1) Eliminate time wasters in your life. What are you spending your time doing… that you shouldn’t be? Until you learn to cute these wasteful minutes out — you wont be able to use your time efficiently.

A perfect example of this in my opinion is TV. The majority of American’s spend WAY too much time watching TV. This must be limited for you to achieve ultimate control over your time. You’re probably watching way too much, so cut it out. The least you can do is improve the value of TV that you watch and only allow time for news or somewhat valuable or educational programming.

2) Decide what is important. Make a list of what is genuinely important in your life. What comes first? In what order? How much time are you willing to give to each of these important things, and if something must be bumped off, what will it be? One of the keys to time management, the most critical and often the most difficult, is prioritization—you absolutely must know what you want to accomplish before you can go do it. I waist a lot of time trying to decide what ORDER my to do list should go in, but this is something you need to do to start crossing things off. It is NOT effective time management to jump from task to task sporadically, and your work will probably not be as focused if you handle your tasks this way. Today’s world has too many distractions and when you allow those distractions to become priority, you lose efficiency.

• Make of list of what you want to accomplish

• Set time frames for accomplishing each item

• Organize each item in order of importance

• Create a game plan

3) Focus on managing your time (focus on your list) If you’re not thinking about how you can be efficient, chances are — you wont be! Begin to focus on your time management throughout the course of your day. Once you have determined what your priorities are start focusing on them. If something isn’t on your list — Don’t do it, until your list is completed. If you are distracted by something that should be a goal, put it on your list, and wait until you come to it, don’t be a slave to your distractions.

I watched this video of CD Vann of SOHO Magazine and SOHObiztube.com on ActionsTalk.com, and had to share it with you. I especially appreciate the beginning of the interview when CD explains how she started her magazine, SOHO Magazine out of Milwaukee.  For those of you who aren’t familiar, ActionsTalk is a site that helps bring attention to start up businesses. They have helped cultivate startup communities in non-hub cities. It consist of Ryan Graves and Blake Samic, it’s great to hear the stories of successful and up an coming business people via ActionsTalk.

“Goals are dreams we convert to plans and take action to fulfill.” – Zig Ziglar

Cd’s story of how she started SOHO Magazine and SOHObiztube.com, and this quote really highlight how important it is to turn goals into movement. Cd was lucky she had her friend George to push her to take action on a dream that she had been holding onto for over a year. As we just finished talking about New Years Resolutions, and setting high goals, it’s so so important for us to remember that writing down goals on a post it and sticking them to our monitor is only going to get a so far.  These plans and good intentions that will all have are nothing without our actions and movement. Don’t wait for a friend to put you out there and push you into action, because it may not happen.  We aren’t all as lucky to have people like that in our lives. Don’t wait to share your ideas with someone, and don’t wait to act on them.  Done is better than perfect.” Set your plan, and take action on your goals. You can always adjust later.  I think this applies to companies that hesitate to launch new endeavors, because they are unsure of the chances for sucess or the ROI on their idea. It can apply to industries being shy about taking on new methods and techniques, and sticking to traditional ways as a default.  It can apply to your position and work, and never presenting your great ideas to your team because you’re nervous about how it will be received.   Just think… if everyone who had great ideas always shared them, how many more success stories would there be? If Blake and Ryan hadn’t acted on their dream of ActionsTalk.com, they and I wouldn’t be able to share Cd’s story with you.

So as you log your dreams and goals this January, ask yourself how long you’ve been wanting these things — and what is taking you so long to put the first food forward.

I wanted to take a minute to encourage you all to fight that mind set this year. Don’t move your goals inside the box so that they are attainable. Better to make an unreachable goal and get closer to it, than to set one below the bar, and cheat yourself out of that “ah-ha” sense of accomplishment that makes it all worth it.  This new years – set a HIGH goal, give yourself a goal you may never quite reach, and then push yourself to get as close to it as you can. Baby steps are fine, that’s often necessary, and I’m not knocking the reach-able goals but they need to lead to something more, something big this year. It’s 2009!!

What’s something you think you’ll never be able to do? For me it’s run a marathon. Maybe I’ll run a 10K early this year, and if I get really ambitious maybe by next December I can find the time to train for a half. Friends… lets be honest — I may never run a marathon in my life, but if I set that as a goal this year (despite the fact that I’m completely convinced that I can’t) maybe I’ll get a little closer to it than I would otherwise.

This new years, think big! Be forward thinking and postive. Give yourself a good goal this time around, and then lets see how close you can get to it in ‘09.  We may surprise ourselves.

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I wanted to add to my “new years post”  after reading a great post by my brother Ryan. He writes about how important it is to acknowlege the lessons that 2008 tought us. I commented on his post by reflecting on the important lesson that I have learned this year, going through a layoff and finding new employment. 

A big lesson for me in 2008: Stay Active- if you’re always doing something, you’ll be doing something right!

I learned that if you remember that you’re awesome  and you keep confidence and positivity close. Keep your “inner drive” going, if you will, then you’ll land in a good spot! I learned so much this year about motivation, about going after something that you want, about how much a mind set can change your situation, and how important it is to stay positive and forward thinking AND moving.  I love to chat about the truths I learned this year, mostly in the past 3 months.

2008 was a good year. Ryan’s post is a great reminder to take it’s lessons with us into 2009!!

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES. From the starting line, if you fail to look at what your end goals will be, and what your overall objectives are, your campaign might as well be pointless. You can’t lose sight of what your after if you never establish what you are after in the first place… think about it. Setting these goals and objectives should start with your client’s ideas — they will know what they want to accomplish because they hired you (the PR pro) for a reason. Now it is your job to help them set realistic and achievable goals and to take their aspirations and form them into clear objectives for your PR effort. Setting these objectives makes your PR planning much more effective.

Kim Harrison of Cutting Edge PR outlines 3 types of goals used in Public Relations: reputations management goals, relationship management, and task management:

1. REPUTATION MANAGEMENT – These deal with identity and perception of your client, aka helping to form positive opinions about your client.

2. RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT -- Improving the relationships your client has with customers, stakeholders, and sometimes even competitors.  Improve communication in the existing relationships help by your client and introduce new relationship opportunities as well.

3. TASK MANAGEMENT – Achieving tasks. This is most common type of goal, and is easiest to measure the results. This would include increasing attendance at events, increasing customer base, increasing recognition of brand, etc. This goal type would be where you would see the monetary profit as well (which is probably why it gets the most attention). However, I don’t think that this makes it the most important type of goal. I stand by relationships and reputation hold just as much if not MORE weight in successful PR efforts.

GET ON THE SAME PAGE
It’s also extremely important to get client and practitioner on the same page about these things. If the client has big ideas in his head, and the PR pro has something a little smaller scale and realistic on the brain, one will see the campaign as a disappointment while the other as a mission completed. This may seem obvious, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to be on the same page. When you work with a client (and this applies to in-house as well as agency situations) it is so important that you have not just complete 2 way communication but open lines of communication as well as honest communication. The meeting in which you both sit down and hash out your different expectations might be a painful, uncomfortable, or tedious task but you wont be sorry for doing it. The results will better, the relationship will be stronger, and ultimately your client/employer will respect you for doing so.

So what have we learned? Once you have your creative approach and strategy in order you’ve got to 1. Set some goals and objectives. 2. Make sure there are at least 3 goals, one having to do with rep, one to do with relationships and one to do with an achievable task. 3. Then get on the same page with your client, be honest and open with them about the goals, what’s realistic, what’s the time-line, how many goals?  Once all these steps are taken you’ve got a well oiled PR effort so… go get ‘em!