I wouldn’t say it was a sudden revelation, but when I finally realised that working 60 hours a week was just too much for my health and sanity to bear, the decision to find an alternative way of making a living was final and absolute.
I had to get out of the daily grind. Getting out of bed every morning was soul destroying – the thought of going in to sit behind the same desk and go through the motions again. I hated my job. Truely. So I thought to myself ‘there have to be lots of opportunities out there for an intelligent, talented and capable person like myself’. A few hours on the internet, I thought, and I’ll be on my way. ‘In a month I’ll have done my research, picked a business model and started my own business. In six months I’ll be able to go full time, and finally get the freedom I deserve.’
Guess what? It didn’t exactly work out that way…
A month of research became six. Firing my boss was no closer a year and a half later! Why? It wasn’t a lack of desire – I really wanted my freedom; neither was it a fear of failure, as I’d been there before and know that only helps you succeed in the long run. Nor was it lack of hard work or ability. I was putting in the hours, even after a long day in my ‘real’ job.
So what prevented me from going out and grabbing my dream with both hands? Wait for it…yes, that same old problem, procrastination.
Procrastination can often be hard to identify. You can be busy ten hours a day but not achieve anything. Procrastination simply means to put off doing something, to postpone or delay needlessly. You can postpone moving closer to your goals while still managing to put in the hours, and this is never truer than when starting a home business.
I spent so much time researching and planning – ‘what type of business would suit me best, what skills will I need to learn, how will I divide up my time, how will I organise my money when it starts rolling in, how many different coloured pens should I use on my planner??’
Even when I’d decided on an internet marketing based business, I’d waste my time with all kinds of nonsense, like, ‘hey - I’d better go off and learn HTML, so that when I come to create my websites, it’ll be a cinch’. I was thinking about every little detail before doing it, convincing myself that this approach was correct, and I’d save so much time in the future. Simply put, I didn’t do enough doing!
All the time was planning my masterpiece, I wasn’t actually making anything really happen, and when you don’t see results, it’s natural to see your enthusiasm wane. I didn’t get to see any benefit for all the hard work, and that made it all the harder to keep going. This can become a vicious circle, and I’ve no doubt this is the reason many new ventures fail to get off the ground.
The problem is that once you get locked into a particular train of thought, it can be difficult to take a step back and notice that most tasks don’t need to be planned to the ‘enth-degree’. What I didn’t realise was that every activity, every new skill and every task I would ever need to perform would present itself in due course, and I could simply deal with it when I needed to.
Then it finally hit me - all I needed to do was just get on and do it! Don’t underestimate this one simple point! It seems so obvious when you read it, but to have real meaning, you need to embrace it – drill it into your consciousness every day. Take action, take action, take action.
Make some mistakes – that’s OK. ‘Great, I’ve just learned a great way how not to market my product’, or whatever. A very wise man once wrote “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field”.
Speaking from bitter experience then, if you are starting any new endeavour, whether it’s a new home based business, writing a book, planning a wedding or whatever, remember the following:
- Just get started! Brainstorm the project and write down anything that immediately comes to mind. I like to use a mindmap - start with the main theme or idea in the middle and draw branches coming off it. When you have something visual to work from, it makes it much easier to see any tasks you need to perform. It doesn’t need to, and actually shouldn’t be a carefully detailed plan! If you need to re-think something later, you will be much better prepared by then anyway.
- Prioritise! Pick out the main tasks you will need to get started, then order them in a numbered list. The most important ones will usually be the biggest or most difficult, but don’t let that be a reason to push any down the list. Tackle the most difficult tasks first – that way, when you get moving, the whole project just keeps getting easier and easier!
- Use this list of tasks and put a timeline against them – you won’t know if you’re making progress if you can’t measure it. If you can see from this timeline that you need to complete a particular task in one week, fill in the sub-tasks by working backwards from that date.
- Make sure to set yourself the task of completing one major task off your list every day. Anything else will then be a bonus. This is possibly the single best tip I can give. It makes such a difference to your confidence and sense of achievement when you complete something every day. Building a huge, ever growing list of tasks is nothing but demoralising.
- Don’t fool yourself – remember that you are the easiest person to fool. Get something done! Focus on being productive rather than just being busy!
Although all these rules seem obvious, you have to keep checking to make sure you’re actually using them. Most importantly of all though - take action and don’t get lost in the minutiae. I guarantee that if you focus on these principles, your personal productivity will increase exponentially, and you’ll wonder how you ever managed to waste so much of your life with the insignificant.