I read an article recently where a young professional opted to cut out social media from his life for 90 days. He did it because he wanted to see what it would be like.

It’s an interesting commentary on our culture and I think he makes some great points about how much time social media eats up, as well as how interactions change as a result of using social media so much. Truth to tell, one of the reasons I limit my time on social media so much is precisely because I want interactions with people that are more genuine and I find social media diminishes to some degree, if that’s the only way you interact with people.

But I don’t think its realistic to live in a social media free world anymore. Social media has become part of our culture and lives. Companies are even starting to use it as a primary method of communication. The challenge isn’t how to live without social media, but rather how to balance it in your life so that its something you use as needed, but not something that replaces your interactions with people.

I schedule a weekly game night. I use it as an opportunity to see friends and do an activity that allows us to not only play a game, but also catch up with each other. I go out to dinner or host dinners. I do other activities that involve spending time with people. And as a result I don’t feel like all my interactions occur just on social media.

What do you do to make sure you get the time you need with the people who are important in your life? What do you do to balance your social media time with in person time?

Owning and running a business is a lot of work. Unless the right support structures are in place it can be a lot harder to succeed. When I first started my business, there was a lot of pressure from my partner at the time to take any work I could find. There also wasn’t a lot of support for what I was trying to do. I ended up taking a lot of work I didn’t want to take because the support I really needed wasn’t there.

Eventually that partner moved on and I found myself with my current partner. The level of support I’ve received has been mind-blowing and what’s most interesting to me is that shortly after this person came into my life, my business started to improve a lot. I realized that because I was getting the support I really needed, that I could actually focus on developing my business the way I felt it needed to be developed.

Having support from your partner(s) is essential for achieving success with your business. A person who believes in you will support you when you doubt yourself and will help you look at your business in a different way, when you really need that perspective. A supportive partner won’t hesitate to raise objections, but also won’t hand you ultimatums about what level of income your business needs to bring in. At the same time, s/he won’t just support you without expecting support in return. Even if the support you provide isn’t monetary, there are ways you can help your partner as well.

What it really comes down to though is that part of what makes a business successful is feeling that someone has your back. That feeling can make all the difference in your business success. If you feel like there is resistance from your family, its time to sit down and have an open discussion about your business and how they feel about it. Be willing to listen with an open perspective. They may have reasonable objections or issues and you want to address those so that you can get the support you need. Addressing their concerns will go a long way toward helping you find the necessary balance you need in your life, and getting the support you need for your business.

One of the distractions I deal with everyday is Facebook. Until recently, I kept Facebook on my browser at all times, until one day I decided to count how many times I checked Facebook. I found out that I checked it about 20 times. I didn’t even do much on there, but I quickly realized it was a distraction that was keeping me from working on my business. Facebook isn’t the only culprit. Twitter and Google + can be just as distracting.

A business owner has to use his/her time wisely, especially when you’re working on your business as opposed to selling a product or working with a client. Working on your business can sometimes be tedious work and the temptation to check Facebook or some other social networking site can really disrupt your productivity.

What I’ve taken to doing is turning Facebook off, and not just from my browser. I’ve turned off all the notifications as well. I get on in the morning and check my notifications and do my business activities and then I shut the tab down and I don’t look until sometime in the afternoon, and once late in the evening. Needless to say I can already tell there’s a difference in the amount of time I’m putting toward my business.

Are you distracted by social media? Do my exercise to find out. Pick one social network and count how many times that day you checked in and record what you did while on the site. After you’ve counted up the times you checked a site, ask yourself how much of what you did was productive for your business and how much was just to distract yourself.

It is okay to use Facebook as the occasional distraction, but if you’re checking it frequently, chances are that you aren’t getting as much done, as you want to. If that’s the case, turn off the notifications to your email by clicking the arrow close to your name and clicking account settings. Also when you’re done looking at Facebook, shut the tab down. You’ll save time and effort that can be put toward your business.

Book Review: The Power of Habit (Affiliate Link) by Charles Duhigg

This is a must have book if you are a business owner. The author provides case studies that show the power of habits and how habits can make a difference in your life and business. He also supplies excellent ideas on how to change negative habits. The book is well-written and the core concepts are easy to understand. You’ll come away with a new appreciation for habits as well as tools for how to change them!

Do you need to be in control? It’s a question I sometimes ask business owners. It’s the kind of question that can make a business owner cringe or break out into a cold sweat. It’s a question that challenges the business owner to be honest with themselves. Do you need to be in control of every little thing?

