SNM036: Don’t Let Procrastination Destroy Your Business

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find out how to stop procrastination from destroying your business on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by get response. Are you a small business owner, professional blogger or marketing agency? Get response Can help you connect with your audience in a meaningful way to see how get response can help your business and get your first month free. Go to serve. No master dot com Backslash Get response. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. I put together my first book for Amazon years ago. There were two years in between the completion of that book and my up loading into Amazon that two years of procrastination cost me thousands of dollars, that hesitation that fear to put something out there, that skipping of a step, that laziness that we all get into. I'll just do it later. I'm distracted or oh, I've got something else going on. It wasn't totally fear. It wasn't always fear about getting it out there. Initially, I was afraid I would do it wrong. And then I simply forgot. Procrastination turns into failure. I noticed the book on my hard drive was cleaning my heart. Oh, what's this file? And this is actually happening me three or four times with other projects. Sometimes I write a book and I forget about it for different projects. But this was one for myself. It wasn't like a publisher partner pulled out or we went in a different direction or decided to videos instead of book this what it was. All me and the crustacean cost me huge amount of money. It's a really bad habit, but it's so easy to fall into procrastination. Ironically, I was just thinking about if I could push back record this episode till tomorrow. I'm one day ahead with my recordings right now when I thought, Well, I'll just go to bed earlier, just relax and hang out and procrastinate on the episode about procrastination. The temptation is always there to not do what we need to. D'oh! It's something that is very common when we're Children, but as we become adults, we need to take it head on and find out what's holding us back. I've worked in private coaching and for nearly 10 years now in different sectors, in different businesses, in different industries. And the thing I've discovered is that there are people who take action and people who look for excuses. Unfortunately, most people, the majority people, look for excuses, which is why on Lee, small percentage of the population are leaders are innovators and the rest of the population or followers. Many people would rather be an employee than a boss. I totally understand that. And part of that mindset part that desire to have someone else from the show is also the ability to procrastinate. We don't wantto finish projects until right before their d'oh, we've all done it. We've all started the book report the day before the books do. In fact, we start reading the book the day before the book reports. D'oh! When I look back on my educational career, I procrastinated a lot. I know that I can wait until the last few days before something and get it done. Rather than work on something for two hours a day for a month, I would rather just cram it into three or four days, and I'm still that way. I'd like to write books that way The thought of writing a book over the course of a month, one or two hours a day. It's not how my mind works. I'd much rather stay totally focused for a very fixed period of time and just get it done as quickly as possible. One of the driving forces that the thing that causes to procrastinate is we're afraid to face our fears. We push back on projects. We hesitate on projects because we're afraid things will go wrong. We're afraid that if we put it out into the world, it'll turn out Our work isn't good enough. It's a legitimate fear because sometimes we do fail. Sometimes things don't go well. I've had projects fail everything, things that weren't very good. When I look back at things, I wrote 12 and three years ago I looked at it and go, Wow, I was a terrible writer I'm always becoming a better writer. My craft is refining. My approach is maturing. The way I write everything about it is always getting better. That's really what we want, isn't it, though, Who wants to be exactly the same for the rest of their life? I became excellent at 20 and I stayed exactly as good as I was for the next 80 years. No, we want to always get better improve. So of course, when I look back, I see opportunity. If I wrote it again and I do rewrites of old books, sometimes I could do so much better. Because my craft has improved. My understanding of technique has improved. All of these things are very valuable. The fear is something that can become overwhelming, and sometimes bad things do happen in business. We don't wanna put anything out there. We slow ball the project long enough that there's no risk of us getting judge and no risk of us failing. I mentioned in yesterday's episode the previous episode, my website, my tire website crashing over the weekend. All I wanted to do was procrastinate. I thought about taking the day off. I thought, Why don't I just turn off the computer and walk away from this nightmare. The website only part of it was broken. Fortunately, I got so lucky for a second the entire podcast and researcher crashed