One of the things that really comes in to play when you are just starting a home business is you need to create structure. Part of that process sometimes means you have to force yourself to focus on one thing at a time and especially to stop procrastinating if you are.
It is likely a new environment for you where you are only accountable to yourself. It is really easy to put things off, saying you will do it some other time and then to just not do it at all after you keep pushing it back. This is dangerous.
We have to start out with and maintain some organization and this requires discipline. Even if you have to pretend you have a deadline or a boss to be accountable to, just do it. Likely you are a bit overwhelmed by the amount of information and all the strange terminology and concepts if you have not worked online before and/or have no marketing, advertising or technical experience.
You don’t have to know everything there is to know on day one. You will learn more and more as you go along gaining experience and skills. Do what you can. It is important to take action. Maybe your first action should be creating some lists about what you have to do. It is best not to ‘bite off more than you can chew’ with regard to lists.
Just make a few – one for today – one for this week or month and one for long-term goals. The reason you don’t want them all on one is that they get really messy with things crossed out and checked off; and it just looks like more chaos. As well you may begin to beat yourself up when you don’t get everything done.
So if you make the ‘to do’ lists short and sweet with realistic expectations about how much you can really do today or this week, you will stay more organized and motivated. It should give you a feeling of accomplishment when you do complete a task.
Anything you can’t complete for whatever reason – not enough time, need to do some things on the periphery before you can actually do whatever it is, waiting for a paycheck, etc., put it on a new list. You may even want to get slightly complicated with a flowchart arrangement outlining something with multiple steps to complete.
Some people think working backwards is the way to think about this – in other words you have the target and you know what that (result) is, and then you need to back track to do everything from A through Z to get your target met. Some things can be done out of order, and others may have dependencies so that you can’t do C until you do A and B first.
As important as it is to get things done in an organized, structured manner, without procrastinating, it is also important not to beat yourself up. If you don’t make a deadline you have given yourself – just put it on a list for going forward. Try to feel good about what you did accomplish and always try to do better each time.
