This isn’t no personal finance expertise blog. I just thought, how about comparing time with money and I realised that they are both valued equally. They are both here to vanish, finish and deplete, and the best part is we can’t do much to not let them go away.
So then I thought, how about treating my time as money. I was clear that if I treated my time as money, I was sure to earn money. A more careful thought made me realise that there can be various ways in which I can manage my time better and make the maximum use of it. Some of the ones, I go to know and others I created. Happy to share them here:
Eat that frog
Heavily inspired by Brian Tracy, I feel one of things that always puts us behind, is the act of procrastination, and we hardly even realise when it turns into a habit. If only we get into a habit of finishing the bigger and tougher tasks first, we have plenty of room for others. We are also mentally free when we are done with the bigger complicated tasks.
Save and spend time wisely
Just like any money lying idle in the account doesn’t fetch any return, so are few days where you have no agenda. Try to invest your time in yourself. Every minute spent on self, yields self-awareness and reflection of self. This helps us to improve and learn. Along with this, it is also important to take time off from work here and there. Longer trips are delightful but those small ones also do the trick sometimes. You only realise the value of a trip when you come back from it, rejuvenated.
Delegate and trust
Sometimes we get into the rut of doing everything on our own, without realising that we might be spending some really important hours doing something which is way less worthy of our time. If we want to make time work as money, we need to learn to delegate and trust people. This is also an essential life skill. When we delegate, we also help people learn and grow and contribute to their overall development. In the process, we save time for spending on other essential tasks where we are truly needed.
Being assertive and saying NO
Saying NO doesn’t always amount to spoiling relations. It actually shows that you care for your time and work. Also, when we say NO to someone for something, we can always give some alternatives to not sound too straightforward. When we say no for a task, we actually save that time for something more worthy, more valuable. That is a far better investment than to slog and do something that we are reluctant to do.
Whether time is money, or money is time, remains a debate. I have, however, found that I need to make my time work for me.
Don’t we all have those dull and dreary days at work? Days where nothing seems right, when it’s all too muddled and messed up?Well, we all have a right to have some such days here and there but we all struggle to fight them and come out neat and shining. So, the question is, how do we do that? I thought of some very easy, quick, yet effective ways to do the same. Here are some you can try too:
Dive deep to get the root cause
First things first, before we let the frustration of a tough day take over us completely, take a minute and revisit the events of the day and even the previous day, if needed, and know what is causing this entire mess. Most of the times, we get our answer here. Once you know the cause, either fight it, control it, accept it or rise above it. Don’t let one bad event take over every other thing you do that day. We must all learn to separate productive from the unproductive, good from the bad and tough from the easy.
Take a screen break
If you’ve been on the screen for long, trying to make things work, may be, it’s time to take your eyes off and break for a few mins. Take a walk, talk to a few people, sip some tea. These little things just do wonders at times. They detach us from the tyranny of some unreasonable amount of work that we might be loaded with that day. Talking to people might transport us to a different world for sometime and when we get back to that mundane screen, may be, it doesn’t look as big a trouble maker.
Take a deep breath
Being a fitness enthusiast, I just can’t stop emphasising the importance of breathing. Taking a few deep breaths helps us to get more oxygen running through the body, it increases our vitality levels and makes us feel rejuvenated. Add a calm music and relax back in your chair. When you focus on your breathing, you let other disturbing thoughts drift away from you.
Stay away from negativity
There can be colleagues, who might not always be sensitive to the needs of the others. These are days when you want to stay away from them. They just might flare you up and make things worse for you on an already tough day. How about negativity that comes from within? The same needs to confronted and sorted too. Thoughts related to failure or incompetency are detrimental on a day like this. The day might be tough on you and if it is happening due to an innate incompetency, it cannot be overcome today itself anyway. Reflection and realisation is what is important. So, the way out is to manage this tough day with a smile and start working on the realised limitations from tomorrow.
Get support
Sometimes, we get the sense of achievement only after we have overcome a big barrier. Accomplishment, however, remains unchanged whether we faced issues while achieving something or it went smooth. Hence, it might be very helpful to seek out for help on a tough day. Things can get sorted significantly if we share our work load. Trust the people around you and take their help. You take their help today when you’re in need and for all you know, tomorrow might be the day when they seek support and they think of you.
Etiquette refers to a set of globally accepted manners. It is the way people size you up. Some also believe that etiquette is a fancy word for kindness. Etiquette is that unwritten code of rules that teach us that no matter how educated we are, it is the way we treat others that is all that matters. Earlier etiquette used to be defined for dinner, telephone and even email. There is, however a new branch of etiquette that has gained popularity. We are referring to social media etiquette. At a time when social media has taken over our lives completely, there are some set of rules we must follow in order to create a desired image for ourselves on social media:
Weigh every piece of content well before posting.
Analyse the type of content that we wish to make public
Share information that you are very sure of being true, unauthentic piece of news shows bad on your account
Know how to react on different types of posts
Share posts on your page that you relate to, every post you share portrays your image
Avoid posting pics and content of others without their permission
Also, seek permission before tagging others
Use social media for marketing of products and services
Never talk negative about any other brand, elevate yours, don’t demean others
Try sharing posts which are informative, knowledgeable or even entertaining but must not hurt sentiments
Social media is a world in itself, the more we know it, the more we immerse in it. Our social media presence in itself is a reason why someone would explore our profile or not. Taking a risk here might not be the best decision. Being active on social media isn’t wrong, being active the right way is what matters.