Business owners wear a variety of hats and learning to let go of some of those hats can be hard. There’s always the notion of it being better to do the job yourself than let someone else do it. The business owner can’t afford to take that kind of attitude. It’s an attitude that can drive people away and stress the business owner out. The reality is that its better to know when to delegate business to other people in order to focus your own efforts on what you do best.

Control is a tricky issue for business owners because we all have to think of the bottom line and more importantly how that will translate into supporting our family and lives. Those issues always need to be acknowledged, but if we also have to consider that quality of life isn’t dictated by just how money you save, but also by your ability to enjoy your life. When I work with business owners, I always look at the relationship the business owner has with not only the business, but the rest of his/her life. A business always needs to be framed in the context of what it supports, in order to understand what is or isn’t working with the business. Not surprisingly sometimes what isn’t working is that need to be in control of everything. When the business owner can acknowledge the need to be in control and more importantly can step back and allow others to do what needs to be done s/he is starting to move into a healthier relationship with his/her business.

Recently I went to a small event where I was vending for one of my other businesses. I got to the place and ended up chatting with a couple of other vendors while we were waiting for the place to open. They told me that they didn’t get many sales there, but they vended because occasionally they had people contact them after the fact. Once we got inside, I saw the place was fairly small and quickly got crowded because of the number of vendors. In thinking it over, I decided it’d be better to invest the time I’d have spent there at my office where I could work on a couple of different projects. I realized that the time I could spend at the event didn’t quite compare to the time I could spend working on my projects.

I’m re-reading Your Money or Your Life with my wife. In one of the chapters, the authors have you do an exercise where you calculate how much time/life force you had to give up in order to get the amount of money you have. When I thought about staying at this event or going back to my office, I calculated how much time I’d spend at the event vs the probability of making enough money to justify that time as well as justify the loss of being able to do other things with that time. In the aforementioned book, one thing the authors point out is that unlike money you can’t get time back and that’s pretty much what motivated me to make my decision.

My time is worth more to me than anything else. I know that I have to feel like I’ve gotten the most out of a situation if I’m going to feel comfortable giving my time to that situation. As business owners we always have to evaluate if the time we are putting toward an endeavor is really worth the income we may or may not make from it. What is your time really worth? When do you know if spending time doing one thing provides less of an outcome than spending time doing something else?

Time is an investment. It’s an investment that is returned either with money or with the amount of happiness a given activity provides you. Each person has to decide how much their time is worth, and if a given activity doesn’t look like it’ll provide a suitable level of reciprocal value, its better to leave than continue to put time toward something that you don’t feel will provide you the value that you deserve.

Learning how to say no to a potential client can be hard to do. We’re conditioned to want clients, and when someone wants to be one, saying no probably seems like a bad idea. And most times it would be, but there are times when its important to say no. For example its important to say no if you know or feel that the prospect would be a problem client. Working with problem clients will always wear you out.

The other reason you want to say no is if you are no longer offering a service that you’d previously offered. For example, I was called last week by a former client who wanted to know if I’d be willing to meet with her for some social media work. I’m getting out of social media for the most part, and I decided to pass her onto someone that I feel could take care of her. My heart isn’t in offering social media services and I felt that taking on another social media job just wasn’t what I wanted to do. So I said no.

Saying no is an empowering experience when you are a business owner. When you know you can say no, you’ve hit your stride and you’ve realized you can do what you need to do to take care of yourself. You know you aren’t going to take work that doesn’t make you happy. You know you’re going to honor your vision and the integrity of your business by only taking work you feel called to do.

Some will say that you can’t say no during these times of economic hardship. They will say you should take whatever job you can get, but I think when you do that you let your own worries get the best of you. don’t get me wrong, you need to pay bills and take care of yourself. But to do that you’ve got to be honest with yourself about what you are willing to do and why you’re doing it. And you’ve got to know when to say no so that you can look yourself in the mirror and keep yourself motivated. It takes true confidence to say no, because when you say no to work, what you’re also saying is, “I believe in myself so strongly that I know what I’m worth.”

I think that what can make or break a business are the habits that business owners choose to adopt. What I mean is that a business is defined in part by the various activities that a business owner does to maintain it. And its a good idea to develop habits that will support your business. Part of how this is done involves creating cues that remind you of what you need to do, so that when you see those cues you accomplish what you needed to accomplish. Here’s a few habits that I’ve observed can help with running a business.

1. Keep a list of clients and projects you are working where you can see them. If you’re feeling bored or don’t know what to do, a list that shows you what projects you need to work on can help direct you. And you don’t need to restrict it to clients. You could also put together a list of tasks that need to be done for the business.

