If you’re not naturally organized (or even if you are!), there’s one book you need to read: The One Thing by Gary Keller. It’ll take everything to a new level because instead of just working on the pretty, shiny stuff, you can only work on what is most important.
For most of us, that sounds great in theory. In reality, if we knew what the one thing we were supposed to work on was, we’d be doing it already. And because there are six things that are equally important and need to get done in the same amount of time, we’ll just work on whatever’s the most fun, right? Sounds great, but you can see the potholes in it.
Here are the five key points that will completely shift the way you run your work weeks!
The Power of the Focus Question
In the book, Keller asks one question over and over: “What is the one thing you can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or completely unnecessary?”
Again, sounds great in theory, but it’s a big question.
First step: choose a lane. You can’t be all over the road; you have to decide where you’re going and stay in one lane to get there as fast as possible.
As a hair stylist, we can do one of three things at once:
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Get more butts in the chair, i.e., see more clients
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Increase your ticket amount by working smarter, not harder, to make more money with the clients you already have.
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Focus on a new venture, like opening a salon, becoming an educator, shifting careers, working for a distributor company, getting hired on with a brand, whatever.
You want to do all three? That’s a problem. We’ve got that creative brain and want to do it all. But if you try and do all three at once, it’ll take a really, really long time.
What is most important or urgent at this moment right now? Maybe your guest experience is in trouble. If you can improve your guest’s experience, would all of your other problems go away?
Once you go through the process, it becomes clear what you should do, and you’re no longer at a crossroads.
The Domino Effect
Imagine we’re sitting at the longest table in the history of tables, and we’ve got dominoes stacked all the way to the end of the table. What happens if you tip over the one domino closest to us? Eventually, it will knock the row of dominoes down until it gets to the end of the table.
The problem is most of us go through our day-to-day lives with tons of dominos. But they’re not in a specific row; they’re just scattered. If you knock one over, it might knock over three. Or you might get lucky and knock over seven.
Because they’re not in a straight line down the table, you’ll never get to that last domino where everything you ever dreamed possible is.
How to set achievable yet crazy goals
What is the quickest path to that final domino? A straight line. You have to get rid of all the other minutia, so you just have the 1000 dominoes that you need to get to the end of the table.
How do we decide that? Figure out what that very last domino will be.
Step 1: In The One Thing, Gary Keller says it should be your five-year goal. To set your five-year goal, dream for a minute: if you could have anything you wanted five years from now, what would that look like? Don’t worry about it being realistic. Write out what you would love for your life to be like professionally, personally with your family, your friends, yourself, in five years.
Step 2: The next domino is your three-year goal. Studies show a three-year goal is the most exciting because we can do a lot in three years. Look at your five-year goal: if you’re going to get these key points in five years, what will you need to have done three years from now to be on track to hit that five-year goal? Write it down.
Step 3: Next is the one-year goal. Look at your five-year and three-year goals. What do you have to do in the next 365 days to stay on track? It’s a long list. But, generally speaking, we overestimate what can be done in a day and underestimate what can be done in a year.
Step 4: Break your one-year goal into sequential quarterly goals. Be ambitious, push yourself, but don’t overload.
If you want to be a YouTuber who films 10 videos a year, plan 90 days from now to have your filming equipment and outline the videos you’ll do for the year. Don’t plan on starting a YouTube channel and have 50,000 subscribers in a quarter because that’s not going to happen.
Step 5: Then break quarterly goals into monthly ones. Decide what you want to tackle each month to get closer to that quarterly goal.
Let’s use the YouTube channel example. Maybe all this month you order the equipment, test and learn how to use the equipment. Then in month two, you lay out everything you’ll talk about and start writing scripts. In month three, you start filming.
Step 6: Set weekly goals based on achieving your monthly ones. At the top of each month, write out your monthly goals and do your weekly goals each week when you plan your week ahead. Then every single morning, decide what you’ll tackle for the day. Aim for one to three things each day.
The only way you’re going to get to that five-year goal is by knocking down the dominoes in a straight line.
Use the 80/20 principle
But how do you even know what the daily goal is? Use the Pareto principle, aka the 80/20 principle, a proven system that says the minority of your effort leads to the majority of your results.
