The Tyranny of the To Do List – and the Antidote

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While I was doing something else all day yesterday, a client emailed me in a panic. Her email was entitled “intense need for help!” Since I didn’t get to her email until close of play I was exhausted by the time I read it and, if I hadn’t been already, I certainly would have been after I’d read it. You know you get those sorts of emails sometimes where you can feel the emotion in the words and even between the words? This was one of those. My correspondent successfully communicated her rising panic that there was so much going […]

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Focus and Discipline: How To Get Things Done

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Working for yourself without a boss requires focus and discipline. I don’t think many of us are born with these qualities so we have to find different ways to learn them, ways which suit us as individuals. Here are a few of my favourite ways to Get Things Done. First off, have a To Do List. Do you favour that way of recording what needs doing? Only a few years back, it would have been an in-tray but now I manage all my tasks on my laptop. I do have a notebook and pen which I use for notes to […]

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Can You Create A Business Doing Only What You Love?

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I am always very interested in my clients’ weekly check-in reports, specifically in what gets done and what remains undone, especially those tricky or challenging items which get stuck there, week after week. Last week in the UK was the 31st January tax return submission deadline. Every one of my clients who intended to get that done last week succeeded. Why? Easy! Because there was: A deadline and A penalty (£100 for non submission on time) A deadline is the single most useful thing for getting things done. A penalty is even better. So here’s my first thought for you. […]

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Cleanliness and Godliness: A Happy Ending in Nunhead

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Yesterday began, bright and breezy, at 8 a.m. with me faciliating a T1ME Focus Day.   The idea is a simple one, join the website by sharing your dream, and one of the services we offer is a fortnightly Focus Day – either 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. or 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.   You turn up and together with the rest of the crew, we each tick off items on our To Do List, generally focussing on the nasty ones like clutter-clearing, filing, accounts and other chores, or Big Projects which need an expanse of 5 hours with a single […]

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An Entrepreneur’s Alphabet: E is for Energy

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People have often admired my energy and I know that people hang around me to feed off it. What's important as I get older is to harness it, appreciate it, bless it, husband it and use it wisely for the highest good. And this helps me because as I recognise how precious this finite resource is, I cannot afford to waste energy needlessly. It's a bit like running the tap while brushing your teeth. We used to do it all the time when we were younger but now we know better. We don't waste a natural resource which we have come increasingly to value.

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