2. Develop a daily routine at the beginning of your day that sets up what you need to for the rest of the day. When I start my day, I’ll check my prospects list, open my browser and open all the sites I need to look at for business on my browser. By seeing everything in front of me, I’m reminded of what I need to do and then I do it.

3. Make time for yourself, but do an activity that has a limited scope of time. Going for a walk has a limited scope of time. Playing a video game, on the other hand, can suck you in for hours and hours. Knowing how to take a bit of time to refresh yourself is important, but pick activities that will give you enough of a break to refresh yourself, but not so much of a break that you don’t get anything done.

Habits are powerful. Creating the right habits can focus you on achieving success. Picking the wrong ones can distract you from taking care of your business. What are some successful habits you use for your business?

In my business, my spirituality is part of what fuels my passion to do what I do. I feel a calling to do what I do. It informs my business practice, and it even informs the kinds of clients I work with. All of my clients are passionate about their beliefs and even if those beliefs don’t directly show up in their business, it does show up in the living of their lives.

Look at your business. What fuels it? What give you the passion you have for it? I’m not telling that you have to get religious about it, but its worthwhile to explore what other parts of your life influence and inform your approach to business. You might be surprised at what you discover and how it helps you motivate yourself when it comes to running your business.

Book Review: The War of Art (Affiliate Link) by Stephen Pressfield

This is the kind of book you need to read whether you’re an artist, writer, musician, or a business owner. In this book, the author explores the feeling of resistance and how it shows up to impede your work as well as presenting strategies to help you overcome that resistance. He also discusses metaphysical aspects of inspiration. I found his advice useful and to the point. It helped me identify places where resistance had shown up to impede my own work. This book is essential because it provides a different perspective on resistance, while helping you find ways around and through it. Pick it up today!

The other day I did something radical. I decided to turn off all email notifications from Facebook. That probably doesn’t sound very radical, but I realized that every time I received an email from Facebook, I’d end up going onto Facebook and in the process waste a bit of time to answer a comment or check whatever else it was that brought me to Facebook. And when I looked at my other social networking accounts I saw similar distractions being sent that clogged my email.

As a business owner, I have to protect my time jealousy. If I don’t, I won’t get a lot done. It’s very easy to get caught up in social media sites, because someone answers a post you wrote or or some other conversation starts up. Notifications only make it more complicated, and are a reflection of a cultural push that we have to be notified of everything, or we’ll miss out on an opportunity or something else.

In Europe, companies are doing away with internal email. The argument is that email wastes time and decreases productivity. It’s an accurate perception of email, and notifications from social networking sites is also part of that information pollution.

The other day I got onto my Facebook account and under account settings, I turned off all the email notifications for my personal account. The only email notifications I left on pertained to my business pages, because I do want to offer a timely response. But I turned the rest off. I consciously chose to step back and let go of the need to be informed. I did the same with my Linkedin, Twitter, and Google Plus accounts.

And the result? Less email clutter, less distractions, more focus on what’s important. I check my Facebook once or twice a day and I can address the comments, likes, etc. Same for the other sites. Most importantly I’m not putting more time into social media than what needs to be there.

Turn your notifications off. You don’t need to be notified about every little thing on your social media accounts. Just go to the sites consistently and you’ll get the notifications you need to see when you visit the site.

I read a blog entry today about transparency in Marketing. The author asked why people thought businesses didn’t become more transparent in their marketing. In thinking about it, I think the main reason boils down to fear. Fear of what?

Fear of loss of income. Businesses live and die by the bottom line and one of the main fears is that by being transparent they will anger their customers and lose business as a result. Businesses think its better to not be transparent to avoid making someone unhappy. The problem is that those approach no longer works in a social media era. It’s very easy for people to post a bad experience and share it, and when companies seem to hide the problem it only makes people more unhappy. Lack of transparency hurts the bottom line more than being transparent and honest with customers.

Fear of Customer unhappiness. Similar to the fear above, businesses are afraid of customer unhappiness. They want to keep customers happy, but often approach it in a heavy handed manner, instead of doing what they should do, which is listen to the customer, and work toward resolving the issue together. Businesses also need to realize that you won’t make everyone happy, but making a genuine effort to resolve a situation will stand out more favorably than anything else.

Fear of competition. Some businesses are afraid of their competition and what it will do if it has access to their marketing. While such a fear can be legitimate, its also true that as long as you can differentiate yourself in your marketing, it will make your business stand out.

These are just three fears. What are some others fears that you think businesses have, when it comes to being transparent?