Effectiveness, Efficacy, Mindfulness, And Sales Momentum
This is part of my 2024 personal goals review. By splitting the review into smaller blogs, I make it easier for readers to skim the main blog and easier for me to reference specific section directly from any focus area.
Apart from the goals mentioned below, in Q4, I started daily mindfulness meditation for 2+ minutes. I did it for 100 minutes this quarter but only succeeded in doing it on 76% of days.
✅ Get Over Sales Inertia
In the first half of 2024, I defined my ideal customer profile (ICP) for consulting services and sought feedback on outreach messages from 3-6 professionals.
By May 1st, I contacted 79 companies in my ICP, surpassing my target of 50. I improved on my ICP definition after reaching out to the 79 companies. After that, while prioritizing my full-time work, I still reached out to individuals at 145 companies throughout the year. I did this to stay in touch with connections, but I’m not searching for clients.
The first message each day was challenging, so I developed a habit of reconnecting with one person on weekdays. Since July 2024, I maintained this habit 90% of the time, succeeding on 93 out of 103 days. I paused this habit during work travel and vacations.
This habit allows me to maintain connections beyond my colleagues.
I tracked the time taken to message one person. I reduced this time from 30 minutes to 5 minutes.
However, I faced 2 challenges:
I lacked the confidence to cold call.
I could not increase outreach to 15 people per day.
✅ Prioritize Effectiveness Over Efficiency
I didn’t try to do everything. I focused on doing the right things, not everything.
Every Monday morning, I planned my workweek and identified a single daily priority.
I couldn’t restrict meetings to specific hours of theday due to the Product Manager role’s nature. So, I prioritized Pomodoro focus sessions. These sessions helped me concentrate amidst distractions like Slack messages and minor tasks.
✅ High Productivity
Out of 217 days tracked, I achieved my productivity goals on 204 days, reflecting a 94% success rate—up from 78% in 2023.
However, I couldn’t do sessions of 25 minutes each due to interruptions and short gaps between meetings. So, initially reduce my focus session threshold from 25 to 20 minutes, and I’m increasing it 1 minute at a time. Reducing the timer instead of eliminating the habit helped me stay consistent.
I completed 902 Pomodoro focus sessions in 2024.
My productivity pulse improved from 68 in 2023 to 73 in 2024—a modest but significant gain given the difficulty of such improvements.
I completed at least 1 writing sprint on 100% of workdays.
✅ Mindful Eating at Meals
I practiced mindful eating at every meal, avoiding distractions like meetings, laptops, phones, or music.
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