If you are a business owner you are probably like me. I see dozens of tasks I need to complete to keep the leads coming in, sales happening, and employees getting paid. Example: I need to blog, I need to run A/B test on LessEverything.com. I need to read the articles in my browser. I need to book travel for another event. I need to figure out facebook ads for LessFilms.
Problem #1: Often times I get lost in the fog of tasks. I’m not really overwhelmed as much as just feeling like I don’t know where to start or even how to finish my day. This is analysis paralysis.
Problem #2: After hours of emails, skype calls and tweets I find myself literally waiting for the next distraction, an email…someone call me. It’s like I’ve been training my brain to be distracted.
These two problems turn me into an unproductive person at work. I even get mad at myself…because I’ve lost focus and I know it. I hate this state of mind, I hate being like this.
It’s in that moment, I try to stop, take a breath and evaluate what is important to the company as a whole. What does the company need from me?
We need to hire another designer for LessEverything. So the action I can take right now is finding twenty possible designers who might be interested via dribbble and message them. Yes, Allan do that right now. So I go spend two hours completing the task.
Another task comes to mind…LessFilms needs more projects, the action I can take is following up with already sent proposals. I go to that right away.
I need to blog more and get those writing juices flowing again. I write this blog post and it feels soooo good to exercise those writing muscles again.
It’s my job, as a business owner, to predict. We try to predict the finances in three month, predict the sales cycle, predict possible inventory issues. FYI “inventory” for a service business is available employee hours which we sell to clients.
I try my best to predict the problems we’ll have in 1-5 months and start laying the groundwork to solve those issues today.
So my advice for getting out of the fog. Make a prediction…example: we’re going to need sales leads in three months. Find the easiest task to complete and start there. The fog will lift as you just get moving forward again.
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