5 Tips to Consistently Execute on Your Goals
Jen Drago 
Creating goals is only half of the battle in growing your business. Learn 5 strategies to consistently achieve your most important goals.
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As an entrepreneur or small business owner, I bet you have goals for your business. I bet you'd like to see your business grow and scale thrive in the future, continue to operate, and serve more people than ever before.
Whether or not you see those goals realized comes down to the execution.
So how do you translate those goals into actions and then most importantly execute on those actions?
In this article, I'm going to share with you some tips to improve the execution of your strategic imperatives. By the way, when I say “execution,” I don't mean killing ourselves in our job! I mean executing on our most important tasks and goals.
As entrepreneurs, we get pulled in so many different directions, but I can tell you that the difference between achieving your growth goals and not achieving these goals comes down to some of these tips that I'm going to share with you below.
Consistency
Consistency and productivity are the keys. How you show up consistently, do the things that are most important in your business, and how you are most productive in the time that you have available to work on these tasks will drive your success.
You may recall in prior posts, as we've talked about the strategic planning process, once we have goals in place that are quarterly and then broken down into weekly goals, it's really important to set aside time weekly to be able to work on those goals. I advocate for 4 to 8 hours per week spent focused solely on moving those strategic goals forward, taking that action to drive your business strategy.
I also advocate for the practice of time-blocking. Time-blocking is simply setting a block of time apart on your calendar that you know you will focus on the strategic tasks. Just having a strategy will not move a strategy forward. As entrepreneurs, we are operating the business. We're working in the business every single day so the only way that strategy work gets done, the important work that propels your business forward, is if you separate it from your operating time and you time-block it. Remove all those operational distractions and don't do anything else but that strategy work in those 4-8 hours per week.
Working on our strategic tasks takes discipline. And let's be honest, discipline is the most challenging thing that we need to have as an entrepreneur to be successful.
We have no bosses looking over us. In fact, that's probably why we're entrepreneurs is that we have no bosses looking over us. But if we did have a supervisor, what would they be telling us to do every single day? A good supervisor would help us prioritize the tasks that move the needle in our business. That's likely not the work that we should avoid. That's the work that we should charge toward and do first. To be consistent in any part of your life takes discipline. Discipline is the main ingredient of consistency.
Batching
The second tip that I have to help improve the execution of your strategic goals is batching your work. Now, if you've listened to anybody who works on management and who helps to advise entrepreneurs, they advocate for batching. Why? Well, it's a lot easier to not switch your tasks up throughout the day and to batch them all in one time period.
Research has shown that task-switching requires at least 20 minutes to refocus if you can really focus at all. This is why multi-tasking doesn’t work and why productivity experts advocate for removing distractions like your cell phone and email when you are trying to finish important tasks.
For example, today, while I'm shooting videos, I'm shooting four videos and when I edit these videos, which will be on a different day, I will actually edit all my videos at the same time. Then when I post them and schedule them, I'll do that all in a given time.
There are probably many operational tasks in your business that can lend themselves to batching. First and foremost, email management. Rather than having your email box open all day and your Slack box open all day and being beholden to all these beeps and notifications, shut them down. Plan two or three times a day in your day that you're going to give energy and focus toward those tasks and remove the distractions the remainder of the time.
Another common batching opportunity for entrepreneurs is creating content for social media and responding to comments from followers. if you're going to create Instagram posts and Facebook posts, do that once a week versus every single day.
Batching is something we should be looking for opportunities to do throughout our business on an ongoing basis. It will make you more productive for sure.
Visibility
The third tip in improving the execution of your strategic goals is visibility and the visibility of the goals themselves.
At Peak to Profit, we advocate for creating a vision narrative, which is a future portrait of your company, and where you see it in 3 to 5 years. Then the goals for the coming annual period derive from that vision narrative, along with assignments of activities and timelines.
Those should all be visible within a few pages of a document that you keep close at hand, not in a drawer, not in a file. It should be on the front page of your planner or journal, hooked to a bulletin board right in front of you, or on top of your desk at all times.
