This article is for my readers who want to become entrepreneurs…
It seems like it’s human nature for us to procrastinate. Procrastination can be a very destructive force for budding entrepreneurs. It can slow us down or destroying our productivity and entrepreneurial dreams entirely.
While many of us have long-term goals that we want to complete for our futures, we are generally very bad at seeing all the necessary smaller steps that are required to get us to those goals. When we procrastinate, it is usually the smaller, more mundane tasks that we are trying to put off. However, our bigger, more long-term goals can be only be achieved by us consistently taking on those smaller, everyday tasks, and mastering them.
Here are some simple yet very effective techniques you can use to help you break your procrastinating habits. For most people, making just a few of these relatively small and simple changes will have a drastic impact on how often you procrastinate.
Set Deadlines
Setting deadlines is a really great way of encouraging yourself to prioritize any tasks in front of you, while also giving you an easy way of measuring and visualizing your progress. Learning to prioritize work and manage your time effectively is an absolutely essential skill for any small business owner to manage.
Not only will you, as the owner of a small business, need to be able to organize your time appropriately, you will also need to be able to apply those same instincts to how you delegate work to your employees. When you decide to launch a new business, break down all the individual stages involved, as well as all the planning and documentation that you need to generate as you go. Learning to meet the deadlines you set yourself for broad milestones will get you into the habits you need to be able to meet deadlines on a day to day basis.
Break Down Your Tasks
Every big milestone you aim to achieve will consist of a number of smaller tasks, but the following advice applies just as equally to day to day tasks. Whenever you are faced with new tasks, try and get into the habit of automatically considering how to most efficiently divide that task into smaller steps. By getting used to thinking about the tasks you undertake as being divisible into smaller, more manageable pieces, you will find it becomes second nature, and your overall productivity will benefit.
Secure Funding
Once you have secured the necessary funds to make your business a reality, it is often a game-changing moment for many people. It can often feel as if the moment you receive that funding is the moment that the whole venture suddenly becomes real. Those who are dependent upon loans from other individuals or entities will be under some kind of obligation to repay that money. If there is a time limit during which the loan needs to be repaid, this serves as a powerful motivator as far as getting things done is concerned.
One of the most common mistakes that new entrepreneurs make is to put off securing their funding because they assume that they need to have an established business to be successful. In most cases, this simply isn’t true. With a solid, realistic, and strong business plan, it is possible to secure funding very early on in the life of your business.
No matter how young your small business it, it is easier to get funding than you think. You can see securing funding as being like firing the starter pistol on your new venture.
Set SMART Goals
When you are setting yourself new goals and objectives, try and use the SMART principle. This means that the goals you set should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. By thinking about your goals in this way, it will highlight to you how achievable they are, and give you the best chance of finding the motivation to do them.
Sometimes, all it takes is a different way of thinking and you will be considerably less likely to feel the urge to procrastinate. Using the SMART system makes even the most complex of challenges suddenly seem far more achievable.
Finally…
The first step to getting your new business idea off the ground is going to be to find a way of limiting your procrastination. Procrastinating is a vice that afflicts even the best of us if we don’t keep an eye out for it and try to overcome it. However, once you have found out how to overcome your procrastination, there should be nothing standing in your way.
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