Small Business Advice on How to Create Daily Success [Part 1]

One of the biggest challenges I see when I coach an entrepreneur is how they manage their time daily. I can give them all the success strategies in the world, but they won't work if the business owner doesn't make the time to put them into action.

If you own a home based business or even if you're starting a home based business, one critical part of success is how you flow through the day.

Our days turn into weeks and our weeks turn into months and we look back and wonder why we're still struggling or why we can't reach our goals. So let's start where it all begins - setting up your day for success which will then create successful weeks, and successful months. In part one of this article are 3 sure-fire ways to do just that (and 3 more coming in part 2).

Decide on your top 3

It is critical to first decide what your top 3 actions are for the day. Thanks to Tim Ferris (author of The 4-hour Work Week), my to-do list for the day is now on a bright yellow post-it note on my monitor. At most, I'll write 5 absolute priorities for the day. These are my "no-excuses, come hell or high water, must-do" actions.

I still have a to-do list that's a mile long, by the way, and you may as well. Just mentally reframe that to "the list I keep to get things out of my head." We all need that but don't feel obligated to get 42 things done today. It'll never happen and you feel perpetually defeated if you try. Focus on your top 3-5. Anything you get done beyond that is icing on the success cake.

Make them profit-producing

The #1 thing I must do each day is marketing my business or something directly tied to attracting clients or making sales. Some marketing action is always on the list. So take a look at that list of 3-5 things. Is it a list of minutia and administrative tasks or are they profit-producing tasks. Do the profit-producing tasks first - how to market your business, how to get clients, and how to sell your services.

You can get to the other stuff later in the day. Trust me on this one - when you focus on profit-producing tasks and the cash starts coming in, you'll have money to start delegating administrative tasks. It's a beautiful thing when that happens.

Shut off your email

My most productive hours are the first hours of the day. If I dare to hit "check mail" I can forget about having a successful day because I remain perpetually distracted. And that goes for checking social media too, by the way. Twitter, Facebook and Linked-in are too distracting and I must stay focused on my top 3-5 cash-producing actions before I start clicking around on the internet.

So try shutting off your email in your most productive hours of the day - yes, close the application entirely and not just minimize it. And for social media, plan when in the day you'll go there and also how long you'll stay.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article where I share a golden strategy that is sure to create immeasurable success for you daily!