Inventor, politician, author, entrepreneur – Benjamin Franklin performed many roles throughout his life, and his business endeavors are often forgotten alongside much of his other work. That said, Franklin had experience in numerous areas, and much of his wisdom is still useful today. Read the two ideas below, and see if you can apply them to your own business.
Arrange Your Life
“Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time," said the wise man. Order is absolutely essential to a constant, and consistent, productivity. Everything needs to have a place, and events all need to have a specific time. Life needs to have a sense of stability at all times to encourage productiveness and happiness. When our minds are distracted with the disorder that tends to take over our lives, we cannot focus and produce the best quality work that we would have otherwise. Declutter and organize the place you work, in your mind, and at home for a better sense of thought and accomplishment. Develop a well-thought out schedule to each day and follow it. If you need to, create checklists and schedules for tasks that reoccur, or even projects that have deadlines and processes that you need to keep track of. You'd be surprised what a bit of scheduling can do for productivity.
Determination
Ben once said, "resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve." It's important to know what you want, figure out how to do it, and then follow through on all of those actions so you can complete the task at hand. But resolution is more than just creating a goal and meeting it in the end. It's important that you plan very clear steps in the process of making it to the end as well. The act of persevering to the end, despite how difficult it is, is part of what has to be done in order to really understand what resolution is. Resolve - and resolve alone - is what separates the people who can get things done and the people who sit around and wish they could get things done.
Businesses don't just run themselves, they need to be organized and carefully planned. And when you do make a plan, you have to stick with it and be resolute in your goals.
