Procrastination is a dirty word when you’re a business owner. As an employee, you can get away with a lot of procrastinating, but when you report to you procrastination can be the death of your business.
If you procrastinate over doing tasks, there is no one is left to complete them, unlike in the workplace where a member of your team will pick up the slack. This leads to a feeling of overwhelm, which leads to you questioning why you started your business in the first place. Sound familiar?
Trainers and service providers have the added pressures of completing their clients’ work in addition to the day-to-day work a business takes to run smoothly. In this case, procrastination is a synonym for missed deadlines, unhappy clients, and business decline.
Combat your procrastination habits and rediscover your motivation and love for your business by implementing these simple strategies. Just because they’re simple doesn’t mean they’re easy!
- Find an accountability partner.
Holding yourself accountable for your goals is a key factor in accomplishing your weekly goals. Having to tell someone you failed at reaching a goal or making excuses to that person is uncomfortable, especially if this chosen partner is a “tell it like it is” person who won’t accept your excuses or let you off easy. Even if you just choose one goal a week, knowing someone is waiting to hear an update is often enough to spur you into taking action.
- Visualise the future you want.
A powerful exercise to prioritise what you want in the future is to create a vision board. Working on a digital vision board is simple and exciting because you choose pictures that speak to you; you’re paying attention to your subconscious desires which can be quite different than your intellectual desires.
Posting these photos on your vision board gives them life, it makes them a solid goal in your life and should inspire you to work hard to reach those goals. But don’t keep those goals a secret. Tell your partner, parents, friends, or kids so they can be your cheerleaders. Every business owner needs a cheerleader or two.
- Harness the fear.
Sometimes procrastination evolves from a fear of getting out of your comfort zone. It’s a form of denial but no matter how long you put something off, it’s not just going to evaporate into thin air, no matter how much you wish it too. Reaching out of your comfort zone can be rewarding if not nerve-wracking and often you’ll discover the task itself was easier or less complicated than you thought it to be.
2 Bonus Strategies to Overcome Procrastination
- Tackle your most important task first.
Start your morning as you mean to go on by completing your most important or your biggest task of the day. Maybe this is your bookkeeping that isn’t up to date or maybe it’s a client call or project. Don’t just assume you can do it later because you don’t know what emergencies or client crises later will bring. Slay the resistance dragon by doing it first. You’ll feel energised by how much you get done after you’ve slain the biggest task.
- Hire a team member.
It’s okay to admit you need help running your business. You cannot and should not do it all. If the small mundane tasks are holding you back, then hire a virtual assistant to handle those tasks. Delegate those tasks which cause you to procrastinate and you’ll find a new love for your business.
In the end, you’ll also come out ahead of the game because while she’s taking care of the business parts you hate, you can take care of the business tasks that you love.
Find out more about our team hiring agreements.
