How

Many people believe that one of the keys to success in business is to work really, really hard. There is a compelling idea that if you put in the hours, you’ll be successful. However, in my experience of working with hundreds of businesses, this simply isn’t true.

Some of you will know already that a couple of weeks ago I got severely panned on an online group in response to an article I wrote about networking. I thought I’d talk about what it felt like and how I handled it.

Why do you need to spot a gap in the market? A business based where someone has spotted a gap…

The conventional wisdom in business about feedback is that it’s very important and you must always listen to it and act upon it. Which is all very well and good, but like all conventional wisdom can be a little simplistic. This isn’t my experience of how the real business world works.

I like to share some of my bag of tips and tricks which I use with my clients, so here’s one which I suggest regularly.

I’ve noticed something about the way that I work. If I can concentrate on what I’m doing, I can get a whole day’s worth of work done in about an hour. Millions of items (well, about 3 or 4) can be ticked off the to do list when I’m in the zone. But if I’m not focussed, my productivity drops dramatically, and my day disappears. So I’ve been trying a new time management technique – the pomodoro technique.

Lots of my business support clients are busy people. We’re all busy people. But sometimes being busy stops us getting things done. There are lots of resources out there for managing your time better and I don’t want to just duplicate those, but to encourage you to do something other than work on your business for a change.