When you have that vision and annual goals for your business, it can't be something that's hidden away in a file folder in a desk drawer. It has to be something that you read and review daily at minimum, weekly.
If you have team members that work with you in your business, you also want to be sharing your vision and goals with anyone who works for you, and that includes contractors, VAs, part-time people, and interns. Anybody that you have working for you needs to understand where you want to take your business and your annual goals. Your team members are the key ingredient to help you achieve those annual goals.
Systematizing
The fourth tip kind of relates to batching but it's a little bit different.
It's creating systems in your business wherever you can. This is going to help you in a couple of ways.
One, it's going to help you when you batch because each time you go to do the same task, you'll have your system in place for how that task needs to be done.
You should have that written out in a process which can be as simple as a checklist or bulleted list. But start to create those processes in your business for the things that you do over and over again and then look for opportunities to streamline those. When you create those processes, which I'm going to call systems and you streamline those systems, and then you batch them together so you're doing like tasks, your productivity is going to skyrocket, which is important for us as entrepreneurs.
We were all the hats and we don't have unlimited time. We have very limited time.
The other way that systematizing will help us is, as we bring others into our business as contractors or part-time employees or even full-time employees,
we will then be able to hand those systems off and those processes off to folks. They will know exactly how we would do it and will be able to follow suit.
So it's going to help you a lot. It takes a little bit of time to do it, but it's so worth it when you actually take the time to write it down.
As an entrepreneur, it helps you see opportunities to streamline your processes and to become more efficient in your execution.
Mindset
The fifth tip for execution is minding your mindset. As entrepreneurs, we don't have someone as our cheerleader every single day. We have to be our own cheerleaders, which means we always have to be in a positive mindset.
Think about ways that help to get you in the most positive mindset, knowing that you can succeed, full of optimism for the future and for your future destination of your company.
What are some ways that you can do that? I'll share some of mine.
First and foremost, I meditate every single day. I find that when I meditate first thing in the morning, it helps to settle my brain, which is going in many, many different directions, (I call it a monkey brain.) Meditation settles my brain down, helps me handle stress, and helps me maintain focus, which is so important for execution and productivity. It also helps me keep stress and anxiety at bay.
Another tip around mindset is to make sure that you rest and recharge. So many studies have shown that when we're "on" all the time and working seven days a week, our brains get tired and can’t function at their highest level, we can't focus as well, we don't have clarity of thought, we don't have clarity of action.
In order to bring that back into balance, we need to separate our work time from our personal time and really shut down and take time off and away from our business.
I know you know this, so here’s another reminder. Make sure that you shut down at the end of your workday, enjoy your evenings away from your business, take the weekends off as much as you can, and try to get that time to recharge your brain.
Another tip around mindset and it doesn't sound like mindset but it is to keep your nutrition at its best. You’ve heard the saying, “garbage in, garbage out.” Eat well because you need a lot of great work from your brain and need to make sure that we're fueling it in the highest way possible.
Finally, exercise is extremely important for your mindset -- some kind of physical activity to move your body, get your blood flowing. I know on the days that I exercise, I am clearer in thought, I am able to articulate my thoughts better, I am able to focus better and I'm able to manage stress better.
I put all of these physical and emotional wellness items in the category of mindset, because your mindset is responsible for 50% or more of your strategy execution as an entrepreneur.
Summary
To review, the 5 tips to improve your strategy execution and achievement of your goals are:
1. Consistency of action brought about by discipline.
2. Time-blocking so that we can spend time focusing on the strategic imperatives of our business and the things that are going to move our business forward and do so in a focused, undistracted way.
3. Visibility, meaning we should keep our goals in front of us daily.
4. Systematization of our business and our processes, looking for opportunities to streamline and batch similar tasks.
5. Mindset, which includes making sure that we're always at our best, feeling our best, keeping ourselves healthy, recharging, meditating, and taking time to really align ourselves with positive influences in our lives so that we can maintain the positivity and the optimism to move our business forward.
If you are interested in optimizing your daily productivity, I invite you to try our Daily Blueprint freebie, a research-based tool to help you organize your day.