As you may be aware the Pareto Principle (more commonly known as the 80 / 20 rule) applies to many areas of business.  Now experience has shown that, on average, many people are actually working productively for only 20% of their working week until they start to focus on how they plan their week and their use of time.

Effective time management is not just about productivity though - it’s essential to your health too (and it’s one of the key determinants of your business success).    This is mainly due to the fact that you generally feel good about yourself in relation to the level of control you have over time, work and your life.  It is not unusual, when coaching clients, that we see a substantial increase in time management effectiveness enabling business owners to double their previous output results in quite a short period of time.  One of the best results I have had to date was coaching a business owner and reducing the hours he worked ‘in’ his business from 80 hours a week to just over 30 hours a week in just 3 months.  Interesting thing was, we also saw an increase in turnover as well!!  So here are some thoughts for you:  What difference would it make to your business right now if you could increase your effectiveness by, say, just ten per cent each day? What would it mean to you if you could double your own productivity? What difference would it make to you financially? What difference would it make to you in your personal life?

It’s partly down to self belief (believe it or not).  Beliefs are our way of seeing the world - they are how we interpret reality.  The same event (say doing a sales presentation for your business) may be stressful for one person and not even register on the stress scale for another.  So it’s not actually the event - it’s how we perceive the event.  This is the same with time - if we believe we are great time managers then we will behave in a way that will support this belief.  It is also important to remember that in business:

Time is money. Isn’t it?

It’s a well quoted saying that ‘time is money’, but doesn’t time greatly exceed the value of money?  You can always make more money, but once your time is used, then it’s gone forever.  So how can you start to improve your time management?  Well, as with any change that you make in your life you have to have an overwhelming desire to WANT to change.  Now, with time management you may need a combination of things you are sick and tired of doing, day in day out, that are giving you the same results (i.e. things you want to move AWAY from) coupled in with how you and your business will benefit from being an outstanding time manager.  One thing I can promise you is that you will radically alter your business performance and personal life by improving your management of time.  

The interesting bit here though is having the willpower and determination to persist.  This is why either telling others about what you are doing, and / or employing the services of a coach, will propel you forward.  As a coach, the main reason I get results is through client accountability - once you have agreed that you want to change you are accountable until you have your gained desired results.  It’s a great motivator.  The more you push your old management of time out of your life, the more you will see the results of your new time management coming into your life.

As with everything in life: Persistence Pays

Time management is really life management. If you improve the quality of your time management you will improve and enhance all parts of your life.  So, in effect, your life quality is determined by your time management quality. 

So, here’s some actions for you to do:

• 1) List twenty things that you would ‘move away from’ (i.e. things in your business and life that you are just plain tired of that are a result of your current time management). E.G you are sick and tired of getting home late / working weekends / running around like a headless chicken - you get the idea.
• 2) List a further twenty things that you would ‘move towards’ if you were a great time manager (i.e. spend more time with family, increase business performance, etc)

Now, if you’re thinking ‘oh, I don’t have time for this’ then maybe…just maybe… it’s time for you to take some ‘time out’ and look at the payoffs that great time management will give you.  Only then will you start building your motivation to change. 

We all have 86,400 seconds in a day.  With that in mind, how do you want to use yours?

To Your Success,

Mike Yates

Creative Entrepreneurs Club

I was asked for input into an article for Look magazine this week, apparently the UK’s best selling women’s magazine. It’s to go with an article about recession-proofing your career and my bit is a beginner’s guide to starting a business as an alternative to staying in a dicey job market.

Here’s what I wrote:

• Self-employment can be safer than a job because you can have multiple clients rather than one employer but you must choose the right line of work to start
• Make sure your business solves genuine problems experienced by a large number of people at a price they’re willing to pay
• Don’t look for a business with no competition - there’s probably no market. Do something people need and do it well.
• Choose a business that’s growing in demand, not one in decline. This is not the time to open a record shop!
• Build your business around work that you will enjoy doing - it’ll make the hard work more fun and your passion for the work will attract clients
• Creating multiple income streams means you won’t be dependent on one line of work that might disappear but you’ll need to be very organised to manage it all.
• Launch one income stream at a time. Once one is running, you can start another. Be clear which line of work is your cash cow and prioritise it.
• Aim for passive income when you can - create the business so that once it’s running it requires little or no input from you.
• Look for people to collaborate with on each part of your business who have different skills to offer and then only do the part you are best at on every project.

• If you are providing services on your own, you can register as self-employed. You will need to submit a self assessment tax return every year.
• Limited companies provide more protection if your business gets into trouble but come with more paperwork and accounting. Speak to an accountant to help make the decision.
• An accountant or company formation agent can register your company. They will typically charge a fee between £25 and £150.
• Unless you are fearless about paperwork use an accountant to do your limited company’s accounts. They will charge from £100 a month upwards.
• Related income streams can run through one business.
• You can register multiple businesses with yourself as Director of each one.

