Winding Down and Gearing Up

I hope this finds everyone happy and healthy now that another holiday season has passed. It seems to come quicker and quicker each year doesn't it? Just when you seem to be getting into the groove of one year, it's time to buy a new calendar.

Though 2008 was a pretty good year overall, the highlight for me personally was starting my own business last summer. It has always been a dream of mine to work for myself and I finally found a way to make it happen. I now spend my days doing work that I love for amazing clients. In addition to starting my business I've appeared on 2 Blogtalk radio programs, 1 mainstream radio program in Canada and taught a teleclass about Twitter. Most recently I've been asked to be a guest blogger on 4 different blogs. Things are really taking off! With all of those fantastic things happening I decided to keep the momentum going through the holidays.

Taking Time to Recharge Myself and My Business
I've been working nonstop since I started my business full time and although I'm grateful things took off so quickly, I've had little down time to plan ahead and create a success plan for myself. So I decided the week between Christmas and New Year's was a great time to do that. I gave myself the week "off" to take a couple of days for myself to have quiet time and reflect on the past year and what I have accomplished. The rest of the time I will use to gear up for a successful 2009.

Organizing and Planning and Goal Setting, Oh My!
Although I want my VA business to keep growing and continue to grow successfully there are many other things I want to do as well. Branches I want to add to my professional tree, so to speak. I want to write more including articles and finally getting that book down on paper that's been in my head for quite some time. With the help of my new friend Donna Kozik I plan to make that dream a reality. There are also many other things I plan on embarking on which I plan to lay the groundwork for in early 2009. All of these things take careful planning.

I'm going to be clearing my desk of everything that's taking up space. File what needs to be filed, toss the rest. My email is out of control so with the help of another new friend Brad Semp and his Email Cashmap System I am conquering that beast once and for all.

I've been meaning to launch my new newsletter for weeks now. I have the service in place and a growing list! It's finally time to give them what they signed up for! So that will be happening the first week of the year.

I'll be making at least one trip to Office Depot to load up on supplies that have depleted and search for others that might make the flow of things run a little more smoothly. It's also time to refill my dayplanner with 2009 pages and other goodies.

I'll also be implementing some systems into my business that I've been lacking like keeping up with my To Do list, entering everything into Quickbooks and setting aside some time each Friday to plan for the week ahead.

Time to create some new forms, update my marketing packet and my website and organize my filing cabinet.

Most importantly, time to back everything up! Put all of my old files on flash drives and discs and clean out both computers. Make sure virus protection is up to date and get ready for working both my laptop and desktop like dogs in 2009!

If You Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail
This is a quote I heard a long time ago and it's always stuck with me. I don't believe you can truly be successful without a plan. Although all of the above may seem like a lot, it is doable and will make a world of difference in how I run my business in 2009. I want to make sure that in the coming year I am equipped with a roadmap to take me to the next level. I plan to be unstoppable in the new year but you can't be unstoppable if you come to a dead end road because you forgot to bring your map! (even if you think you know where you're going, you'll eventually take a wrong turn if you try to do it from memory)

Creating success by "winging it" is not only much more work in the end, it's very risky. By taking a little time regularly to work it out on paper and do some maintenance in the office you'll eliminate many of the "uh oh" and "now what" moments from your life.

I wish you much success and prosperity in the new year and hope you are taking a little time for yourself to recharge your batteries and get ready for an amazing 2009!

Happy New Year!
Jackie

100 Days to Success

I recently read an article in Success For Women Magazine about how the CEO of PBS achieves success by breaking her one, five and ten-year goals into 100 day increments. This immediately resonated with me because I personally find goal setting to be overwhelming and I believe it is one of the things that has been keeping me from achieving the success I've sought after for so long. I always see these big elaborate goal setting programs that require you to basically map out your life and follow the yellow brick road to victory. Sounds great but I honestly don't have time or patience to do it. However, 100 days sounded VERY doable for me so I started thinking, what could I accomplish 100 days from now? Could I be healthier? Have more money in my bank account? Read that book that's been collecting dust on my nightstand for months? What could I do with a 100 day deadline?

Set a Date and Put It In Writing

I started thinking about all of the possibilities and immediately got excited. So one night after my husband and daughter went to sleep, I stayed up a little later and fired up the computer. I opened my Outlook calendar and counted 100 days from that date. March 10th was the magic date so I created an event called "100 Day Mark" and created a list of bold headings titled:
Health Goals
Business Goals
Family Goals
Spiritual Goals
Personal Goals

Under each one of these headings I listed 1-3 things I thought I could accomplish in 100 days. I was so excited but I knew I had to break it up a little bit more because it was still a bit daunting to look at this list.

The Halfway Point
The next thing I did was count 50 days from the starting date to create a halfway point toward achieving my goals. I listed all of the same goals as on my 100 day mark but I looked at each goal and decided what I could accomplish by the halfway point and entered that information in a different color in parenthesis next to the goal. For example. My 100 day health goals consist of the following:

1. Lose 30 pounds by March 10th (in orange I wrote "lose 15 pounds")
2. Walk 45 Minutes/day (in orange I wrote "should be up to 30 minutes")
3. Drink 8 glasses of water/day (in orange I wrote "should be drinking 4-6 by now")

I proceeded to do the same thing with the rest of my goals.

Break Them Down Again
Once I had a 50 day mark, I decided to create two more milestone dates: 25 days and 75 days. I followed the same steps I did for the 50 day mark. I decided where I should be at that point and wrote it in next to the original goal.

Daily Baby Steps
Now that I've got my four milestone dates I thought it would be good to break each 25 days into daily baby steps that I can take toward achieving success in each of those four increments and ultimately my final 100 day goals. I'm still working on filling in the daily goals but it's going well.

I still don't know if I will attempt the one-year, five-year and ten-year goals the way the woman did in the article but I'm definitely inspired to give these next 100 days or so a shot. I'm determined to achieve everything on my list and when that happens I will keep going with the next 100. Achieving my dreams 100 days at a time. I'd love to hear what your process is for setting goals. Please feel free to comment!

I will keep you posted on my progress. Stay tuned! Until then have a great week!!!

Jackie