What Happened to Our Free Time?

According to time management specialist Michael Fortino, over an average lifetime, you will spend seven years in the bathroom. You will spend six years eating. You will spend five years waiting in lines. You will spend four years cleaning your house. You will spend three years in meetings. You will spend one year searching for things. You will spend eight months opening junk mail. You will spend six months sitting at red lights. You will spend 120 days brushing your teeth. And here’s the big surprise: You will spend four minutes per day conversing with your spouse and thirty seconds per day conversing with your children.

Business Success Dashboard

1. A business success dashboard is a computer based reporting application that displays your key business metrics in gorgeous colorful graphs that all but smack you in the face with startlingly practical insights about how to boost your business success.
2. No longer do we need to rely on black and white printed sales reports choking with numbers arranged in columns and rows. You can't get powerful insights from looking at numbers arranged in tables - it's scientifically proven, so don't bother arguing! 
3. The really exciting and cool thing about business success dashboards is that they take the guesswork out of your decision making.
4. Dashboards put right in front of you the bare facts about show-stopping results like how well your marketing is attracting profitable leads, how easily you can convert a lead into a customer, what your customers like and don't like, where you're wasting time in your business and how healthy your cash flow is.
5. But as a small business owner or entrepreneur, you'll only give your time to setting up your business success dashboard if it's fun, fast and profit-building. So here are 7 dos and don'ts to make sure your dashboard is:

1. DO start with just a few business metrics, like profit, revenue, cash flow, new leads, website visitors - whatever you're measuring and tracking now. DON'T wait until you have worked out all the measures that matter for your business: it will take forever, you'll get bored with it and you'll be missing profit pumping opportunities from the measures you already use.

2. DO use basic tools you already have - like Microsoft Excel - until you get into the groove of dashboarding and using your business metrics to manage your business. DON'T invest in flashy software until you know how you want your dashboard to serve you.

3. DO use simple line charts to display your measures so you can see trends over time - the trends are more important than the points. DON'T compare this month to last month, or do any other two-point comparisons like this - you never see the real trends or get any real insights this way.

4. DO include Pareto charts to dig into your data, such as to show you the 20% of marketing campaigns that bring 80% of your customers, or the 20% of sales that bring 80% of the revenue. DON'T ever use pie charts - they absolutely suck when it comes to giving you any kind of useful information from your data.

5. DO let form follow function, and only include the measures that matter to your business, and the graphs that best reveal those measures' trends and insights. DON'T go all Picasso on it - limit your creativity to choice of colors, not to find out how many forms of bling you can build into it.

6. DO use your dashboard weekly, to look for clues about the best ways to ramp up your business results. DON'T lose the discipline of regularly tracking, testing and tuning your business - sure, the dashboard will only be one input to managing your business but it's an essential input.

7. DO get help from someone who's really cool with Excel and graphs, or someone who is experienced with measuring and tracking. DON'T rely on dashboard software people who can't demonstrate skills in choosing meaningful measures and displaying them appropriately (they usually get carried away with pretty but useless guages and dials). DON'T freak out trying to do it yourself either - the difference that a business dashboard will make to your success and sanity is too valuable.

TAKE ACTION:

1. If the Dashboard Fairy granted you a wish to instantly dashboard 3 measures of your business success, which 3 measures would you choose? What are the 3 most important results that have the most leverage to increase your profits, and improve your work-life balance? Now set up the world's simplest dashboard using Excel, to start tracking those measures. And finally, commit to taking at least one action to improve the results those measures reveal to you.

6 FORMULAS TO BUSINESS FAILURE!!!!

We are all looking for a recipe for business success that is easy to follow. But what if instead there was a recipe for disaster?

Why would anyone want to know the formula for failure? Because you may be blind to the fact you are already following it, at least in part. And if you know the ingredients to avoid, you'll save your business before it's too late.

