i3 - March/April 2020 - 50

Business
By Jake Sigal
A DV I C E FO R E N T R E P R E N E U RS

Spring Cleaning:
Get your Time and
Business in Order

We arrive at the end of the
course we take. In mountain biking (and in skiing),
we say always look where
you want to go, never
where you don't. The same
applies in business - it's
never a straight line but
it's time to get on the new
line towards success.

In mountain
biking, we say
always look
where you
want to go,
never where
you don't.

Tidy up Meetings

Over the course of the
year, my calendar is filled with 30- and
60-minute recurring meetings. These
can be a time vampire. While some are
internal, many include clients and people outside of the company.
I like to see if any of the weekly meetings can be moved to a bi-weekly or
monthly cadence. Also dropping a meeting to 30 minutes can save hours over 12
months. Another good move if possible
is to try to bunch the meetings on one or
two mornings to free up a steady work
block in the afternoon.
My last tip for recurring meetings is to
commit to a simple "yes" or "no." If you
really want to keep an eye on meetings
that you don't attend, turn on the option
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to view declined meetings
in your calendar settings.

Kill Zombie Deals

After CES, there's no shortage of new services, products, ideas, people, markets
and other things that are
exciting. However, many
will not pan out for one
reason or another and it's
time to move on. The worst
are the zombie deals that
won't die naturally and need the ax.
When going through the storage room
in our home, I often debate with my wife
about whether it's time to give certain
things to charity. Whenever it's uncertain - we put a donate date of a year out
on a piece of tape. Later, if we haven't
used the item by then, we know it's time.
Zombies in business can be treated the
same way.
Sometimes, you just know it's dead.
However, many times in the spring I add
a "kill date" to a deal a few months out.
This sets a specific timeline and assigns
tasks needed for a deal to succeed. It
also reminds me to kill it if it doesn't
work out.

More
Housekeeping
Here are a few digital items I
clean up annually:
1. Google alerts: Open up the alerts
website, delete the ones you
haven't clicked on in the last three
months and create new alerts for
topics, people and companies that
you are tracking this year.
2. To-do lists: Close out existing todos or rewrite them so they get
done this week.
3. Flagged emails: Close out, forward or just delete them. As a
courtesy, before I delete an email
or remove a flag, I email the
sender, confirming I didn't do anything and ask if this is still open.
4. CRM deals and tasks: Check out
your CRM and look for anything
that's been around for a while
without any changes. I like to
move deals into a new category in
a pipeline for action needed and
review with my team to rename,
assign new tasks, merge with
another deal or delete.
5. Basecamp (project management
tools): Besides reviewing my own
project list, once a year I go
through all tasks that I have
assigned to someone else, to
clean up the list and close tasks
out that don't have due dates.

fStop/Getty Images

ime is the most valuable asset for running a small business. CES allows us to be innovative, test new products
and services, and explore ideas. But spring is the time to
cut through the clutter and focus again. It's the best time to
review the new things that were tried at CES and to pinpoint
what's going to generate business for the core of the year.

I T I S I N N O VAT I O N

3/17/20 2:05 PM

i3 - March/April 2020

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