• Get clients quickly - be clear who your target customer is. Work out where they hang out and offer to give a free talk there.
• Set up a free website for your business at weebly.com
• Choose a good domain name that is easy to remember and spell
• Save money on advertising: write an information-packed article on your area of expertise and submit it for publication on related websites. Include a link to your business’ website and you’ll get a better response than an ad - all for free!
• Google adwords provides a useful way to bring visitors to your website within minutes and you can limit how much you spend per day
• Business Link provides lots of free business advice and training

Of course it goes without saying that having a good system for controlling the finances in your business is paramount.   Do you know how much money you have in the bank with which to work?   Do you know what you owe and who owes you so you can plan your cashflow.   Do you understand the difference between cashflow and profitability?   If you’ve made all that profit, where is it?

Do you want to know the answers to these questions and feel the ease of control at your fingertips?

Much has been talked about delegating this task to another.   Delegating is good, but abdicating is not.   You will still have to work with your accountant to provide them with timely information and learn to understand what they give you back.   If they are not happy to teach you or gifted at translating “accountant-speak” to a language you understand, change your accountant.   One way or another you must work with someone who is helpful, as excited about your business as you are and a team player who deals in plain English.

If you care about your business being successful, I urge you to make it a priority to get this first system in place.   It will be enlightening and liberating, in more ways than one.   We can talk about other good systems as tyour business progresses.

A client I taught to use Sage in his own businesses let me know how much he loves it.   You could become one of those, or you could be contracting with someone else who loves Sage (or any other accounting package, for that matter) and can use it to provide really useful and exciting, powerful management reports for you.

Knowledge is power.   This knowledge applied in your business will turn it into a Business to Love, one which provides you with more profit in less time.   Want one of those?   Who doesn’t?

We are going to set aside a whole month to challenge our members to up their blogging game, by blogging at least twice a week on their own blogs, by being guest bloggers on our blog, by participating in a trackback game where we all link to each other, and more.

We kicked the whole thing off with our Radio Show on  Tuesday 26th May 2009 to explain the ‘Why’. Listen below to the recording.

Join the challenge (it’s free!)

To take part, register at CreativeEntrepreneursClub.com.

We will follow up with the ‘How’ in a live teleclass at 10 a.m. on Thursday 4th June going straight into a Block Busting Day 11-3 on that same day where you can roll up your sleeves, check your stats at the beginning of the month, and create most or all of your blog postings for June, timed to go out at intervals during the month.

Then, as the month progresses, we will bring you short, really useful interviews with our favourite blogging experts and support your quest for blogging profits and real web results via blogging in our Masterminds Google Group and challenge-specific online forum.   We will point you at people doing it really well and making money doing it, marketing their businesses all the while.

Why blog, why bother?   How to create content really easily and quickly, groovy plug-ins, lovely blogsites, keywords, measuring traffic and more blogging secrets follow throughout the month.

This is the first of a monthly series of challenges for Creative Entrepreneurs which will be fun to participate in and bring really measurable results for your business.   The first few monthly challenges are going to be free.   Once we have established a model which works, we shall switch it into our paid-for level of membership.   Meanwhile, come on down, fill your boots, blog your little heart out and feel the link love - all for free!

Are you up for The Challenge?

Join the Creative Entrepreneurs Club for free to take part.

This is relatively easy for me on two counts.   My preferred way of living is minimalist.   I know precisely why this is.   It’s because I live my life very intensely through my emotions and they are so fully engaged in every other area of my life - work, family, friends, hobbies, projects, inspirations - that I just want my surroundings to be calm and calming.   Minimalism provides this calm emotionally undemanding sanctuary and can be very stylish too.

My other thing is that I was trained as a (military) child to be very neat and tidy and you get extra points for that.   I have a cleaner so I dont clean, but my space is always tidy.   I need it for mental clarity too.

Interesting, isnt it, that you can be neat and tidy AND creative?   So no excuses, team!   Clear space, better creativity; that’s our new CEC motto just created.

So let’s look out for some areas in which you might be hoarding “stuff” which is getting in the way of you getting started, making progress or being even more successful.  Many people feel they cannot get on or get started until they have a nice clear space.   (It’s just procrastination by another name, but never mind that for now).

In your office: piles and piles and piles of office papers (please tell me you are not printing out emails?), financial and accounting stuff which needs doing, filing, your in-tray of jobs to be done, your inbox of emails which need deleting, sorting, replying, filing, your To Do List.   Lots of clutter potential there.   Be ruthless.   Know confidently that if you chuck it and it’s important, it WILL come back.   I can definitely vouch for that, trust me.

About your person: what extra clutter are you carrying - need a haircut, a diet, a handbag/briefcase clearout - what’s weighing you down from being your total best self?   How are you using that as an excuse perhaps?

