5 Tips to Help You Meet Goals and Deadlines

Since high school (or earlier), many of us have struggled with meeting deadlines. Poor time management skills and procrastination often lead to last minute cram sessions which produce substandard work. At work, failing to meet deadlines is one of the cardinal sins that can easily get you fired. An employee who fails to be punctual and achieve deadlines is no more than a broken cog in a machine, and will be quickly replaced. How can professional procrastinators learn effective time management in order to successfully meet deadlines?

Breaking One Task Down Into Bite-Size Pieces
The lesson many of us never learn is that one large task can always be more easily accomplished in bite-size pieces over a long period of time. If you are given a project to complete in the next two weeks, the right time to get started is that very day. When you first receive a project, you should take out a calendar and find a way to break it into four or more evenly spaced parts. Don’t just mark the final deadline date. Give yourself mini-deadline dates per segment and meet them, whatever the cost. Failing to meet one of your own mini-deadlines should be regarded as a failure to meet the final deadline.

Rewarding Yourself
Some people, however, lack the self-discipline necessary to break one large task into several small ones. These people won’t worry if they miss one of their own deadlines, procrastinating and pushing it back to the second, third and final deadlines. They will only panic as the last deadline approaches.

A simple way to reinforce meeting your own mini-deadlines is to reward yourself. If you completed the first phase of the project ahead of time, reward yourself with a night out, a nice dinner or a gift for yourself. If necessary, pencil these in under each mini-deadline. A variation of this would be to abstain from an addiction – such as, beer or cigarettes, working and at same time chatting or engaging in online affairs– until the mini-deadline is met, with no exceptions.
If you truly lack the self-discipline necessary to pull this off, you’ll need a partner – kind of like an Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor – who oversees your day-to-day activities to make sure you never veer off course.

Plan Ahead
Meeting deadlines is a lot like playing a good game of Chess. Good chess players plan five to ten moves ahead. Bad chess players only concentrate on the current move. If you always focus on events several days down the road, you’ll be better equipped to handle any potential crises that pop up. It also allows you to set aside a day or two before the final deadline to polish your project and add finishing touches. Don’t just focus on today – focus on the whole week.

Get Organized – Technology is your Friend
This is the number one reason people fail to meet deadlines. They simply aren’t organized. In this age of smart-phones, tablets and cloud computing, there’s simply no excuse to be disorganized. Simply entering events in your Google Calendar will sync it across all your mobile devices so you can keep aware of all current deadlines. Cloud-based calendars and documents can also be shared and edited by collaborators, which makes working with a team a breeze.

File documents neatly in your computer or cloud-based storage. People often waste time finding digital bits and pieces of their projects when they aren’t organized, using “search” to desperately find the document they “swear was saved to the desktop”. Good self-discipline is reflected in good organizational skills.

Be Able to Meet Short Notice Deadlines
Last, but not least, always be ready to meet short-notice deadlines. These occur at every workplace, upsetting employees and managers alike. If you were able to manage your time effectively, as shown in this guide, meeting a sudden short-notice deadline should be a breeze. Smoothly and coolly meeting a last minute deadline makes you look great – especially when your procrastinating co-workers are tearing their hair out.

9 Options for Small Town Entrepreneurs

Living in a town with a small population presents a unique challenge to entrepreneurs. A narrow local market means the margin for error is greater than in centers of higher population. But a small town presents a great opportunity to form strong bonds with customers. The trick is to find out what business is suitable for the town.

3 Options for Acquiring a Business

Start a Brand New Business
Open a store or agency that has not existed in the town. There may be hurdles, such as educating residents as to how your company will enhance their lives, but if it is a “first”, there will probably be interest in your company.

Take Over an Existing Business
It may be the right time for a business owner to get out, which presents an opportunity to continue the business. The advantage of buying an existing presence is a shorter customer acquisition period. Residents are familiar with and comfortable with the company.

Introduce a Franchise
This option may meet resistance from residents who see a franchise as the death of a small town; however, a franchise presents a familiar image that can attract local patrons. One of the biggest hurdles for the franchisee is the upfront cost.

Prior to determining whether a new business is appropriate, there are several avenues to investigate in order to find a need that exists. Business brokers recommend that entrepreneurs do some research before introducing a new business to a small market. Research can be done by simply asking residents what kind of business they would like to see open locally. Examining other towns that are similar within the state is helpful in order to find out what has worked elsewhere. Another research technique would be to look at companies that operate in multiple small markets to see if that type of business would work in your town.

Identify Areas to Satisfy Market Need

Serving the Local Market
What opportunities exist to serve the local market? Are there products or services that are lacking a local business presence? There may be an opportunity to sell locally made products or global products that show a demand from townspeople.

Complementing Area Businesses
Are there offerings that would go along with existing businesses? For example, if a town has a significant number of farms, there may be a need for a store that sells produce, storage equipment or farm machinery. Or there may be a need for a reliable equipment repair operation.

Selling Local Products Elsewhere
If a local business provides desirable products, consider selling those products to larger markets.

Market to Tourists
towns that lie on travel corridors or are destination spots themselves provide opportunities to sell local products, such as town-related novelties or local specialties. If the town is a destination point, there may be a need for tour guides or taxi services.

