Following through on follow up

Okay, so  it's Thursday afternoon and I'm still trying to follow up with all the little 'loose' ends before I go out of town Saturday - you know what I mean, the person you left a message for that hasn't called back yet, the email reply you need to send to a client with an estimate for work, the new contact you made at the networking event yesterday that you promised to connect with on LinkedIn, and the hundred other similar things.

But the neat thing is, I'm not worried that anything is going to be forgotten. That's especially important to me as a marketer and business owner. One of the easiest ways to waste marketing dollars is not to follow up with prospects and customers. Most business owners know this but still admit that they could do much better on their follow up. The key to being able to accomplish this is to have a system in place and to use it.

I recently started reading Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. My husband had turned me on to it a few years ago and although I never read the whole book back then, I did learn some of the methodology - just enough to be dangerous as the saying goes! Now I'm back to using "What's Next", a free software tool to help people implement Getting Things Done or GTD as its many users refer to it.

So I'm not worried. I may still have a ton of loose ends, but they're all listed right there under 'Next Actions'. And as soon as I post this, I can put a check mark to show that I completed the Next Action that says 'Post to blog'!