The Key Elements of Your Daily Game Plan
Step #8: Eat properly, be consistent, and choose your projects carefully. These are a few components I want you to include as part of your daily game plan:
- Eat like an athlete. I am not a nutritionist, and you can re search this on your own, but you need to start thinking like an athlete. This means that from this point on McDonald’s is out for lunch. No more double cheeseburgers, large fries and a shake. Most people, when I track their productivity throughout the day, always seem to fall apart a little bit in the afternoon and usually it’s because of lunch. So I need you to make sure you balance yourself nutritionally, and do a good job there. It is absolutely crucial.
- Become consistent. Think about this: If Monday is a great day and Tuesday is okay, Wednesday is very good and Thursday is poor and Friday is just average, well you probably have an average production week. If you think about that for a second – you had one great day, two okay days, and probably two where you could have done more. It’s very important that you aim for overall consistency and that means you have to make sure your daily game plan includes doing things consistently throughout with energy.
Be careful about, what I call, campaigns or projects. Sometimes campaigns and projects are hard to get started, and, quite frankly, become overwhelming. When this happens, they are often put on hold and never completed. Think about this. How many times in your career have you thought about starting a project or a campaign and then you got so busy with other tasks you said, I really can’t do that right now. Or worse, it can be so successful that you never go back and make the campaign or project part of your regular business practice. For example, let’s say you did a referral campaign and got five or six names. That’s wonderful, when is the last time you did it? Last year, but you haven’t had the time to do it since?
Step #9: Identify the times you have been at your best. What made you perform at your best? When you had a good run, a real good stretch business-wise, what gave you that stretch? What were you doing?
You need to identify those times, then match your most difficult task with your highest energy periods, depending on whether you are a morning, afternoon, or evening person. The least productive time on average, as I said earlier is probably mid-afternoon for most people and that is usually because of lunch. Perhaps that’s a good time to do your administrative work.
The most important part of your day should be early morning, a time when you plan your day, go over your goals and business plans, and get ready to have an excellent day. In addition, what I find is that doing your marketing and client service calls as early in the day as possible is best.
I prefer marketing in the morning, because we have more control of our mornings than we do over our afternoons. Let’s say that by midday everything gets a little crazy. Because you got things done early in the day, you can handle it. It’s nice to know that if the rest of the day gets a little out of control, you can still end up with a very, very productive day because you accomplished what you needed to earlier on. Again, to me that is extremely important.
A Step at a Time
I once asked a very successful client of mine who has been in this industry for 35 years if he could define what it takes to be successful? This was his response, “Great careers are nothing more than a compilation of great years. Great years are nothing more than a compilation of great quarters. Great quarters are nothing more than a compilation of great months. Great months are nothing more than a compilation of great weeks. Great weeks are nothing more than a compilation of great days. Great days are nothing more than a compilation of great mornings and great afternoons.”
More in our next issue!________________________________________________________________________
