5 Tips to Manage Overwhelm

The exact solution to managing your overwhelm will depend on what the source of your overwhelm is. You can also be suffering from more than one source of overwhelm. Here are five tips to help you manage the most common sources of overwhelm.

1. Find support.

Is your overwhelm related to your packed schedule? If so, one solution is to get some help in the form of contractors, employees, or volunteers. A quick fix is to list five to ten of the most mundane daily or weekly tasks you do, and hire and train an intern on a part-time basis to do those tasks for you. Even a few hours a week to start will be a big relief.

2. Set boundaries.

Is your overwhelm due to client demands? Learn how to control the flow and limit the channels of inbound requests for your time and expertise. A couple of ways to do that include cutting off certain communications:

a. Schedule all phone calls. Don’t answer an unscheduled call. If this sounds impossible, try doing it one day a week to start with. Let your clients know you’ll be available for them four days a week, but the fifth day is for you.
b. Limit the communication channels that you will respond to. Don’t answer faxes or social media messages, as an example.
c. Check email only twice a day. I know. We’re addicted, and this is much harder to do than it sounds.

There are many other ways you can set boundaries, but this is a start.

3. Prioritize.

Is your overwhelm due to wanting to have it all? A lot of times we stay busy doing things that are urgent but not important. Then we get overwhelmed because we do not get to the important things. One way to solve this is to put your to-do list in priority order. Carve out at least one hour a day to work on the most important thing on your list. Some coaches call this your Power Hour. You’ll be thrilled at how much progress you will make in just one week.

4. Carve out de-stress time.

Is your overwhelm mostly emotional (for whatever reason)? Critical for your emotional well-being is to make time for laughter, relaxation, friends, family, and whatever you do to blow off steam. Our mindset, moods, and overall mental state can contribute mightily to overwhelm. We now know from neuroscience that learning how to de-stress is a set of skills everyone can acquire and significantly benefit from. It’s a field called resilience if you want to Google more about it.

5. Perspective and purpose.

Is your overwhelm due to a variety of factors? When times get overwhelming, what keeps me going is maintaining perspective and understanding my purpose in life. It’s important not to blow little things out of proportion. If I’ve had a tough day, I remember that I don’t live in a war zone, I’m not in prison or held hostage, there hasn’t been a hurricane or flood, and I haven’t been a crime victim. My “tough day” suddenly becomes a great day, and if I got to spend even a minute helping someone or serving my purpose, then all the better.

3 Steps to Start Running on Millionaire Time

Let’s do the math. To earn a million dollars in a year, you have to bring in $83,333 per month. Assuming you bill hourly and work for the standard 1,000 billable hours per year, you need to charge $1,000 per hour. If you want to make five million in one year, you will need to charge $5,000 per hour.

Here’s some breaking news: You won’t get there doing tasks that are worth $10 per hour. Even if we drop a zero and aim for six figures in a year, you won’t get there doing $10 per hour tasks either. At six figures, you’re worth $100 per hour.

The difference between poor people and rich people is simple: one values the scarcity of their time and uses every minute wisely, and the other doesn’t. Here are some tips to help you start thinking like a millionaire, which is the first step to becoming one:

Step 1: Identify your “nonprofit” tasks

Take a look at your to do list. Eliminate any activities you are doing during your work day that are not profit-making. Some of you will feel resistance to giving these up. Here are some examples:

1. Watching TV
2. Poking someone on Facebook
3. Going to the post office and standing in line for 20 minutes to buy a $1 stamp
4. Playing Cityville on Facebook, or even responding to others’ requests
5. Looking at competitor’s web sites
6. Reading and answering email requests on email lists you subscribe to

Here are some more examples of nonprofit activities.

1. Working for free: Not writing your time down as billable or writing off time you worked.
2. Going to a workshop where you really already know everything but you feel insecure about your knowledge
3. Trying an idea from a peer for your business when you have no idea whether it will pay off or not
4. Staying on the phone for half an hour to dispute a five dollar charge
5. Answering emails of people asking for favors but that have not paid you anything
6. Attending a networking meeting where all your friends are when you haven’t gotten business from the group in a year

Do you feel resistance to considering giving any of these up? It’s normal. We do most of them because either that’s the rule or habit or we want to be liked. If we really want to grow our income, we need to make a conscious choice.

Step 2: Delegate or delete your “nonprofit” tasks.

The only way you will make it to a million is if you start delegating everything you’re doing that is worth lower than your current billable rate. This includes both personal and professional tasks. Delegate the lowest hourly tasks first, which will free up your time but won’t cost you a ton of cash.

Step 3: Focus your newly freed up time on high-profit tasks.

Here are some examples of high-profit tasks:

1. Calling a power partner to discuss a joint venture project that will make both of you money and serve both of your client lists.
2. Writing content for a book, course, or program
3. Making sales calls
4. Speaking or preparing a speech
5. Appearing on TV to spread your message
6. Teaching a workshop or designing an event
7. Hiring staff
8. Strategizing your business
9. Listening to what your customers want and need

If you have some changes to make to your to do list, then congratulations. You’re three steps closer to becoming a millionaire.

