The Power of 90 minutes

How do you spend the first 90 minutes of your working day? If the first thing you do is turn on your PC to check your emails, or perhaps make a few phone calls, you could be getting into some habits which are stopping you from growing your business.

Why? According to entrepreneur Nigel Botterill, spending 90 minutes of protected time every day on the things that will impact your business the most, is essential to making it more successful and crucial to moving you closer towards your goals.

Maybe you’re not a morning person, but having an uninterrupted 90 minute slot everyday will make you more productive. That means closing down your email, switching off your phone and closing the door to intrusion. Nigel Botterill values his daily 90 minute window so highly that the people he employs know only to disturb him if the office is burning down or for some other absolute emergency.

What should you spend your 90 minutes working on?

Anything that will impact your business – draw up an email campaign, send an email to all your existing customers or prospects, write a sales pitch or some other sales or marketing activity. The key is to focus on the activities that will help you get and keep customers. If successful people recognise that this protected time is an effective activity supporting the growth of their business, why wouldn’t you want to do work on incorporating it into every one of your working days?

If you don’t think you have time to spend a focused daily 90 minutes working on your business, outsourcing some of your other work could be the answer. Source someone else to do the repetitive daily or weekly tasks that could free you up to grow your business, 90 minutes at a time. There will be certain core activities that only you can do, that can’t be taken over by someone else. For the rest, a Virtual Assistant or Bookkeeper could make you more productive in the areas that are most critical to your success.

How to get the most out of your 90 minutes

There are a few things you can do to help you focus and get the most from your daily 90 minute window.

• Remove the clutter from you desk – this way you won’t be distracted by anything lying around.
• Switch off your mobile and divert your landline to your virtual assistant.
• Turn off your emails, or better still put your laptop to sleep.
• Make sure those around you know that you’re unavailable. You don’t want anyone knocking on the door, stealing your precious time.
• Set some goals – be accountable to yourself.
• Make it the last job of your day before deciding what the focus of the next morning’s 90 minutes will be.

We are all creatures of habit and I for one intend to get into this 90 minute routine, after all if you do something often enough it becomes the norm.

How would you spend your first 90 minutes?