on a consistent schedule in order to lay out your map for the future, your vision. And to do that key part that I said that most people are missing. Prioritize. So CEO mode, I want you I want you to ascend to the boardroom, I want you to do this. Now CEOs in corporations, they’re always on the top floor. If there are 35 floors in the building, the CEO sits on the 35th floor. If they’re 80 floors in the building, the CEO sits on the 80th floor of the building. So I want you once a month to get into the elevator of your office of your company’s office building. And I want you to hit the top floor, I want you to hit the penthouse. And I want you to rise up ascend to the boardroom where the CEO sits one time per month for your CEO meeting. And the end of a month start of a new month is the perfect time to do that this month happens to fall on a weekend which that is my favorite time to have these meetings because nobody is looking for me. There are no clients that I am. I don’t promise them responses over the weekend. That is my time. And I don’t have I don’t feel like I need to be responding to emails. I don’t need to be on social media as much it is a break. And it allows me to free up my mind in a different way. So it’s a perfect CEO strategy time. It’s a perfect time to have this little board meeting with myself. And this is where you formulate your 30 day plan. So this is what allows you to define a big vision for your business. And this is I come from a project management background in my corporate career. I was a project manager and also I found under a software company, which building software is all project management, that is everything to us is managing the build. And that’s what you’re doing here. And I want you to, I want you to understand that as the CEO, you are coming at this from a high level and looking at this and saying, What does this project look like, for 90 days? Okay, we’re going to talk about a 30 day plan. But the 90 day vision is important. Because that helps you have a bigger vision of where you want to go, sometimes 30 days is hard to say, well, I can achieve that in 30 days. So 90 days, what that allows you to do is look a little bit further out and say like, okay, so if I said, I want to have 80 new clients, in my program, at the end of 30 days, I could break that down into one month increments, and I could say, Okay, well, that’s six clients a month. That helps me understand from a project management standpoint, from a delegating standpoint. So if you had staff, you would delegate this out, if not, this is your time, where you’re saying like, Okay, this is how I’m prioritizing the things that need to get done. Because if I said, I need six clients this month, then I would say, that helps me prioritize the things that need to happen, what are the actions aligned with that number one priority.

Okay. And I would say that for the next 30 days, this is my priority to sign six new clients that sort of lets me know exactly what I need to be doing will direct outreach, if I’m not launching. So if I’m having a launch, then it’s okay, six clients are going to come from the launch. So putting all of my effort into what needs to get done for the launch, and I would start chipping away at what needs to get done in order to have a successful launch. What are all the activities that I need to do? What do I need to have in place, and by what dates, I would start doing it that way? If I wasn’t launching, though, I would need to have a ground work game of how I’m going to get consults on my calendar, booking sales calls with people so that I can close them. And so something like what do I when we have those courses and programs we need to finish quote unquote, need to finish, say I had this goal of six clients in a month. I know I’m doing them through sales calls, that means I’m going to have to be booking consult calls, maybe. So in a program like mine, where limitless entrepreneur, we have a complete business building suite for you have information and modules to go through some of my clients, they don’t know where to spend their time, because there’s so much in there, it can be overwhelming. But we say okay, well, what’s the priority, you’re having sales calls, you should go through the sales section, if you are not closing sales at a 50% rate. So if you aren’t booking 50% of the calls that you have, then you need to brush up on your sales skill. So that might be a priority of learning that we put into the plan for the next 30 days. Why would we put it there? Well, one, the next month is going to be a similar priority, I’m going to have six new clients, I need to get to hit my 18 in 90 days. So learning brushing up on my sales goals right now means that will pay off for the next three months to get me toward my goal. It might be less important for me to dive into a module on content creation, if I already have a pretty good handle on that. And it’s not attached to my it’s not directly related to my 30 Day and 90 day goal. So I hope you see how that works that by setting the priority that informs the actions that need to be taken because they are aligned aligned with a specific goal. And that’s how you actually achieve with the things that you’re doing. And you stop you get off the hamster wheel, you stop running for the sake of running, and you start to actually produce results with the effort you are putting in. So this is how you do it. So we have that 90 Day goal, we would break that into 30 day increments. And we would say so from like a software standpoint, just to sort of illustrate this point for you. I didn’t build my entire software in one month. We can’t do it. You look at the resources that you have, that you have on hand that’s the staff that you have, how many hours you have to work, you you have the ability to work, how much money we had to spend, and we said okay, well we can’t do it all now. Well, what’s the most important thing to do first, and then you start building from there. Okay. And then now that we’ve done that One thing, we have that on the calendar, we actually have some extra time some extra resources. What’s the next most important thing to do? And you decide this is how you move more than one ball down the court at a time. So, actions aligned with priorities is a key. So that’s why prioritizing is important. And then, and then defining what the actions are that align with those priorities. And that is how you get organized. That is what you put into Asana into a Trello board into your spreadsheet, whatever it is that you are working off of that helps you that is how you get organized. And you start chipping away at those based on the dates that you set for deadlines, or just working in priority order. So the next step that you take now that we have a monthly plan, you break your weeks down. And this is going into that organizational part, right? How many some questions to ask yourself, and these are in the free guide. So make sure that you download that. In the show notes, you can find that break your week down? How many hours do you have per week to work, like what you want to set yourself up for success, you don’t want to put so much on your plate, that you you don’t want to put a month’s worth of work on your weekly calendar, because that is