I’d love to hear from you: post the tasks you are giving up, and let me know what tasks you’ve labeled as your must-do high-profit tasks.

There Is No Such Thing as a Time Problem

I know it’s a bold statement and a lot of you will disagree. But please have an open mind and hear me out.

Time is the great equalizer. We all have the same number of hours in a day, yet some entrepreneurs, many of them self-made, become wildly successful, while others languish. Only one in twenty business owners in the U.S. (2002 numbers) make it past $1 million in annual revenues. I believe the way they use their time is a big factor in their success or failure. Here are three better explanations of your time problem:

1. You are not delegating enough. This could be on a couple of levels: you might not be delegating enough tasks, but you also might not be delegating enough authority. This problem is based in fear of letting go of control and trusting. (If you don’t think you can afford a team, then you have some kind of marketing problem that needs to be addressed.)
2. You are doing everything from memory without having documented, automated, or systematized your business to the extent that makes you competitive with others. Read Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth. This one is more of a skills issue than a fear issue.
3. You remain in a reactive mode, fighting fires all day. There could be many reasons for this, and fear is at the root of most of them: we tend to do what we already know how to do, we may have some boundary issues with clients we need to work on, and we might be doing #1 and #2 above which contributes to this one.

(There are several more, but I have to leave some content exclusively for the benefit of my coaching clients!)

When you can go deeper to root out your so-called time problem, then you have something you can work on to improve your business. What can you do to better leverage your 24 hours each day?

Why Is Marketing So Expensive?

Just about every small business owner I know dislikes the time and expense it takes to market their business. They’re networking at meetings, running ads, or joining groups to attract clients. They have a limited budget and they have limited time. They aren’t necessarily getting the results they need in the form of new clients. It’s hit and miss. They’re not really sure how to get the best return from their methods, so they’re trying a lot of things and getting varied results.

If this sounds like you, you’re not alone. This is a tough area to crack for many entrepreneurs, and the reason it’s tough is that it’s not completely a marketing problem. Here are three things you can do immediately to get clarity in this area of your business:

1. Understand that marketing can be systematized, and until it is, it will continue to drain your time and money. For example, once you get your main marketing message clear, you will want to select three marketing channels to find prospects. Then you’ll develop a set of procedures that staff can execute to attract those clients within those channels. Include steps for measuring results, and you’ve greatly lowered your marketing costs. You’ll know what works and what doesn’t and you’ll be able to refine. Even better, you can delegate marketing tasks and free up your time for client work or strategy sessions.
   
   Let’s say you offer a monthly open house at your office to attract new clients. Each step can be systematized and delegated to staff. All you should have to do is show up.
   
   Another example might be using local networking events to attract clients. You’ll want to create procedures for your elevator speech, follow up system, and community interaction. Once you approach this systematically instead of attending the next networking meeting that looks good (and leaving the business cards you got in a stack by the computer), your results will increase.
   
2. There is great synergy in completing foundational work before you begin to market. You’ll want to know exactly who your market is, how they think, and why they would use your services. From there, you can develop a message that is coherent and consistent that will work across all marketing channels.
   
   Once you complete your foundational work, which you only have to do once (until your offering or the market changes), your message will be crystal clear to your prospects. Then you can market your message everywhere.
   
3. Executing your marketing strategy is your last step and one that will be continually repeated. (The two above steps only have to be done once.) This step follows the procedures laid out in #1 and communicates the message created in #2.
   
   This is actually going to the networking meeting or conducting the open house, or running the ad.
   

The take home message in this article is that most entrepreneurs have “marketing” grouped together with systematization, messaging, and the actual marketing execution. That’s why it’s so expensive. When you can separate these and make each area efficient, you will greatly reduce costs and increase the effectiveness of your marketing programs.

What lesson is there in a millionaire’s ring tone?

When I realized how all of us in my coach’s million-dollar mastermind had default ring tones on our iPhones, I thought how boring we all must be.

I wondered if wealthy people, or at least the people in this group, lacked creativity and individualism? But that wasn’t it. On the contrary. These were amazingly creative, fun, and sharp minds that I was privileged to spend 2 days with at the Ritz in Miami.

And then it hit me. How can you make money by changing your ring tone? You can’t. You don’t.

In any business owner’s day, there are a million things to do. We all have so many choices about what to do first, what to do at all, and what to delegate. It’s a really simple concept: the millionaires don’t do “ring tone” tasks. They don’t do the tasks that don’t yield them a healthy return.

How do you organize your day? Do you work on the things that scream at you the most? Do you work on the things you like the most? Do you work on the things that you are most comfortable with? Or do you have some other method for working your inbox and your to do list?

Because successful people organize their days differently from all that. They work on the highest payback tasks. They don’t even bother with the tasks that don’t net them a return.

Take a look at your own to do list. How can you prioritize it in a way that brings you the most return? What “ring-tone” tasks do you have on your to do list that you can get rid of?

When you can reorganize your day to match the habits of multi-millionaire business owners, you come that much closer to becoming one yourself.