The world may have trotted a lot forward but the intricacies and incidents involving a woman are still put into question, every too and fro. Especially in a country like India, the deep-rooted gendered work division has chained women for ages. So, empowerment in India primarily starts with breaking the shackles and then firmly taking the principles along. One such epitome of such phenomenal woman achievement and empowerment is Snehal Brahmbhatt. Being an entrepreneur of the biggest honor as she is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Shilp Group (a leading real estate company in Ahmedabad) and also the owner of Yasmin Karachiwala Body Image Studio, she has addressed the implications of stepping out. She said that a woman dons multiple hats a day as it does not matter if she is going out every day but still she will equally care about her home and always get back to the thought of her home. Every minute counts and thus when she is at work and even when she is not, she is never signed off her role. \
Snehal shared that for a woman, the first role of establishing herself as a woman with a distinct identity of her own (working or non-working) is a humongous job. When at work, many obstacles will come along. So, she has to focus on her growing business as well as fighting the other obstacles. Being an entrepreneur myself, I really like it when I see women coming forward for business. It could be for financial independence, security, passion, creating a personal identity and so on. But no one should be judgemental about women doing business.
She believes that business is all about getting the right people on the bus and then managing them well. Both of them are a woman’s fote as women are experts on soft skills and emotional intelligence as well. Thus, she extended her warm regards to all the women in business and wished them all the luck for the future.
When it comes to marketing your product, it often becomes difficult to select the correct option or a combination of options. What works for you might depend on the industry, the product and even the audience. We could be finding ways to market a whole new business and sometimes look for marketing a new product of an existing business. In either of the case, there are certain points that serve as a guideline and tell us where to start from.
Know your WHY
As Simon Sinek says, it is important to understand the WHY behind decisions even before we know the what and the how. Why we choose to sell a product, why we choose to market a particular product must be amply clear to us before we devise a marketing plan. Answering the why often helps to answer the what and the how. We could be marketing a particular product because we want to highlight that as a show stopper or because we want to give the message that we are expanding our kitty. Whatever may be the reason, we must brainstorm to set the objectives clear in our mind.
Know your product
Merely knowing the basic details of a product isn’t enough to market it. When we sit to devise a marketing strategy, we must know the ins and outs of the product, it’s functioning, usps, a compelling pitch, why would somebody get attracted to it and so on. We must be in a position to view the product from various perspectives. Sometimes it is also good to criticise our product and find negatives in it, that gives us a good perspective to market it well.
Know your audience
Knowing the product is important and so is knowing your audience. When we know the demographics, the section, the category we are targeting, we tweak our product marketing pitch accordingly. We know we need to use certain specific language and medium when we target young, college going crowd and what to use when targeting office going professionals. The demography plays an important part.
Know your marketing medium
They say no marketing medium is wrong. It is important to understand your product and audience in order to determine the marketing medium. It is the digital age but outdoor has its own importance too. People still prefer to use newspaper marketing to create mass awareness. The current age demands a mix of outdoor, print and social media for the right marketing. The same can be mixed in various proportions and in the form of lined up campaigns to ensure maximum reach.
Know your marketing spend
No plans must be made in the air. We need to have a practical marketing budget in hand before we start making any elaborate plans. At the end, even a beautiful marketing plan can go to the dogs for lack of budget. The budget must also be bifurcated into campaigns, media, phases and so on so that we have the exact idea of the spending stage-wise.
We might choose the most trendy and fancy medium to market our product but nothing will go successful if we haven’t worked on our basics.
Marketing remains one of the most important aspects of a business. From a small tea stall to a large multinational, everyone needs a marketing spend. The question, however, is how to efficiently use the marketing budget to reach the desired goal. Over the years, many forms of marketing and advertising have evolved. Word of mouth was probably the only source of marketing in the olden days. Then came newspapers, flyers, leaflets and in the 1800’s, the idea of billboards was born. Then came the Internet and lured business owners into reaching out to the masses.
Marketing is to a company what investment is to an individual. Just the way it is advisable that we should not put all eggs in one basket and must look at different avenues of investment, similarly while devising a marketing plan, it is essential to select the right medium, rather the right combination of marketing avenues.
As business owners, first we must have complete clarity of the product that we are selling and the exact target audience for the same. This helps us to decide the marketing medium. No medium is right or wrong. We just need to choose the right one. OOH advertising continues to have a huge appeal to people. Conventional billboards tend to appeal to the senses of the people while they move around the city. The sheer size of the billboard make it eye catching and delivers the message straight to the viewers. The only pitfall is that if people just pass by the billboard, they might miss the message completely. Technology has given way to digital billboards. They are surely more attractive that the conventional ones. Nothing can beat the magnanimity of billboards.
On the other hand, digital media has become a hot favourite in the past few years. This is majorly because social media offers the flexibility of reaching out to more number of people. At the same time this reach can be customised to the exact target audience. Most of the times, online marketing is also cheaper than OOH forms.
It is also a better idea to keep a combination of online as well as outdoor media. Marketing campaigns can be designed in such a way that marketing is done in a phased manner where awareness can be created through outdoor and reinforcement of the same can be done through digital media. This can also give the benefit of reaching out to a variety of audience.
Marketing is the lifeline of any business and requires a careful consideration. No amount of money is less if funds are employed intelligently.
