In the 21st century with its parallel projects, changing locations and a highly dynamic work environment a tool is needed that makes it easy for you to keep control over your time. Keeping control puts you in the driver seat. You can shape your daily business and your private life the way you want it to be.

DAISHO is the next generation software for Goal, Time and Contact Management. It’s a strategic weapon, which meets exactly the challenges of our century. It’s a software which puts you in control, not somebody else.

We are happy to announce that DAISHO 1.2.1 is now available.

With DAISHO you can…

• easily track your goals
• plan your work capacity goal-oriented and on a long-term basis with time budgeting
• manage your goals and activities effectively with the context concept
• save time
• create and cultivate your social network successfully
• get started immediately

The software is based on P2P functionality and is a pure Java application.

For more information view the Guided Tour. DAISHO is made for professionals of the 21st century.

You can try DAISHO 30 days for free. Please feel free to download it here.

If you buy DAISHO now, you will get all upcoming versions for free.

Keep control with DAISHO!

Interesting question, isn’t it? I found this nice categorization over at IttyBiz. Naomi Dunford argues that you are either in the business of selling emotions (e.g. sex, safety or even envy – that’s the love category) or selling money. Here, you are selling your customers a monetary gain (making money or saving money).

Naomi Dunford heavily argues not to mix these categories when trying to sell something, as this would weaken your position.

Although it might seem to limit youself to have just these two categories, I think posing this question forces you to rethink your marketing positioning. Food for thought on a rainy day.

Which business are you in?

In today’s work environment, business opportunities quite often originate from one’s personal network. Therefore, it is essential to carefully foster your social network to ensure this source of business opportunities is not drying up. As business coming from your personal network is quite often not direct business with your contacts but rather personal referrals and recommendations, it is important to foster your network also from a strategic point of view.

See it as a continuous process, based on the following questions:

• What do I want to achieve?
• How do I get there? What actions do I have to take in order to achieve my goal?
• What resources (human, capital, etc) do I need?
• Which people (influencers, decision-makers) do I know?
• What is their role “in the game”?
• Am I well connected in my target industry?
• What do I have to do in the short-, mid- and long-term to improve my position?

(more…)

As discussed earlier, goal setting becomes easier once you break them down into subgoals. Then, you should think of appropriate actions and measures that supports you achieving your goal. Breaking down the goal into subgoals gives you a good overview and allows you to monitor the implementation more effectively.

To illustrate how you can effectively set goal, I will take our pyramide that you already know from my last article.

In practice, it is common that you have different contexts where you assign your goals to. Contexts are subject areas that are seperated from each other, for example acquisition, marketing, projects, sport, and further education. With the help of contexts, you are able to structure your goals, tasks, and projects more effectively and hence, keep an overview of your current and future activities.

Once you have allocated your goals to contexts, you can start breaking them down into subgoals or milestones, as we call it. Knowing what actions it takes to achieve your goal, you should roughly plan your work capacity by setting time budgets. Those time budgets tell you how much time you are planning to spend for which project. Now, you have to schedule your activities, meaning that you have to allocate the time budgets of your context to each single workday. Now, you know exactly how much time you are planning to spend for each context. The tartget-performance comparison shows you how exactly your rough planning through time budgets matches with the more detailed planning (scheduling).

Monitoring the process and of course, the results of your goal achievement is hereby essential in all three stages. That’s the approach we have also implemented in our software.

To be successful in goal achievement, you have to set SMART goals that are Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic as well as Time and Resource constraint. The challenge hereby lays in the process and the actions involved to reach the goal. Setting goals usually involves long-term planning. To reach this goal, you also have to think of the mid-term planning as well as daily business activities. Those are three stages that you have to pass through on your way to the goal achievement.

Once you have understood this approach (and you act according to it), you will see that setting and achieving goals become easier. Let me explain with the help of the graphic below how this works.

First of all, you should keep in mind those three different stages when setting goals. Each stage is different and therefore, requires another approach. If you want to achieve your goals successfully, you have to break them down into several subgoals. Those subgoals can be seen as milestones in project management. The “project” hereby is to achieve the goal. Just an example to illustrate this. If your goal is to become a freelancer and start up your own business, you have to take different actions in order to put this goal into action. Office established and setting an IT infrastructure up and running are two milestones in this example in order to come closer to the goal.

Similar to a project, you define a starting point and a deadline for your subgoal and you assign specific tasks and actions to it. Hereby, it is also important to set priorities for each goal. This simplifies your goal achievement.

In the next step, you have to think of appropriate tasks and activities in your daily business that helps you accomplish your goal. During this approach, monitoring the results and process of goal achievement is important.

You can do it on paper. But with the proper tool it is more convenient. In the next article, I will demonstrate how to integrate this approach into your daily business using DAISHO.