As a home business owner, you probably wear many “hats”: marketing, sales, customer service, research & development, bookkeeping…to name a few. With all those day-to-day responsibilities, it can be very easy to get distracted from the kind of work you must do every day to stay in business – Income Producing Activities (IPA).
If you feel like you are crazy busy in your business, but at the end of the day wonder what exactly you accomplished, maybe you are spending too much time on “busy work”, not income producing work.
Start tracking your daily business activity: keep a list of everything you do, no matter what the task. After a few days (or at the end of the week), look over your list. How many of those tasks were directly related to your specialty and produced income for your business?
Stop and think about why you aren’t concentrating on Income Producing Activities:
Is this a new business venture and fear of failure is winning out?
Have you started too many “big projects” at once and can’t seem to finish any of them?
Do you feel that as an Entrepreneur, you should be doing everything by yourself to prove you can be successful?
These are just a few of the questions I’ve struggled with over the years in my business ventures. Without a “boss”, no one is telling us exactly what we must do every day to earn a paycheck…
So we need to keep it simple and stay focused on our IPAs.
- Make a list of your business’ Income Producing Activities
- Do at least one IPA every day
- Don’t waste time on tasks that you are not a specialist in – get help! Or get training in those areas that will increase your ability to create more IPAs
Yes, being a business owner is hard work. But you can help yourself make that hard work more rewarding by focusing on your specialty – the skills that produce income and the reason you wanted to become a business owner in the first place.
Top photo credit: kpi via photopin cc
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Image below courtesy of jscreationzs/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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