As an entrepreneur you have to wear multiple hats. Some days the positions can range from Researcher, Webmaster, Accountant, Inventory Manager, Distribution Manager, Customer Services Representative, Sales Manager, and on and on. All these hats can make it hard to complete tasks and focus.
One way I try to stay on track is creating a daily list of goals. For some strange reason some days I spend more time on one task and less (or none) on others.
One particular day I was asked “How long do you spend on a task like research?”
Well, that’s a good question but I followed it up with a bad answer, “until I am done”.
This was a bad answer because there was no time frame attached. Though I had many tasks on my list that day, I spent the better part of the day researching (basically surfing the net from one site to another) neglecting the other tasks on my list.
I had to find a way to focus. To make sure I was only spending a set amount of time on each activity. To complete all the tasks on my list otherwise my business would suffer.
After all what was the point of setting my daily goals if I could not stay focused?
To aid in my quest to focus my attention I needed to automate my daily list of goals then limit and track how long I was spending on each task.
For this I turned to Yahoo! Widgets. Yahoo! Widgets is a free application platform for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. These Widgets help you save time with an at-a-glance view of your favorite Internet services right to your desktop. Be careful you can loose focus just searching through the Yahoo! Widget Gallery because they offer over 4,000 desktop Widgets that do almost anything from displaying a weather forecast to playing a game.
Widgets generally sit on your desktop and don’t look like applications as we’re used to seeing them in a standard window. Instead, Widgets tend to look like small pictures or animations.
Here are four Yahoo! Widgets I used to boost my focus:
- JC Sticky Deluxe
This Widget is just like any sticky note / post-it note / memo taker. It has a ton of cool and powerful features like; multiple stickies, customizable fonts, colors, background themes and the ability to print stickies. - Job Timer
This Widget counts up instead of down. It is useful for timing how long a job, presentation, or any other task takes. You can name your task so you can actually time 5 simultaneous tasks at once. - Generic Countdown Timer
This Widget is a simple countdown timer. You can set the time in hours, minutes, seconds and an alarm will ring once the counter reaches zero. You can choose to initialize the counter with a default time when the Widget starts, which is convenient when you always need a countdown for the same amount of time. - DailyBilling
This Widget is a time tracker for sorting and accumulating time spent on projects.
Multiple projects and multiple hours may be tracked each day. Data is written to a file each day that can be referred to at the end of the week when you compile your time and can’t remember what projects you worked on last Tuesday.
By using technology more effectively, you will get more done and stay focused. Your business depends on it!
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