Emotional clutter - what past stuff could you release?   What’s your story and how does that limit you?   Carrying that around can be exhausting, just imagine the time when you finally feel its safe to put it down and let it go.

Head space - thoughts not written down which perhaps you are worried about forgetting.   How much do you feel you have to remember?   Do you really?   What might happen if you forgot something or delegated some of these tasks to others to take responsibility for?   Write down your thoughts and let them go, make room for more/better ones.   You might try journalling first thing each day as a cure for mental clutter.   It worked for me.   Try The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.   I never got past the first chapter, but it was enough to create a journalling habit which clears mental space.

Domestic clutter - clothes, books, shoes, stuff you have used and not thrown out which clogs up surfaces, cupboards and drawers.   Old newspapers?   Broken bits and bobs? Don’t start me!   Think of these as tolerations which need to be busted, fix it or cut it loose.

So here are my strategies:

1.   The office stuff can be done once a month during our Last Friday Block Busting Days.   Whittle it down until you can clear papers, inbox, filing etc. in four hours with us each month.

2.   The domestic stuff you can do as a family, or swap with a friend.   You can call in a professional and pay them money to help supervise you doing it.   I’ve done that too it works when all else fails or if you are planning a big house move or moving to live in another country for example.   You know those articles in the Sunday papers about what people take with them in a fire.   That’s all that’s physically important and in my experience it’s really very little.   If in doubt, start slowly and work up to a thorough and wholesale clearout!

3.   The best strategy I’ve ever seen for sorting stuff which you know has to go but which you are loath to part with “in case” you need it later is to divide it all into three separate piles.   A you can let go with ease now, B you want to save till later definitely, and C you are not sure about yet.   At the end of the initial sort, go through C and divide it into A and B.   A goes out now - dump, recycling, charity shop.   B is bagged up and labelled with a date.   If in six months’ time you havent felt a need for anything in the B bags, dispose of them as with A without opening them!

My own experience of clutter clearing is that it is enlightening and spiritually uplifting, creating feedom, liberation and lots of lovely clarity and space.   If that weren’t motivating enough I can point you at clients of mine who have or had so much stuff that it put them off taking action for a whole year.   Yes, some of my coaching clients have spent a year with me just dealing with their stuff.  

But can you imagine how good that feels when you finally get clear?

Clarity and Clutter Clearing go hand in hand.   The stuff you keep just stands between you and the stuff you want.   The Universe abhors a vacuum. Clear it out and just watch the stuff you want magically appearing in the space you have made available.

Now that your clutter is cleared, time to get clear about what you want in your life, work, office, handbag, wardrobe, love life instead!   And off you go a-manifesting for the good stuff, the stuff you really want, the stuff that’s about your future, not your past.

And finally, if you have five minutes - there’s a very funny clip by Michael McIntyre at The Royal Variety Performance 2008 called The Man Drawer. Recognise yourself and enjoy!   The funniest humour is the truest.

He kicks off by talking about medical research into the little town of Roseto, Pennsylvania populated entirely by people from the small Italian town of Roseto Valfortore in Foggia. The town had an unusual, positive  effect on the inhabitants. The death rate of the people of the new Roseto was 30-35% lower than expected and the death rate from heart disease was half that in the rest of the US.

This wasn’t because of some healthy diet or outdoors lifestyle. After much investigation, the researchers determined that it was the unusually strong sense of community in the town.

“What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn’t diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town’s social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.”

This shows just how powerful a thing community can be. I’m not sure we can claim for the same effects from joining the community of the Creative Entrepreneurs Club, but I do believe there is something fundamentally healthful about feeling part of a clan and being connected to others who you can call on when you need a bit of help.

You can read the whole of this chapter of the Outliers book here.

And you can join the Creative Entrepreneurs Club here.

Listen here: 

We usually kick off with an expert speaker on topics such as a beginners’ guide to internet marketing, how to make money out of your ideas and how to turn your idea into a book or TV programme. Our speakers are recognised experts on their topic.

Unique to Creative Entrepreneurs Night is the latter part of the evening where you have a chance to get expert advice on the spot on your current business challenge - whether it’s getting more clients, productising what you do, scaling your business, or managing your time.

This is far from the standard boring business networking events of besuited people exchanging business cards!

Creative Entrepreneurs Night has been running for over a year under the previous name Scanners Night (a scanner is a creative person with many interests) and typically has 40-60 attendees. This is your chance to meet your fellow Creative Entrepreneurs Club members.

Tickets for Creative Entrepreneurs Night are half price for Creative Entrepreneurs Club members.

In January we kick off with a very original way to start your year by planning without plans.

Join Now and Come to Creative Entrepreneurs Night.

They always say you shouldn’t make recommendations because so much of this is in the relationship, however many like a recommendation and as a Creative Entrepreneur you will get exclusive access to our preferred network of outsource magicians.