1. Get rich quick. 

You see a trend, like Web design 10 years ago, and you jump right on the bandwagon because it sure looks like that would be a great way to make money fast. Or, you invest in a program or coach that promises you'll make millions in just a few short months. Not happening. Get-rich-quick ideas are rarely true, and are never sustainable.

But what about those trends? What about the hot topic of social media, isn't there money to be made? Absolutely. People will get rich—the people who are passionate about social media. Everyone else will lose.

When you follow your passion with a single-minded focus, money -- and lots of it-- will be created over time. And when you do start making money, you'll be ahead of the trend, not following it. That's how you get rich right.

2. If things are going south, work harder. 

You're ankle deep in the red, so you decide you'd better figure out how to squeeze an extra hour of the day to get more done. When that fails, you start seriously looking into cloning experiments, so you can get twice as much done. Stop right there. Most entrepreneurs fail because they try to work harder, when they should be working smarter.

Rather than ask yourself, how can I find extra hours in my workday, ask yourself how can I spend 10 hours over the next few days developing systems so that this one thing can get done in 10 seconds? Failed entrepreneurs are almost always exhausted entrepreneurs. Successful entrepreneurs have sustainable systems in place that not only enable them to do more in less time, but serve as the infrastructure for scaling their business.

4. Measure revenue from the top line. 

You look at your income statement, and if the top line looks good, you think you're doing all right because you're focused on the money coming into your company. Wrong. The gross revenue means nothing if, at the end of the day, you have no operating cash. You need to think about the money you'll have leftover. I know many entrepreneurs who say they have a million-dollar project, but actually end up losing money in the end. And I've known entrepreneurs who landed $15,000 projects and took home 10,000.

3. Nurture the weak. 

You have a few "problem" clients who take up a lot of your time and energy and then reward you with late payments, so you've decided to work with them to create a better relationship. Nope. Devoting your energy to fixing weak or challenging relationships deprives your best clients of your attention, which means you'll eventually end up with unhappy clients all the way around. Let's face it – those crabby clients will never be happy with you. My first business really took off when I let go of my weakest clients and nurtured the strong.

Think of this analogy: Failed entrepreneurs measure a successful day of fishing by how many fish they catch. Successful entrepreneurs measure a successful day by how many fish they cook.

5. Focus on your wallet. 

You're always thinking about money – how much money you could make off of a client, or to how many referrals you can get to well-heeled clients. Bad choice. Every time I see entrepreneurs with a singular focus on how much money they can make, I know I will find ways in which they are weakening their company. Your main focus should be on doing everything you can to help the client. Was Steve Jobs thinking about money when he developed his latest round of products we can't live without? Not likely. I would argue he was thinking, "How could I make a product that will have the most impact on society before I die?"

6. Turn your hobby into a business. 

You make a killer from-scratch spaghetti sauce, and your friends think you should bottle it and sell it. Wrong! Launching and growing a business requires passion, something that pulls you out of bed in the morning because you can't wait to do it. And you'll do it all day long, and love it, even when you're so exhausted you can't even tie your shoes. That's not a hobby. A hobby is something that releases energy; a passion is something that creates energy.

Sure, there are other ways to fail at business, but this formula is fool-proof. Follow it to the letter, and your business will be toast by Christmas.

Entrepreneuring Success

Abilities required to be a successful entrepreneur :

1) System Planning & Controls

2) Monitoring techniques

3) People techniques

4) Finance techniques

5) Technological facilities

6) Information management

7) Personal Learning & growth

8) Family management

9) Travel Management

10) Organising Techniques

Forgiveness & Reconciliation

1. This is one of the winning habits ever. To keep a grudge against anyone is one of the worst things. in fact the real fact is that you will be holding your OWN emotions at ransom by keeping unforgiveness against another!!

Time Management and You !

Time Management and You !

Have you ever thought about the fact that you and your life is actually ruled by Time... if its not the other way around, read further to know more about how to optimize your time to get you the right desired results, in less then the time you expect them to close.

its about TEM MGMT.