Episode 47 Small Business Tips - On Making A Plan: How To Improve Your Focus Using A Mini Memo Board
Welcome to another quick tip episode where Fiona shares how using a mini memo board helps her stay focused on the key tasks she has for the day. At the end of this episode, you may end up buying your own memo board as well!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
On making plans
Mini memo boards
How to use it
Quick tip on cleaning one
Conclusion
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to Episode 47 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast.
OK, so today is a tip episode. This is where I share a really quick tip tool or tactic. Now, if you love these kind of quick tip episodes, then definitely go and make sure that you signed up to my weekly email, which comes out every Sunday and is full of quick tips and insights just like this to help you in business. You can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com/subscribe.
All right. So on today's episode, I often get asked and I don't want to sound like full of myself or anything at all, but I do get asked quite often are "How do you get so much done?" And I'll definitely record a longer coaching episode on this exact topic and how I break it all down. You can definitely find it in my book as well. But for now, I want to introduce you to a tool that really, really helps me stay focused and helps me work on the most important things each day. And I'm sharing it with you today in the hope that it does the same for you. OK, ready. Let's get stuck in.
So I am somebody who likes a plan, I mean, that's probably quite apparent from this podcast or definitely apparent if you have read my book, Passion, Purpose, Profit. But the reason that I like a plan is that it forces you to focus in the same way that a strategy does. And I work with a lot of small business owners and large companies as well on strategy. And often, you know, people will be like, well, I just want a plan. And it's like, well, we need a strategy in order to make that plan. But the plan and the strategy both force you to focus - to focus on what's important. What do we need to do? What's the objective? You know, why are we doing this? And to ask those questions and a tool that I want to talk about in today's Quick Tip episode to really help me focus, even though it might sound really simple when I first say it is the mini memo board.
So obviously we're not face to face and I can't see you as such to show you what this looks like, but I have a mini memo board, a mini whiteboard, really. And it's about the same size as a hardcover book, maybe a little bit smaller. And it is with me everywhere that I work. So obviously, most of the time I'm working at my desk in the office that we have in the garden of our home. But even when I go into a business as a consultant or if I'm running a public workshop or if I'm doing a live speaking gig and let's hope they all come back soon, this little memo board comes with me to those things as well.
So how do I use it? Well, what I really use it for majority of the time is to write down the top three, just three tasks that I need to get through each day. And so I write them down and hopefully I get through them and at the end of the day, I'll wipe it off so long as they've been done. And I'll check my calendar. I'll check what's coming up for the next day and I'll make my list of three again for the following day. And what I try to do here is to focus.
You know, I can't do everything. I don't want to list with like 20 things in it because it will one. I probably won't get through them all. And two, it'll just overwhelm me. It's like, oh my God, I've got so long to go, you know, like with anything else, if you can break it down into smaller things, it's going to be less daunting. And so I really just try and focus. I can't do everything. So I asked myself, what are the top three most important tasks or projects that I need to work on the next day? And so that way when I come into the office, I'm kind of ready to take on the day. And I'm also not going to get so distracted easily by anything that comes up like an email or an inquiry.
I don't know if you guys heard it or read it. I think it was a while ago. Gosh, who was it? I think it was Ashton Kutcher who said something like emails other people's to do tasks, landing in your life or something like that, so that when you open your emails, you're getting all of these requests from other people and that you shouldn't necessarily do that.
So I guess in a different way, my memo board is allowing me to focus and not get distracted by, say, requests that come in by email or an inquiry or whatever else. Now, that's not to say I don't check that stuff. I definitely do. And I try, though, to check my emails at two certain times of the day. And I have a lovely virtual assistant who helps a lot with my inbox and she manages majority of emails. But I know that the most important stuff I need to get through is on that memo board.
The other thing I love with this is that you can revise things or wipe it all off if need be. And I'm not wasting paper. I'm not writing notes in various places or I'm not making sort of digital notes in, say, I find notes or something else that just never get looked at again because I'm just putting it all on this memo board and it's just it's just all there. And I know that I definitely know in the past I have been somebody who say got a Post-it note and then I've got a paper diary and then I've got my iPhone notes. And then I might have something on Google calendar and it's just really hard to stay focused. And so this memo board is a very just simple, easy way for me to focus, like, what do I need to get done and listing those things out.
And when I go to do speaking gigs or public workshops, I'll bring this with me again. It's really small. Like I said, it can fit in a handbag or laptop bag. And I write what I do in that instance is I'm not writing the three tasks I need to get through, but I'll write a rough agenda so I know how much time I have to cover certain topics. So say, for instance, you know, I did a talk for Etsy for one of their summits and I had to speak. I think it was like four hours on something. And so I needed to break that down. It was like a workshop. And so I had to kind of break it down to talk about this for forty minutes, then have a break, talk about this, talk about this. And so I'll put that agenda on this mini whiteboard, this mini memo board, and I'll bring it with me. And again, being a whiteboard, if anything changes, say we go over on one particular topic in the workshop or people have lots of questions around that theme, then I can wipe it clean and I can revise the agenda for the second part of the day. So I stay on track and we're not going away over time.
I picked up my mini memo board just from Officeworks, which is a large stationary office supplies company in Australia, but you can find them anywhere and everywhere, you just literally need to sit mini memo whiteboard. I have had this one for, gosh, five years now and I use it daily and it's still good to go. And hot tip, if you ever want to clean a whiteboard, the best thing is actually toothpaste. You can to smear some toothpaste on give it a brush with an old toothbrush or an old nail brush or just a cloth and let it dry. And it's basically clean and white new. So if you're someone who uses whiteboards, definitely use the toothpaste thing. It's amazing, like five years of writing on this every single day and it's not gray-ish or anything. But yeah, I guess that's really what I want to talk about, this simple tool that has helped me so much.
So if you're someone who finds yourself easily distracted or you have notes all over the place, you might want to consider a mini memo board because it's a tool that you can use to list out the top things to get done. It can help you stay focused and work on really what's most important to you and your business and not get sidetracked. If you want to see what mine looks like - I mean, it's basically it's just it's tiny. It's not that exciting. But if you wanted to see what it looks like, I have a reel on my Instagram - just at @mydailybusinesscoach, and I have a real cold tools. And if you click on that, you will see what it looks like and kind of how I use it.
So definitely come over and connect on Instagram as well. And of course, I'll link to that in the show notes. So that is it for episode 47, short and sweet. Kind of just like the mini memo board, as I just mentioned, you'll find everything you need to know from today's episode, including a full transcript and any links at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/47 as this is episode 47.
Remember to subscribe so you don't miss out on future Quick Tip episodes with tips, tools and tactics to help you in your small business. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you next time.
Thanks for listening to My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