You probably see it already in your business. You know that pool of your best guests that send you referrals and spend the most money? They’re your 20% (minority effort), making 80% (majority results) of your profit. Or, if you’re invested in stocks, they always say 20% of your investments account for 80% of your returns.
It will be the same thing when you put effort into your business. Once you get really clear on the one thing, you realize you waste 80% of your time on the 80% of the work, like
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Scrolling social media aimlessly,
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Trying tired marketing strategies that don’t work anymore,
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Tweaking things are already fixed,
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Working on all of the wrong things.
Those won’t get you closer to your goal. Get clear on what the 20% is in alignment with all your goals. It should only be a couple of things to give you a focus for the week and help you feel so much more effective.
Time Blocking
Time blocking is when you set aside time to work on your business with no excuses.
Let’s say at noon every Monday, you sit down to work on your business (aka the things that push your business forward). Sure, you need to do things like clients’ hair, your finances, ordering color, and post to social media to keep the wheel turning. But you need to spend two hours a week minimum working to move the needle and push you forward.
Time blocking means you are fully accountable to yourself, your business, and that top 20% every single week. Even when you don’t feel like it, you do it because you know that’s how you’ll get to your five-year goal.
Ask yourself right now if you have two hours of dedicated time where you are fully accountable to working on that 20% to push yourself forward?
Four Thieves of Productivity
The four thieves of productivity cause us to feel overwhelmed and distracted. They can get to us at any given time and make us feel fully sucked in.
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The inability to say no
Raise your hand if you’re a walking doormat. If you would bend over backward and kill yourself to the point of exhaustion to do anything to make anybody’s life easier.
If you’re going to push forward and do your 20% to achieve your dreams, you have to start saying no. Some people’s feelings will get hurt, and some people will judge you. That’s okay because this is your lifetime.
At some point, you have to say no to opportunities, favors, and questions if you’re going to get closer to your own personal goals. You have to decide to do this for you and your five-year vision. Because if you keep making everybody else’s life easier by saying yes, you will never say yes to yourself.
2. The fear of chaos
Most people are scared of everything falling apart. There’s the fear of failure, misunderstanding, judgment, or getting messy. You can’t let that get in your way or be afraid you’ll fail or embarrass yourself. You can’t be afraid of your best-laid efforts, of falling flat and having to shift gears.
The way to best control the chaos is to focus on your one thing. Whenever you feel distracted or lose focus, look at your goals. Are you getting off track? Are you starting to feel fear because you’re not working in alignment? Did you shift gears?
Cross-check yourself to see if you’re on the straight and narrow and keep walking through the fire if you’re set on achieving that five-year goal. It’s never going to happen if you don’t put in some risks, let things get messy, try some stuff and fail, right? That’s how we find what we’re supposed to be doing in the end.
You can’t allow the fear of the chaos to take over. You have to walk through it and hope to see the light at the tunnel.
3. Poor health habits
Health is never just eating right and exercising. There’s spiritual, physical, emotional, mental, and business health. Having positive business energy is super important because, as hairstylists, when our business behind the chair isn’t doing well, we take it home. It affects our relationships, the way we eat, desire to exercise, everything.
Same with mental health. If something difficult is happening in your life, it’s hard not to walk into the salon with it on your face.
And then there’s the physical health: eating well, exercising, not having a Starbucks Venti Frappuccino every morning. Taking good care of yourself helps to get you closer to your goals. When you’re not eating right, your head’s not in the right space, you’re down on yourself, and you’re not confident. You can’t possibly be productive like that, right?
4. Your environment doesn’t support your goals
Who works with people who aren’t supportive? Or with a negative salon owner? It’s so difficult to grow and keep your head held high when the people who are around you are pulling you down.
Have you ever worked with a team where everybody’s like having fun and is super inspired and is going places and shares a vision? It’s a lot easier to keep your head in the game, to be productive, stay happier, eat healthier, and do all of the things we should do.
If you don’t have a community or work at a salon that supports you, find one that does. It’s a nice cross-check to have somebody else who speaks the language and can make sure you stay on track.
Those five key points are huge in helping you to find your focus each week and to know just what to work on, what to skip, and to stay in alignment with working towards your big goal. Make sure you pick up The One Thing by Gary Keller to get all the goal-achieving tips!