Serve the Local Government
municipal governments have needs from janitorial services to computer repair to office supplies. Investigate the needs of the local government to determine if something is lacking or services are being delivered poorly.

Provide Expertise to Existing Businesses
Business owners often need assistance with accounting, taxes, facility cleaning and other services. Look for a common need and become the local expert. There will be opportunity as long as there are businesses that are operating.

Once the research into existing needs and opportunities is completed, strategy and planning are essential to ensuring that the grand opening is not followed by the resounding thud of an empty store. Finally, as with any business, money management is critical to making sure operations will continue if hard times hit the small town.

Compliment of the Season!

For the joy of the Birth of the Cosmos's Saviour, for the betterment of humanity. That we may all be saved, We at Diamondstar Int'l identifies with our Lord and Saviour this yuletide period. May His Peace reign supremely in our individuals life, in Lagos, in Nigeria, in Africa and the world at large.

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year ahead.

Emotional Intelligence and its Impact on Leadership

Defined as the skills or ability necessary to identify, assess and control the emotions of oneself, other people or entire groups, emotional intelligence is a concept that has become widely popular in management texts and related literature for its ability to enhance and capitalize on the human potential of an organization.

Seeking to support a leader’s cognitive, emotional and physical resources, the use of emotional intelligence is a modern tool of effective management, enabling the individual to manage a wide range of employees that are often performing in a unique set of roles. In addition, emotional and personal competencies are two primary factors that are shown to be directly linked to performance within a work environment, making their identification and analysis essential for effective management as well as the increased development of the organization’s human capital.

It Pays to be ‘Likeable’

In part, emotional intelligence is a response to the problems businesses face in the modern world. With tighter budgets, escalating costs and the continuous demand to produce more for less, there’s a need to develop a higher standard for leadership skills, ones that will effectively address the challenges of high employee turnover, a rapidly changing business environment and the ever-increasing demand for improved products and services. And at least in part, the solution to these problems is found in a leader who possesses technical knowledge as well as the social and emotional abilities that will enable them to meet and beat the afore-mentioned challenges and maximize the human potential of their organization while achieving their own personal agenda.

Any organization at the forefront of its industry needs to retain the best employees to remain competitive. And if you take a look at the factors that contribute to the highest levels of creativity and effectiveness in the workplace within these types of businesses, you’ll find components of emotional intelligence 9 out of 10 times.

That’s because duration of employment is directly linked to an individual’s relationship with their immediate supervisor, with some figures reporting that only 11 percent of employees who rated their boss as ‘excellent’ would consider looking for a new job. This figure is in comparison to the 40 percent who would consider leaving after rating their boss ‘poor’.
Moving Up Requires More Than Just Technical Capability

Your skills can land you a great job but emotional intelligence is what enables you to keep it and, more importantly, get promoted and motivate those around you. In fact, some psychologists believe that emotional intelligence matters twice as much as both technical and analytic skills combined. And the higher the individual moves up within an organization, the more crucial emotional intelligence becomes – not really a surprise given the high degree of loyalty required to inspire people toward achieving an expansive, complex or long-term goal.

To climb the modern corporate ladder, a leader must be competent within their chosen field but also have a finely-tuned sense of emotional intelligence. Specifically, they are typically expected to be more positive, approachable, warm, empathetic and optimistic, traits many believe to be more important than traditional cognitive intelligence in the successful achievement of workplace goals. The reason for this may be due to the fact that a focus on emotional intelligence often includes the ability to contain any negative feelings and focus instead on a positive outcome – a capability that is vital for high-reaching leaders and executives.

Tips for Maximizing Employee Potential

As a manager, maximizing employee potential should be one of your top priorities. Disgruntled, idle workers who do the bare minimum are dead weight for your company. Each employee you hire should be considered an investment in the company. Being able to push your employees to the maximum potential (without breaking them, of course) will enhance your entire company’s productivity and efficiency. Here are some ideas to help your workers be the best that they can be – and not hate you in the process.

Hire the Right People

First and foremost, recruit the right people! This seems simple and silly, but more often than not employers choose the safe choice – the middle of the pack applicant that won’t stir up trouble. Applicants who are too opinionated or have “too much personality” are often nixed from the list of potential hires due to their unpredictability. This would be a huge mistake – often these individuals possess leadership characteristics which would enhance your workforce.

Identify Existing Skills and Areas for Potential
From your workforce, you should assess individual potential. Maybe your data entry grunt actually has skills in other areas, such as product design or technical writing. Get to know your employees, their past experiences and their interests. Often times, an unhappy employee is simply a bored one, stuck in an unchallenging and unfulfilling post. Maybe a certain employee doesn’t have outside skills, but has such a mastery of their job that they can be given the responsibility of training new hires. Or maybe they have outside skills that can be pursued in their free time – for example, search giant Google used to require that its programmers set aside 20% of their time on personal pet projects, in an effort to foster creativity. You can even rotate employees between positions to insure that everyone understands the different jobs at your company, so they can substitute each others’ jobs, if need be.

Understand if your employees are natural leaders, followers or innovators. If there are a few cogs that are getting stuck, such as irreparably disgruntled employees, these toxic employees will have to be removed from the equation to insure smooth operations.