When was the last day you achieved everything you intended to do on that day?

There are thousands of articles and resources out there for small business owners about increasing productivity. There are almost as many telling us we’re moving too fast, we need to slow down, and to do less to avoid burnout. 

Here’s the deal. You can’t go full speed ahead forever. You also can’t drop everything. Are we talking about finding the holy grail of balance?

After decades of being a small business owner and attempting to balance a workaholic nature and my personal life, I can say I have almost arrived at the sweet spot – that place where I feel I am doing more than enough for my business, and truly enjoying life outside of it. What’s this you say? Work-life balance for a small business owner isn’t a myth after all?

“How Mike, HOW?”, you may ask. It’s eye-rolling-ly simple, but that doesn’t negate the immense impact. You are going to require some major stick-to-it-ness.

Every small business owner needs a daily routine.

If you, as a small business owner, can’t create a routine you can stick to, it’s going to be nearly impossible to follow through on all of the intentions you set for yourself daily. I learned this the (very, very) hard way. Things pop up, you get dragged into impromptu meetings, or your team has questions, you name it. Those intentions to scale your business, make calls, appear on webinars – all the things get jumbled. Then, we have family dinners, work outs, maybe some continuing ed courses (cough, cough) that don’t get attention because we’re working. It’s an easy rut for small business owners to get caught in. One that will leave you burnt out, and with less accomplished.

A daily routine blocks and protects your time. Each block is a time allotment to focus on that one thing. Eventually (talking years, here), I created a daily routine. Once I did – and stuck to it, big, and small goals were accomplished. 

To maintain my daily routine, I use my calendar. I know, I know. So simple. At the same time. I really use it. Ends up, to achieve everything you want to accomplish, even if it’s a nap, it needs to be scheduled – and you have to stay accountable to it. 

I don’t use a task manager, unless you want to call Erin, my scheduling manager, a task manager. Erin is the all time protector of my schedule, and she creates time for not only business tasks, but personal ones as well. 

Each block of time is scheduled for a priority – from workouts, to seeing my parents, to dinners, to business goals. One of my big goals is to carve more time out for creating small business systems and writing books about them. I could easily wake up every morning with that intention, but what would make me accountable?

Sprintapalooza – A prime example of how I have scheduled my time to increase productivity is Sprintapalooza. It’s a group of fellow writers who I join every morning for what we call a writing sprint. Every single weekday I write collectively with other authors and we are writing our books. We created this group to not only have the time available for us to write, but now, we’re accountable to each other. We have to show up, or be the one who doesn’t – who wants that? We log into Zoom, and we all see each other there. We check in every twenty minutes, report if we made progress, and then get back right to work. The results? Every single day, I get an hour of writing in and it never gets put to the side. It has immensely helped the quality and quantity of my writing, and it has had the greatest impact on my productivity and effectiveness as an author.

What is your daily routine that will move you forward? Remember, being a small business owner isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. You must build in blocks of time for your business and personal goals. And let nothing get in your way.