us well, that I was able to bring that back up within just a few minutes. That only went down for five or six minutes. The entire membership site infrastructure. If it was down for one day, people would be upset. But only people who were logging in on a holiday weekend not too many people on Lee. One person in the email me about and noticed it while I was down because was only down for less than 12 hours. He e mailed with a complaint. I found the problem and I began fixing it. Seven hours from when I knew the problem was there it was fixed. I'd moved to another server, but I looked at the project. I thought it was gonna cost me thousands of dollars and be a huge nightmare. And maybe my website was lost forever. I just had this small hope, had a feeling that I was right. And then it was the host and switching to another company did fix everything, but I didn't know until that seven hours later. Part of me just wanted to procrastinate and say, You know what? Maybe few customers would be upset. They'll deal with it. I'll send him copies of the content of different way, and I'll deal with it tomorrow. Do within a few days. It's too stressful to deal with right now. As I mentioned in the previous episode, my rich will help me to get through that relaxing myself. My blood pressure was up for a few days. I check my blood pressure every day, and it was up for two or three days because I was so stressed out about this happening. I care so much about presentation that just one customer see my website not be. It's absolute best, really upset me. I don't want anyone to have inferior experience. I'm so obsessed with that because I want to be the absolute best. It haunted me so these fears we have, Sometimes they happen. We can get stopped by the fear of something bad happened, and sometimes when something bad happens, that's what we wanna procrastinate. In both those situations, it seems so much easier to walk away from the problem than to deal with it head on when you have a giant project in front of the size of the product is overwhelming. Week and 1/2 ago, I realized that I needed to change my shopping cart company. The pain processor won't change. Just the shopping cart is gonna change just the person who creates the checkout buttons on my website. Not the first to actually process is the money, but just the same person who tracks the orders. I don't know why it has to be two different companies, but it does. I discovered last weekend we can half ago that they were deleting products without telling me. I pay them a monthly fee to generate these buttons. That's all they do for me. They generate the buttons that make the check out pages. They tracked the orders they integrate with my other software. That's it. And they decided that if they didn't think one of my projects was serious enough, they would delete it without telling me. I only found out again when a customer sent me an email saying This button's missing. Why? Why isn't the buy button working? Assuming it was a mistake with the company. Turned out, it wasn't have to change to another brand. It's so much work thought of doing that, just changing that part, copping over all my customer data. Because if I change to know the shopping cart, I have to change my membership integration software. So one problem became, too, and began to feel overwhelming. I decided it wasn't an emergency. I began slowly building up the new infrastructure. I started working with the new shopping cart. The next day, I began setting up the new infrastructure that I needed to switch over. But to be honest with you, I did take it slow. It was overwhelming. I'm glad that I did, because Sunday morning a week later, everything it crashed had to change. My host had to change my software platform, my WordPress theme. To be specific. I had to change my shopping cart and now my membership plug it. It's a huge, overwhelming project. I look at doing all of those things. How could I possibly handle doing it? It's probably gonna take me 100 hours of programming to do it if I do it all myself. The way to deal with big projects, whether it's books or anything else. I'm working out. I chop it up into pieces so I do each one step, one little step at a time. I develop a plan that's face one. So my plan for saving my website Step one move to a new host. I switch to a more expensive provider. I switched to Traffic Planet, and I'll be honest with you. It's like driving a Ferrari. Price is much higher. It's $25 a month instead of $5 a month. But whoa, it's nice. I've been on a lot of servers in my life. I used to use a server that was over $200 a month. It wasn't worth it at all. Very disappointed with the experience, the websites kept getting slower. Lots of technical problems. At first it was okay. But over time, as with many companies, they diminished in quality team I'm with now. I'm very happy with that. I'm very excited that I switched so Step one. Even though I was overwhelmed, I pushed back that fair procrastination. I let go of that fear failure and I chopped up in a small pieces. I switched providers and I e mailed them and had them move the website for me. I didn't even have to do that part. They handled everything. Their cue was seven hours long. As of the back of the line. I knew before I switched would take him about seven hours. That was step one. I let him handle