Get the Most from Your Networking Groups

by Lisa Saline

Every small business owner has the challenge of getting his or her business name known. And the array of opportunities to market a business is vast but marketing is typically expensive for the small business owner. Where large corporations can wage multimillion dollar ad campaigns, the entrepreneur has to be more selective in its battles. However, networking groups can be a very cost-effective way for one to spend their time rather than their money. Still, there are some tips that can help a small business person to maximize that time spent in their networking groups.

The first tip is to go into a networking event with a plan. The larger the group the more important is the plan. The plan should contain a goal of how many new people you are going to see. The number of new people that you can introduce yourself to is a lot easier in an open event like a Chamber of Commerce mixer, rather than a smaller membership based group we you are likely to know everyone already. Another element the plan should contain is who you are going to see. Even with the membership group where you see everybody weekly, plan to sit next to and get to know one of the members you don't know that well. Always increasing your circle.

The second tip is for membership type groups where everybody knows you and provides you leads. The tip is to understand that your purpose for attending each event is to educate. Not only do you need to educate everybody about what you do, it is more important that you concisely and precisely educate everybody about who is a good prospect for you. If you tell people that everybody is good prospect for you, that tells them nothing. But what you want to do is trigger in their mind specifics about people that can open the floodgates of leads for you. Regardless of your business, your core clientele can be segmented into different groups. For example, if you find that your customers often wear blue shirts and you tell your networking group people who wear blue shirts are good prospects for you. That will immediately trigger memories people that they have seen wearing blue shirts that they know.

The third tip is to prepare your leads early or provide them via e-mail before your weekly (or regularly scheduled meeting). This will save you a lot of time in the meeting so you can be concentrating on tips one and two above. You can always provide leads during the week when you may have more time and simply claim credit later with whatever formal procedure your networking group uses. Do not spend a lot of time in your networking groups clarifying leads that can be done via e-mail or telephone before or after the meetings.

Hopefully, by planning what you want to achieve your networking group meeting, then ready to educate your group, and prepare your leads early your time will be well spent.

Time Management for Multitaskers

by Penelope Trunk

Time management is one of those skills no one teaches you in school but you have to learn. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you can't organize information well enough to take it in. And it doesn't matter how skilled you are if procrastination keeps you from getting your work done.

Younger workers understand this, and time management is becoming a topic of hipsters. One of the most popular blogs in the world is Lifehacker, edited by productivity guru Gina Trapani, and her forthcoming book by the same name is a bestseller on Amazon based so far on pre-orders.

In today's workplace, you can differentiate yourself by your ability to handle information and manage your time. "Careers are made or broken by the soft skills that make you able to hand a very large workload," says Merlin Mann, editor of the productivity blog 43 Folders.

So here are 10 tips to make you better at managing your work:

1. Don't leave email sitting in your in box.
"The ability to quickly process and synthesize information and turn it into actions is one of the most emergent skills of the professional world today," says Mann. Organize email in file folders. If the message needs more thought, move it to your to-do list. If it's for reference, print it out. If it's a meeting, move it to your calendar.

"One thing young people are really good at is only touching things once. You don't see young people scrolling up and down their email pretending to work," says Mann. Take action on an email as soon as you read it.

2. Admit multitasking is bad.
For people who didn't grow up watching TV, typing out instant messages and doing homework all at the same time, multitasking is deadly. But it decreases everyone's productivity, no matter who they are. "A 20-year-old is less likely to feel overwhelmed by demands to multitask, but young people still have a loss of productivity from multitasking," says Trapani.

So try to limit it. Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users suggests practicing mindfulness as a way to break the multitasking habit.

3. Do the most important thing first.
Trapani calls this "running a morning dash". When she sits down to work in the morning, before she checks any email, she spends an hour on the most important thing on her to-do list. This is a great idea because even if you can't get the whole thing done in an hour, you'll be much more likely to go back to it once you've gotten it started. She points out that this dash works best if you organize the night before so when you sit down to work you already know what your most important task of the day is.

4. Check your email on a schedule.
"It's not effective to read and answer every email as it arrives. Just because someone can contact you immediately does not mean that you have to respond to them immediately," says Dan Markovitz, president of the productivity consulting firm TimeBack Management, "People want a predictable response, not an immediate response." So as long as people know how long to expect an answer to take, and they know how to reach you in an emergency, you can answer most types of email just a few times a day.

5. Keep web site addresses organized.
Use book marking services like del.icio.us to keep track of web sites. Instead of having random notes about places you want to check out, places you want to keep as a reference, etc., you can save them all in one place, and you can search and share your list easily.

6. Know when you work best.
Industrial designer Jeff Beene does consulting work, so he can do it any time of day. But, he says, "I try to schedule things so that I work in the morning, when I am the most productive." Each person has a best time. You can discover yours by monitoring your productivity over a period of time. Then you need to manage your schedule to keep your best time free for your most important work.

7. Think about keystrokes.
If you're on a computer all day, keystrokes matter because efficiency matters. "On any given day, an information worker will do a dozen Google searchers," says Trapani. "How many keystrokes does it take? Can you reduce it to three? You might save 10 seconds, but over time, that builds up."

8. Make it easy to get started.
We don't have problems finishing projects, we have problems starting them," says Mann. He recommends you "make a shallow on-ramp." Beene knows the key creating this on ramp: "I try to break own my projects into chunks, so I am not overwhelmed by them."

9. Organize your to-do list every day.
If you don't know what you should be doing, how can you manage your time to do it? Some people like writing this list out by hand because it shows commitment to each item if you are willing to rewrite it each day until it gets done. Other people like software that can slice and dice their to-do list into manageable, relevant chunks. For example, Beene uses tasktoy because when he goes to a client site tasktoy shows him only his to do items for that client, and not all his other projects. (Get tasktoy here.)

10. Dare to be slow.
Remember that a good time manager actually responds to some things more slowly than a bad time manager would. For example, someone who is doing the highest priority task is probably not answering incoming email while they're doing it. As Markovitz writes: "Obviously there are more important tasks than processing email. Intuitively, we all know this. What we need to do now is recognize that processing one's work (evaluating what's come in and how to handle it) and planning one's work are also mission-critical tasks."

Principles of Time Management