Procrastination Will Murder Your Business

Procrastination is the habit of doing something later when you could have done it now. I am not talking about the occasional task over flow. The refusing to do something that you know you could easily do now. This habit will choke the life out of your business like a bad Hitchcock film.

Let's talk clean as you go. When you are preparing dinner for the family, do you clean as you go? Just reading the question forcing you to want to say yes even when it's a no. Logically we would clean as we go, leaving a much smaller mess to clean up, at the end of dinner.

That being said, how many of us leave the dishes for the next day, or even procrastinate clean up to the point of you are running out of dishes and flatware to use. Before I became self employed, I was in the last group. Yes I would put off clean up for as long as I could. Ick is right, that is not a healthy life style.

That was the lifestyle I was sporting. Being self employed forced me to become more efficiant with my use of time. Time is money more so when you work for yourself than for other entities. I learned quickly that clean as you go, is a huge time saver. A proper place for everything is something I am still working on. I function in chaos.

Schedule For Success

I use a combination of Microsoft Outlook, and OneNote to create a schedule. Even a Mac user like myself will use Microsoft tools, especially when it makes sense. Onenote is free to use and can be used with Outlook. Outlook is my Calendar and Onenote is my tick journal.

The calender is used for scheduling appointments, trainings, and events, both virtual and physical. Onenote is used to tick journal my tasks. Since the two applications work well together, I use the appointments in Outlook to guide my tasks in Onenote.

Let's say I have a Zoom training on "Overcoming Objections" at 10 to 11 am, and a Lunch appointment at 1 pm. That leaves a 1 1/2 hour window to complete tasks. I like to schedule a 10 or 15 minute drive in a 30 minute block. This allows me to either arrive early, or right on time depending on road & traffic conditions.

In OneNote I would anotate the 2 appointments with a list of tasks in between them. They would be the tasks that I would need to do earlier in the day like engage with people from the East Coast. This habit will allow you to not only map out your days, weeks, months, but also save you all kinds of time getting organized and trying to decide what to do next.

Confusion leads to procrastination. If we spend too much time trying to figure out what to do next, your rational mind might give way to fear and panic. Remember those two morons. Whe we are in a state of fear we tend to do nothing.

Don't You Just Love A Good Hook?

The hook grabbed you, and the content kept you reading. Regardless of how great your hook is, if you do not complete enough income producing tasks, your business will die or worse just remain a hobby. Everyone respects a person that has tried and failed. We all love stories about the under dog that refused to give up. Don't we all avoid that one person that is always talking about a non existant business, and how it is going to make them all kinds of money?

Time is a factor and some of us have regular 40 hour a week jobs, or some of us have businesses that are established and supporting our households. Yet we are trying to carve out more time so we can get these other streams of income going. Personally I stopped reading popular fiction, cut down 90% of television, stopped console gaming all together. Now I am not suggesting you get monastic, but we all have frivolous non income producing time wasters we indulge in.

When we feel tired we can get overwhelmed, and confused. Boom yeah it is easier to sit on the couch and watch Star Trek episodes with my cat Spike. This is me retreating to my comfort zone. Why? This is where I am safe, in control, and risk nothing.

That is the illusion of comfort. The truth is we are currently uncomfortable or are going to be very soon, and this is our solution. We have identified our income producing actions, now we just need to schedule them and follow the schedule. Hey if you find an extra 30 minutes here and there to do something fun and frivolous, schedule it.

For the actual act of putting something off, rather than say I will get to it later or sometime next week. Take the task seriously and get it on the schedule. Once you make this a habit, do it awkwardly for a month, then a bit better for the next month, and like a pro for the rest of your months.

When we try a new skill, it takes 30 consecutive days of practice before you start building confidence in the skill. In the martial arts world we would say you only need be 1 belt higher than your students. This is true in anything. Not one single person has all the answers, but a good team can get most qeustions answered.

Try scheduling for success, for just 30 days. Somewhere around day 32 or 35 you will wonder how you ever accomplished anything without this habit. Give yourself some patience and room to make mistakes. No you do not need software, you could use a notebook. Quite often I will draw something out in a notebook before attempting to make a digital copy of something.

If you would like more info or a tutorial video where I demonstrate the use of applications in building and maintaining your schedule just let me know, and I will do my best to comply. Thank you so much for reading :-)