that. That was that whole day. That was it. Step to develop a plan for building a new member subside. I'm actually going to change my membership site in one phase and then the main website in the second phase. I don't want any changes. Toe happen live. I don't want you as a customer to it. Ever see a part of my website broken wallets in transition? Doing a hot swap is hard with a website cause something always happens. One of the mistakes that I made, I don't know why I did it with this platform. It's a stupid mistake. I usually make one website that's the blogger and another separate website in a sub folder. That's the whole membership site. That way the two sites don't interact, and if one gets damaged, the other one's not hurt and vice versa. But For some reason, when I built this platform, I didn't think about it. I don't know. I can't really explain it. Why I didn't do it separately. It didn't even cross my mind. Maybe because I haven't built a membership site in a few years, so I hadn't thought about in a while. So now I'm building a brand new member, subside on a separate platform. Step 1/7 member subjects up to buy the new software, the new software tools that I'm using, and it's thrive themes, which you talk about all the time. It's one of my sponsors, is one of the people that I mentioned, how great they are often and have you some of their tools in the past. And I'm switching over to a pure thrive team set up and leaving behind the old technology I use for a couple of reasons. The WordPress theme amusing right now. One of the problems is that they check to see if their software stolen hundreds of times a day. They send the signal back to their home server, not once a day, not once an hour. Every single time someone visits my website, they have to run a check on the license and slows down how the site runs. That's one of the problems amongst many, and it's silly. You don't need to check hundreds of times a day if I get hundreds of visitors or thousands of times a day. So I knew I needed to change that platform. And I'm switching over everything to thrive. Themes, my entire design, my time membership site design. The next struggle is building that new member subside and making it look good. The thought of moving over each little lesson in the video and all the downloads and all of those things it's overwhelming. So instead of that, I broke it up into pieces and in fact, I hired someone else to design the pages of the membership site, the home page, the top of a lesson page, a module page and a lesson page. Those four things and then a transfer everything over. I'm not sure if she's willing to do the job. The person I hired immediately tried to import my old website, the very one I'm tried Lee, behind into the new website. I sent obviously a scathing e mail. That's not what the job was I would've told you to do so. I don't know if the person's going to do the job, but that's OK. I broke it up into small pieces. I don't have to worry about everything falling apart. When you break it up into small pieces. You're just in with one task at a time. I'm not even worrying about moving the data back and forth. She should have been working on that because the initial project, this is why you set up a project of milestones was simply the design. Until the new website looks amazing, I don't want start adding data and I don't want there to be any integration between the membership site and the old site. I want the new members of sight to be perfect when you see it and hopefully I'll be up in a couple weeks. It's going to be so perfect. I'm close with the design house. Messing was designed Ellman's myself tonight. If I have to go in another direction, I'm gonna hire someone else already. Know who I'm gonna hire now that I understand the task a little bit better. But I'm just dealing with one piece at a time and That's how we deal with each project. I talked about this with books a lot. The reason I love writing books for your script Scrivener is that it lets me break a book up into tiny, tiny pieces. Yes, my new book is 40,000 words, but really, it's hundreds of small little pieces. Why don't know if it's hundreds is at least 100 small little sections. Some of the sections are only 300 words and summer 1000 words. Breaking it up into these little pieces makes it very manageable. I mention it all the time. That old saying, How do you mean elephant one bite at a time, not ever being an elephant. I don't know if they're delicious, but they're big and we take a really long time to eat one. You want to isolate the reason you're procrastinating? Is it fear failure, or is it fear of success? I've worked with people before who are afraid that success would change them. I went through that fear myself at several phases of my life. When I was trying to prove different areas, I I ask myself, Will I stop being the same person? Why become someone I don't like. I definitely say this right now. 18 year old me would hate 35 Romi. We wouldn't get along very well. We do have both impeccable taste in music, but I will say my taste. Even though we like the exact same genre, we still listen to the same stuff. My taste has gotten a little bit better, a little tighter than what he used to listen to. But, man, he would hate me because I've changed pretending you're not gonna change as you age much as you want to