By Dijana Green

The beginning of any year is a busy time for most of us. As auditors, our workload is always high and balancing personal and business workloads isn’t always easy, it is most important.

One of my key learnings while managing 44 bakeries a few years ago was that the key to success is planning and consistency. I found that planning my time, meetings, audits, time to make and return phone calls, respond to emails, doing all the transactional tasks, allocating time, and even rolling strategic requirements, etc., made the heavy workload manageable. Without making time every morning and late afternoon to plan ahead not much was achieved.

Planning is the process of thinking about and organizing the activities required to achieve a desired goal. It involves creating and maintaining a plan, including psychological aspects that require conceptual skills.

Planning is a traditional method for managing a workload, but I can vouch that it pays off. Being a mother of three kids, running a business, and maintaining personal needs regardless of how busy I am—making the time to plan my day, week, month, and even the year ahead—produces results and keeps me on track.

Consistency is conformity in the application of something. Humans are creatures of habit and we generally prefer to operate like clockwork. We like to eat at the same time, wake up at the same time, go to bed at the same time, and start and finish work at the same time every day.

Our bodies operate more effectively if we stick to a routine. We need routine for our bodies to understand when to shut down for the day and when our livers needs to start detoxifying.

Just as our bodies need routine, so do our brains to function optimally. The brain is a complex organ, with an estimated 100 billion neurons passing signals to each other via as many as 1,000 trillion synaptic connections. It continuously receives and analyses sensory information, responding by controlling all bodily actions and functions. It is also the center of higher-order thinking, learning, and memory and gives us the power to think, plan, speak, imagine, dream, reason, and experience emotions.

Consistency is essential—nothing is achieved without it.

Five key ways you can maintain consistency:

• Operate with checklists, to-do lists, and objectives in mind.
• Remind yourself frequently of your desires and passions.
• Hold onto your beliefs and trust yourself.
• Don’t give up and always finish what you started.
• Maintain your health and well-being. Identify what your body needs to operate at optimal health and work toward achieving consistency with everything you do.

Keep these key points in mind and focus on the points that ring true for you. Keep focused and disciplined to allow consistency to flow in your life and in all that you do.

Until next time, I will leave you with wise words from Anthony Robbins—one of my favorite business motivators: “For changes to be of any true value, they’ve got to be lasting and consistent.”

About the author

Dijana Green is a food technologist and has been working in the food industry for 28 years. Green spent 11 years working for George Weston Foods and 11 years at Goodman Fielder. When working for Goodman Fielder, she managed 44 bakeries in Australia.

Green has a long and rich career achieving impressive quality assurance improvements in the food industry. As national quality assurance manager at Goodman Fielder, Green was responsible for reducing customer complaints by 22 percent, reducing class one complaints by 50 percent, reducing food safety audit costs by 32 percent, building supplier relationships, managing quality and food safety new product development requirements, and developing initiatives to build brand strength.

In 2009, Green left her corporate role to consult and in the last four years has developed a business which operates in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Fiji, servicing close to 200 clients.

Green is a mother of three and when not working loves to spend quality time having fun with her children, being outdoors, reading, cooking, exercising, and helping others.