Coming from someone who is disorganized, with a capital D, I made it one of my missions to be actively more organised this year.When it comes to staying focused, here are my top tips to ensuring stuff gets done. First up, find a place where you can dump the contents of your brain on a daily basis. As small business owners and entrepreneurs, we often fall prey to shiny object system, flitting about from project to project and never successfully completing anything.

My favorite tool is called trello

You can use in on you computer or on your tablet or phone. Trello allows you to create boards, and you stick cards, like sticky notes on a board. These can be added to and moved around. I love that I can put down any fantastic idea, so it’s there for later. Once a week, I go through my boards to see what I should continue with, which brings me onto my next tip. Having a marketing and editorial calendar. This one is super important, and so many retailer I know don’t think it’s necessary, or haven’t even thought about putting one into place. What I like to do for my retail stores is have a theme for each month.

From here, you can work out the suppliers and product that will be featured, blog posts you might write, and any in-store promotions or events you might have. Make sure that when you’re doing this for yourself, you include personal events and activities, so self care and family time are top of mind and don’t get pushed aside. My next suggestion is to write some goals down. Why is this important? Because when you don’t write down what you want from life, you won’t know when to celebrate success and you’ll have no milestones to gauge how you’re going.

My friend Karen Gunton gave me great exercise to write down 100 personal and professional goals to achieve in 12 months, so I challenge you to do the same and I’ve created a great download for you this week incorporating a 100 goal list. In that download, I’ve also included a great guide to getting stuff done and avoiding overwhelm.

Once you’ve got these big picture things worked out, this guide will show you how to put it all into place, to ensure everything that needs to, gets done. When you’re planning out what needs to be done, whether it’s today, for the week, or for the month, make sure you ask yourself if each of those tasks will help you achieve a goal that’s on your goal list. Prompting yourself, when you write a task down, allows you to decide if a task is if it’s a necessity, or if it will help you move forward, or whether you’re just doing busy work.

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