Progress Update

Quick Start Challenge

Hi, nice to see you here again. I am Brian Jowers and this week has been rather hectic all round both personal and business. This week I am going to give a progress update, what I have been doing.

What happened over the last week

Last week we had the three grandchildren at home, ages 13, 11 and 10 (oldest is a boy) from the Sunday to the Saturday.

As my wife, Julia, was going to be busy with the grandchildren and preparing for her sisters birthday BBQ on the Saturday, I took the Friday off from my day job, but had to work all the hours plus expected overtime, in four days. And, continue my normal business activities and the QSC weekly challenge.

Come Saturday and I am roped in to first put the BBQ together, then to cook the sausages, burgers, jerk chicken, spicy chicken and kebabs. I thought we were having spinach stew and rice, jollof rice and chicken plus other Ghanaian dishes. The BBQ seemed to be the favourite, especially amongst the children!

We finished quite late, as there was still a lot of food left the host suggested we come back after church.

We duly arrived back with the church congregation for an even better afternoon. I noticed it was even hotter round by the BBQ.

But a good time was had by all.

The aftermath: exhaustion

Julia had been on her feet, also for most of both days.

When we got up on the Bank Holiday Monday Julia was exhausted, she had pains in her lower back and difficulty walking and sitting. I was not feeling too brilliant myself.

The outcome was that I needed to be at home for my wife, but I had to get the day job done so I opted to work from home.

I don’t know about you, but when I WFH I am more conscious of how much work I have done, so tend to put in more hours at home because of disturbances at home – running errands, unplanned visitors and just getting side-tracked.

And The Quick Start Challenge?

The first week challenge was to setup and start a blog, which I managed to complete, click here to see. Fortunately I had a previous part build WordPress installation which I had sort of put aside getting this site this site up and running.

The second week is just as challenging in that we have to create opt-in, offer and sales pages which are connected to the autoresponder. Which must be tested, ensure that it all works!

Do Not Omit the work / life balance

Progress doesn’t have to mean rushing!!!

I have learnt this last week that over doing things, whether in your business or personal life can knock you back.

Your business life will have an effect on your personal life, and vice versa.

The key to help getting it right is scheduling / planning, there are a lot of software tools to help with this, but they all have drawbacks or failings in someway:

• Only desktop
• Only mobile
• Not compatible with application X
• Need time to learn how to use
• Dedicated device – completely lost if it fails (remember the Psion?)

I currently use an A5 2 page diary to record such things as:

• To do list
• Daily activities – in timeslots when possible
• What needs to be completed by the end of the week
• Webinars signed up for

I found the A4 version to be too large and cumbersome.

In a future blog I shall cover in more detail, how to manage the work/life balance, how to do the planning and making effective use of your time. And I will also look at some practical tools, I am evaluating something at the moment, time permitting.

Meanwhile check out this link for a message from my mentor.

How are you progressing?

Let me know how you are getting on, please enter your comments in the box below…

Brian