Procrastination is one of the major barriers that prevent many small business owners from taking their businesses to the next level. A habitual procrastinator hardly gets important things done on time. And like in every human activity, a delay is dangerous in business. Procrastination can make you miss great business opportunities, making it difficult to reach your business goals. In Today’s podcast, Eric Twiggs from What Now Movement and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions discuss five steps business owners can utilize to beat procrastination.
Summary
Your 5 Steps Plan to Beat Procrastination & Become More Productive
Procrastination is a bad habit that has hampered the effective operation of numerous small businesses. Many small business owners have unintentionally impeded their business growth due to procrastination. When business owners procrastinate, they fail to deal with important tasks before them and rather spend time on activities that are not related to their business growth.
Every successful business owner knows how to get things promptly done to maximize productivity, build passion, and meet deadlines. Conversely, procrastination whittles down performance and kills enthusiasm, and in a worst-case scenario, can lead to a business failure.
In today’s digital age, when many people are easily distracted by a lot of frivolities, especially the social media buzz, it becomes imperative that business owners should be mindful of how they manage their time in performing their duties.
With this in mind, we have highlighted the key ingredients to help you beat procrastination and become more productive.
What Is Procrastination?
Procrastination is the act of postponing, delaying, or putting off tasks that you should be doing right away, especially habitually or intentionally. One major habit of procrastinators is delaying performing important tasks and instead doing other menial tasks to avoid the ones that matter. 
As a business owner, if you fail to manage procrastination properly, it can lead to a bigger problems.
What Are the 5 Steps for Beating Procrastination In Business?
Learning to overcome procrastination is essential to reach your business goal faster. Below are the tips that can help you beat procrastination in your business operation.
Attitude
Attitude is a dominant way of thinking or feeling. Your mindset greatly impacts your choice of action and how you respond to challenges or events. As a business owner, you must assess your attitude and know how it impacts your work performance.
You should replace negative thoughts with positive ones to start having positive results. To develop a positive mindset, you must focus on what’s going well in your business. You should note where you’re making progress-which are your wins and positives- that promote your personal or professional health. When you start paying attention to your ‘wins,’ you build confidence and become less likely to procrastinate.
Negative feelings will limit your thinking, undervalue your achievements, and ultimately lead to underperformance. On the other hand, learning to keep a positive attitude makes you more energetic, productive, and successful in your business.
Awareness
This simply means figuring out when you have the most energy to get things done. Understanding your power time is very important as it helps you know when you will be more productive in performing your high-priority activities. Doing the most boring or tasking work when you’re at your best will bring a better result. Plus, you should consider drafting a strategic plan to help guide your daily activities and keep you on track.
A strategic plan helps business owners define their vision for the future and identify their organization’s goals, objectives, and strategies for achieving them. A strategic plan should not be bulky for effectiveness and ease of implementation. Smart business owners use a one-page strategic plan in running their business day-to-day.
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Another method of beating procrastination is to maintain healthy living. In other words, you should pay attention to your mental and physical recovery by having proper sleep and diet, doing systemic exercise at least 30 minutes daily, and setting aside some time for meditation/contemplation.
You need to take some time to reinvigorate yourself if you want to avoid procrastination and build a thriving business. There are numerous benefits to taking proper care of your mental and physical health. To start with, it helps you avoid the risk of burnout and depression and also helps to increase your mental alertness. Therefore, you need to make a concerted effort and be intentional about daily recovery.
Automation
You must build a system where things happen without you. For example, you can consider having virtual assistants to help you get things done without directly getting involved.
In addition, you should try to figure out ways to automate your activities with smart technologies. Smart technologies are affecting businesses‘ bottom line in no small measure. Some of the technologies that can be helpful for your small business and reduce procrastination are accounting software, customer relationship management (CRM), HR management, and more.
Activity
Taking the right action at the right time is critical to the growth and development of your business. It’s practically impossible to build a large company without executing well. You should start by defining your goals and strategies to reach them and keep those goals/plans in front of everyone Secondly, do the necessary things to help you get closer to the target goals daily. Lastly, knowing the ‘why’ of your business ( the reason behind your business) is a very important factor that will help you overcome procrastination.
Learn More About Our Guest
Eric Twiggs is a founder and CEO of What Now Movement, a certified life and business coach, host of the 30-Minute Hour podcast, and author of The Discipline of Now: 12 Practical Principles to Overcome Procrastination. The Discipline of Now has been recognized as a Global Top Ten Finalist for the 2020 Author Elite Awards in the category of Best Self-Help Book.
Learn About Financing Solutions
Financing Solutions provides an easy-to-setup unsecured business line of credit to small businesses. The small business financing product is a great cash backup plan that costs nothing to set up, nothing until used, and is inexpensive when needed. Financing Solutions is rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and 5 stars by the BBB/Google Reviews.
Unlike a traditional business bank loan, our business credit line requires no collateral or personal guarantee (except in fraud cases), making it an excellent alternative business financing option. Small businesses often use their line of credit for short-term expenses, working capital, to make payroll, or for business investment, especially when business cash flow is temporarily down.
Get a free, no-obligation business line of credit quote by filling out our simple 2- minute business line of credit application here.
Remember: The time to set up a credit line is when you don’t need it.
