Hello Blog world! I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I’m thankful for everyone reading this blog as well as all the folks out there who have put their trust in Agency Performance Partners. This blog is in reference to the holidays because I think it’s important to not only reflect on past holidays but to think about ways the holidays can be better for our business.
We all know that the holidays are rough in the sense of all the running around we typically have to do. I know that for myself my personal commitments are higher than they are during the rest of the year which can cause stress in my time management. With that being said, I told myself that I would plan for the stresses and personal commitments rather than letting them control me.
For instance, I knew that since this was my first Thanksgiving as a married man that it was going to add to my friends and family wanting to spend more than the usual holiday time and that they were looking at my wife and I to be the ones to hold court this year. So, I looked at the week ahead, the time required from a personal level versus a work level and I made myself a weekend schedule. Now it isn’t ideal but I have roles and responsibilities that I cannot simply say “I’m losing two days of the week so those will have to wait until next week.” If I did that I would put myself further behind.
That’s why I’m writing this blog on a Sunday night. Usually without the holidays I would be in my pajamas on the couch enjoying football but sacrifices have to be made and I’m ok with that because I created a plan for myself. I recently heard that when it comes to time management you need to plan something for the mind, something for the body and something for the soul. I include work as the mind set because work teaches me to flex my brain muscles and I only get better with the way I work. For the body I count that as my physical fitness and the soul is my personal time. I plan around those three core components. It’s not always an even distribution, it’s not supposed to be but you have to plan for those three principles and it especially becomes apparent during the holidays.
Our business cannot suffer through the holidays though and sometimes I find we put more emphasis on the soul portion of our time management. We want to spend time with our families and we want to be able to see our friends however we cannot use the holidays as an excuse to neglect our business. The reason I say this is because in my professional life I’ve been in two types of companies. Successful ones and Not So Successful ones. I’ve always liked stacking the two against each other to find out what made each one different. It would take 8 blogs to cover it all so I’ll use just use this one as an example.
I noticed that the not so successful one always treated December as a lost month. The mantra was that no one buys before the holidays and we just want to take a break anyway. The other company had a completely different take on it. They treated December like it was the busiest month of the year. We were pushing harder than ever to hit our monthly and year end goals, we were planning for the following year, and we were hustling. We managed that chaos through our time management and as I said it made a significant impact each year.
With that being said, I wish you all a happy holiday season but don’t let it be your excuse to neglect your business. Your business will be there January 2nd and so will you. The only difference is you get to dictate how impactful you will want to be that year. For everything else there is Agency Performance Partners. We are running a great end of year promotion that if you click on the link below you can learn all about it!
https://www.agencyperformancepartners.com/promo/