setting yourself up for failure, which is setting yourself up for disappointment, which is going to ruin your belief that you can make this happen. That is going to trigger that failure of you know, your ego is going to start setting you up to say like, well, you can’t handle this. It’s so much work. Why even bother? You don’t want this business. That’s where the fear of success can come in. Like, even if this works, it’s so much work, how are you possibly going to keep this going. And you don’t want to do that you don’t want to put yourself in that position of ruining your belief because belief is a prerequisite for success, you will not be able to produce the results that you want, without 100% belief that they are not only possible, but inevitable. You must believe so setting yourself up for success where you’re having wins is going to build belief in yourself and in your business. So don’t put a month’s worth of work on a week’s calendar. Okay. So how many hours do you have every week to work? And then what are your non negotiables there’s going to be things other than your big vision goals that go on your calendar, there’s going to be things that you have to do client work if you have existing clients, if you have existing people in your network that you need to take care of. That’s going to be a non negotiable. Now I’m just talking about work time, there’s family stuff and everything. I want you looking at the hours that you have that you can devote to work. Okay, so we’re only going to talk about work stuff. So the client work is a non negotiable, maybe visibility in the market. So something for me is a non negotiable is I do this podcast every week. non negotiable is that I you know, how am I in integrity with my audience is a non negotiable. And then there are line items under that I do a Facebook Live training every single Wednesday, inside my Facebook group, I release this podcast every week, these are non negotiables to me, so I need to look at that and say these need to be in my 30 day plan and where do they fit into my week? Prospect outreach may be a non negotiable for me, especially with this goal. If I’m looking to sign six clients, I need to be reaching out to people, that is a non negotiable, I am not going to reach my goal if I don’t do this. So how long do those non negotiables? Take? How many hours a week do I need in order to hit the non negotiable Done button? How do I get every single one of those done? And then what time do you have left? So if you have 20 hours a week that you can work and your non negotiables take up five, then you have 15 hours left to work in the week. You know, it might be less than that I have 10 hours to work per week, my non negotiables take up five, okay, you’re working with five hours, you better use those wisely. And they better be aligned with something important and not just busy work because you don’t have you don’t have space for busy work with five hours left a week. Okay. So in that time left, that is where you would put maybe learning something that is more aligned with the 90 day goal. So maybe that is PR. Maybe that is booking yourself on podcasts. Maybe that is something that’s a longer term vision. Maybe it’s Really, it’s really going to depend on your business and what your priorities are. But you would use the time left that excess time, and say this is what I’m going to do with it and make sure that it aligns with a greater goal that you have either part of your 30 day goal or your 90 day goal.

And then if you have a time deficit, if you have less time, so if you said my non negotiables, take up 12 hours, and I only have 10, or my non negotiables, take up five hours. And that’s all I have, then you need to that’s when you start saying, it’s time to hire, I’d love for you to hire before you get to that point, because it will allow you to expand so much faster and scale up so much faster. But if you can’t, then this is a sign by going through this process. It’s going a lot of people say like I don’t know, maybe I need a VA. Well, this is how you know. And truthfully, everybody needs a VA, you need somebody that’s going to help you do some of the things that do not require your attention. And that would be a process that you go through, you would say, Okay, well, what can I unload on somebody else. So if you have a time deficit, and you end up having more work than you have time for after going through this process, that it is actually a process you have gone through and confirmed and not a feeling that you have that you have more work than you have time for we often feel that way. But when you break it down, and you say this is these are my priorities, these these are the action items I need to get done in order to achieve my goals, and I do not have time to do them all. I’ve done the math, it’s not working. Truly pay attention to that. If you’ve gone through that process, and you end up at that conclusion, then you have a time deficit. And it is time for you to hire Upwork is a fabulous resource to hire part time help, go to upwork.com and get somebody for just the amount of hours that you need. So if you say I have five hours to work, and it’s taking six hours of non negotiable time, how, what’s an hour’s worth of work every week that you can get rid of. And we will go into all of that in a How To Hire episode one specific for that. But that’s just kind of a little a little taste for you. So that you understand the thinking behind hiring, how you hire and who to hire. Okay. So I hope that this was helpful for you seeing how you break down, you start chipping away at your month looking at projects versus tasks, don’t put a project on your calendar, don’t put sign six clients on your calendar, you have to put you have to put the finite action on your calendar that gets you to sign six clients. And that might just be an hour’s worth of outreach and follow up on your calendar every single day. Okay, so I hope that this was helpful, I hope you are seeing how spending an hour every month having this brainstorming and formulating your plan the CEO meeting for yourself by having your little CEO board meeting how this can not only save you time, but make your time worth more money. This is how you create results in your business. And you get off that hamster wheel, you stop running on the treadmill of your business and you start running a real race. So please make sure you download that free guide that I have for you the formulation guide that is going to help you give you a guide to a template to walk you through so that you know that you are hitting all these points. And you can certainly adapt it over time. But this gives you a good jumping off point. So that we’re starting you on this process and on this path toward prioritizing and organizing yourself your business for maximum results. So I hope you found this useful. I hope you found it helpful. Guys, I’m going to leave it there. Thank you so much for being with me. Thank you for staying till the end. I want you to know that you are only limited by the limitations that you accept. And once you stop accepting those limitations, that is when you truly become a limitless entrepreneur. Thank you for being here. I will see you on next week’s episode. Have a great rest of your day.