What’s Your Best Tip for Remaining Consistent and Accountable in Business?
May Group Discussion Question
Each month, I’ll pose a question for us to discuss in the comments. The goal is to crowdsource the best resources, advice, and recs. Everyone can see the question of the month and my personal answer, but only paid subscribers can join in the comments to share their answers.
Question: What’s your best tip for remaining consistent and accountable in business?
My answer:
Many people will tell you the key to success in business is consistency. Put in the work and keep showing up. This is much harder than it seems. How many of you have started a newsletter, sent a few emails, and stopped? Maybe started a new social media account only to post a few times and stop? Or had grand intentions of finally getting your finances in order, only to fall months behind?
🙋♀️This is me raising my hand, because I’ve been there, too.
So what’s worked?
Admin Monday
Mondays are the worst, right? So why not make them even more painful?😂 On Monday mornings, I cross a few things off my list before doing anything else.
This starts with my inbox:
Catching up on emails. You know. The ones you left bolded because you would get to later.
Sending the emails you’ve been putting off. Things like media pitches, collabs, etc.
Then accounting tasks:
Reviewing and categorizing all my expenses and income. I use Wave Accounting which I love!
Checking PayPal account, logging into my bank account to move around money. I loosely use the Profit First Model.
Depositing checks. (It terrifies my husband that I leave unopened mail on the counter for a week, but I assure him I have a system! It’s called “Admin Monday.”)
Next I focus on weekly recurring tasks.
What are the things you need to do weekly to stay afloat? For me, this is newsletter and content creation. The best thing I did was create a content calendar. Set up a Google Calendar just for your content and start mapping it out. This includes which emails need to go out, to which list, about which topic, and when. Decide what you can realistically commit to. Maybe it is 1 email a month. That’s okay. Now some people take it a step further and do something called batch working, where you would spend 1 day a month writing ALL your emails for the entire month at once. I’m not at that point yet. Instead, I dedicate Mondays to working on my content for the entire week. That usually means writing 1-2 emails (like this one!)
Then I think about automations.
What can you put on autopilot? What can you set and forget? For example, I schedule my emails and social media posts in advance. I’m actually going to do a whole article on this in the future because I have many tips when it comes to automations and the apps I personally use to do this!
Anyone want to try it out?
The first couple weeks of doing this will be hard. You’ll want to skip Admin Monday to do the fun stuff (unless you enjoy the above tasks, in which case, you are gonna love this even more!) But after a few weeks, you will train your brain to accept this new schedule. You’ll feel good about getting recurring tasks out of the way so you can work on your new projects. And, if you are like me, you’ll actually save so much time by not bouncing back and forth between recurring and new projects.
Let me know what you think!
Paid subscribers: leave your own tips in the comments 👇