1 | 4 | There are many ways to accomplish your goals

Hey there! I'm Marian Knopp, the Online Business Systemizer at marianknopp.com.

The Productivity Tip of the Day™ is: There are many ways to accomplish your goals

Let's recap the tips from this week. In tip number one, I gave you a disclaimer about productivity tips. They're not all about you. You have to be self-aware about who you are and what you want to do in order to figure out which tips will work for you, whether they're coming from me or elsewhere.

In tip number two, I encouraged you to start the process of collecting all the things you need to do, but to do so in a very smart way. To utilize search engines like Google, YouTube, Pinterest, to get better ideas to put in your inbox, rather than "search Google for __". The few seconds that you'll save by actually doing this search before you put the item in the inbox will do dividends. There will be so many things that you won't put off if you utilize that tip.

Yesterday, I told you to write down everything. Write down all your thoughts, all your ideas, all of the imaginary to-do lists that you have in your head. Make sure you're actually writing them down for your own to-do list outside of your head. David Allen says, "Your brain was meant to have thoughts, not hold them."

Next week, I'm going to be talking about laying out all your priorities and to start processing all the items that are in your inboxes. Today's tip is more of a prompt to expand your mind around all the things you want to accomplish in your life and your business to prepare you for next week's tips.

Sometimes, people can get stuck on a goal because they think it has to be done a certain way. Maybe they saw someone else do it a certain way, or they read about one of the ways that you can do something somewhere, and they just got it stuck in their head that that's how they're going to be able to reach their goal. You see this a lot with businesses. There's more than one business model out there for you to get success, but some people get stuck in this idea of how they're going to succeed, because they read it somewhere. But maybe that method's just not practical for who they are and the skills they have, and so that's why they're getting stuck or that's why it's not successful for them.

So, for this tip, I want to remind you about what we talked about in tip number one, which is you need to be aware of who you are and what you're doing. It's not enough to just think, "Oh, I need to this. Let me go do it." You have to think about where your skill set is and who you are as a person in engaging around this activity.

I'm going to give you two examples today. For my first example, we'll talk about my goal of creating content, which is what I'm doing right now as I'm saying these words to you. I have to be aware of who I am when I'm creating content. My goal is to create content, and I would like it to be on all sorts of platforms, because I'm not 100% sure yet where my content should live. So, I just want to try out a little bit of everything, and then assess later and find out what works, and then I can hone in on those platforms. That's my goal and the details around that goal.

But I need to tackle this goal with activities that make sense for me. There's a lot of ways that I could do this. I could write a blog. I could just go straight podcast and that's all I do. But, I need to be aware of what my skill set is and who I am as a person. One of the things that I've said over and over again, is that I'm very detail oriented. While there are many ways that I can go about this, in terms of writing, or speaking, I need to be aware that detail orientation could help or hinder my efforts.

The second thing about me that has to do with creating content is that I really enjoy speaking. I am an extrovert. I love talking to people. And so, it makes more sense to me to communicate my thoughts verbally than to write them all down. I'm not the best at articulating. Just because I like doing something doesn't mean I'm great at it. I actually have a really hard time articulating my thoughts a lot. But, if you give me the time to think about it and assess, and then come back to you, I can definitely give you some quality content.

So, keeping those things in mind with my goal, how would it be best delivered? You are seeing it right now as I publish this series, is that I've decided to go live. Going live is a bit of a challenge for me, because I'm detail oriented, and I know I'm going to have "ums" or I'm not going to flow. My thoughts aren't going to flow very well, because I didn't rerecord a billion times. If I had prerecorded these videos, I probably would have stopped the recording and rerecorded this specific podcast at least a dozen times, just a bunch of times, because I feel awkward. I feel like, "Oh, shoot. I should've said that here." Or, "Oh, I forgot this thought that I wanted to mention there." So, for my detail orientation, in terms of being the most productive in giving this tip to you, I'm going to go live.

The other thing with detail orientation that I'm not doing is I'm not heavily editing it once I go live. I'm just taking the recording from this live broadcast and then I'm uploading it into the podcast platforms, and taking the transcript and turning it into a blog, because I know that I would just spend hours just crafting something very specific. So, I'm sacrificing a bit of the quality in order to just get the content out there and to get it on a lot of platforms. In the future, when I'm very specific on what platforms I want, I can care more about the quality and I can spend more time on this. But for now, just to find my voice and get used to this and get into the habit, this is what is actually more productive for me.

I'll give you another example. I love learning. You know there are so many different ways that you can learn. I often have a goal to learn something new, especially because there are lots of tools out there, a lot of productivity tools that I like to try out, because my clients will ask me about them and I want to be able to say, "Hey, actually, that's not worth our time." Or, "That would work really well for your business." I can only have that expertise to be able to say it if I try it out and I learn it, and I do it for myself. And so, I often have to-do items that ask me to learn something new.

Some of the ways that I could learn something new is I could read a book. I could listen to a podcast or an audiobook. I could watch videos. I could do a mixture of those things in an online course or a program type setting. I could actually do the activity as I learn it, maybe do a workshop or an apprenticeship. And so, we have our goal, I want to learn something new. We know all of the ways that I can do it. Which way is going to be best is based on who I am? Going back to the fact that I'm detail oriented, it makes the most sense for me to actually immerse myself in the experience of learning.

If it's a workshop or an apprenticeship or I'm able to watch a video where I can see all the details happening and imagine myself actually doing it, I can consume a lot more of those details and be able to apply it to what I'm trying to learn and learn it more effectively. That is what is most productive for me anytime I'm trying to learn something. I'll download the tool and I'll play around with it. I'll go through some of the video tutorials. Maybe I'll set up a call with support and have them walk me through a few things. That is what's going to be the most valuable time for me when I'm learning something new.

For other people, however, they get distracted with lots of details, and reading a book or listening to an audiobook or a podcast is actually more effective, because they're able to hone in on the very specific process or instructions that they need to accomplish. They can work it out in their brain so that when it's time for them to apply what they've learned, they've already personalized it for themselves.

So, you can see there are lots of ways to get things done, and there's no right way of doing things. But the tip that I'm giving you today is that there's many ways to accomplish things. No, there's no right or wrong way, but there kind of is a right or wrong way based on who you are and the details of what you want to accomplish.

That's something for you to think about this weekend as you're going about collecting all of those thoughts and ideas in your head. We'll get into processing your inboxes and organizing everything. Stay tuned for the tips next week, which will be all about that.