In many contexts, we hear that less is more.

You say it in health and fitness all the times. Focusing on small daily habits that stack up rather than trying to do it all at once. In my experience I’m juggling college, internships, working full-time, and life in general to growing my business, focusing on less and choosing seasons tends to allow for the most productivity and progress. This is the basis of one of my favorite books, and some thing I require or encourage my foot screws to read. That is the book, Essentialism by Greg McKeown.

The book and the concept of the lessons more is fairly meaningless without practice and application. It requires you to define what is a priority, or essential and also, equally as important, to define what is not. You’re giving yourself permission to not do certain things, to do less. And those things might be very good, and things that you do indeed want to accomplish, but we can’t accomplish everything at one time.

In that same breath, you absolutely can accomplish more than maybe you think in one year by focusing on less in a given season. That is what today’s episode is about - how you will hopefully be able to get more of what you want done in 2023 by doing less.

This is going to be especially applicable to entrepreneurs. It’s not just for those early in business, or more mature in business. And nearly any season I have experienced so far, our endless possibilities and what we can focus on. And a never ending to do list if we aren’t careful.

We talked about goal setting for this year in a previous episode. You will hear some overlap in this episode. But we are going to start by identifying one to three goals, and work backwards from there. This is not rocket science. And this is not new. But it’s needed nonetheless. We will consciously and subconsciously always come up with more that can be done. We are very good at filling white space or a lack of clarity with busywork. Having a clear focus to refer back to you again and again can mitigate that.

So what are your one to three goals. I am going to focus on business. Feel free to apply the concepts to whatever makes sense for you.

Is it getting to a certain amount of clients? Making a certain amount of money? Focusing on the email list growth. Each of these seems simple enough, but are massive tasks in your business if you want to make significant growth in these areas. And they require strategy, and refinement as you go.

Once you determine your one to three goals, it’s important to look at if these three goals affect one another are completely separate from one another. I could see email list growth and sales or client roster growth going hand-in-hand. Essentially you are focusing in on optimizing email marketing as a nurturing and sales tactic to help you reach the goal of getting more clients or higher revenue. Maybe your approach to gaining more revenue is creating more income streams. That’s the next task that I want you to complete. Determining goals or mile markers that you would need to achieve in order to reach these 1 to 3 year long goals.

If you want to have a certain number of clients by the end of the year, you first need to recognize that this means you will achieve the goal by the end of the year, not in month one. How many points do you need to attain on a monthly or quarterly basis, whatever makes most sense for you? And what is the plan and marketing strategy for that to happen. We can’t just wish for these things to happen, or say that they are going to happen and expect them to without any strategy in place.

Same with growth on your email list. Where are the email subscribers coming from?