do it. You just can't live hard forever. You can't travel on the world going to raves, going to clubs six nights away. You can't do it forever. It just wears down on you. And it doesn't feel as much funny where Hey, I still love going to festivals. I still love seeing some D days. I still D J myself. It's a big apartment life for a long time. The fear of success is something you have to look dead in the eye and say, Why am I afraid I'm going to succeed? You're not going to change. Fear of success comes from the idea in the business world. That money changes you. That money will have this power to alter your core personality, which is totally inaccurate. Money only magnifies who you already are. I knew people who are awful poor, and then when they made money, they were just is awful. I have never met anybody who was nice, poor and became awful rich. That doesn't happen. Whatever is inside of you simply gets magnified by, well, it doesn't get changed. Released that fear of success and you'll get closer to breaking through your desire to procrastinate. Another element of procrastination is the way we look at the future as humans. One of our greatest struggles and the reason we have so many problems in our society is our inability to prioritized long term, high value goals over short term pleasure goals. And this is in every category. This is why most people in America are overweight. I still overweight, still work, not it have lost a lot of weight, but I need to lose a lot more out saying at the midpoint, halfway to my goal. Sometimes I just want to eat something delicious. The short term desire to taste something good is the reason we ignore the long term goal Now obesity is the number one killer in America. I've been working a lot of projects on health lately. A lot of books and things I work on another. Niches are about health space, and I can tell you this right now it's the number one thing that takes people down. It can cut your life down by 30 or 40 years, really shorten your life, been smoking and obesity there. The two killers. I've read so many medical papers on it, and we look around us that everyone eats so unhealthy in our society. And now we're trying to shift into teaching this idea of body positivity, and you shouldn't make fun of people for being fat. My problem with obesity, as someone who suffers or himself has nothing to do with making people feel good or bad are saying that you can be attractive in any size. I don't care about any of those things. I care about. The fact that it slashes your life span down by 30 or 40% that it cuts down your quality of life that you can't spend as much time with your kids That's the stuff I think about. People are caught up in the wrong idea, telling everyone to feel good, even though they're double the way they should be. It's horrible because then they don't live as long and they don't get to spend time with their kids. That's horrible. We're so caught up in the feeling of right now. The short term feelings of I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings don't make someone feel bad for being overweight. As an overweight guy, I realized that's the wrong message. We're focused on short term, feeling good, and it's just a bad for healthy people where I live. Wow, I watch people that have amazing opportunity. Screw it with procrastination. People come to my island. I live on straight at Paradise Island. People come here from all over the world for epic surfing, amazing waves, amazing lifestyle. And they all end up leaving after a few months because they didn't work. They didn't work, they didn't work. And since their bank accounts are empty, all their plans fell apart because they spent all day surfing everyday. Look my promise that I don't surf enough of all of you my island. I'm only one that has this. Most people here served three times a day. They spent 67 hours a day in the water. So they have, what, two hours a day to work and they don't do it. It costs them their opportunity to stay here forever. I only serve a couple times a week. I'm working on a project, my girlfriend, to increase that so that I start serving 45 times a week. At least I'd like to get up to Savage. I really need to surf every day. Part of it is that the tide changes every day, so the time of day to surf is always shifting. It means there's no way for me to serve at the same time every day, so I can't build a schedule. It takes away. As I mentioned yesterday as I mentioned the previous episode, I can't build a ritual if it's not always at the same time. That's one of the things that were adapting with. I always want to be real with you and tell you exactly I'm going to. That's one of the challenges for me, but I see these people, they come here, they don't do their work. They don't put in any effort, even when there's opportunities before the morning when they get part time jobs. They just put it off because they want to catch those waves again. And it feels so good. Surfing is amazing. I love surfing, elevating lives. I'm not any good. But man, when I catch that wave, it's a slice of paradise. People get caught up in that short term pleasure. They don't think about the long term benefit of putting in the work, and suddenly they have to leave paradise. They don't get to surf anymore. They're gone. They're a few other techniques for dealing with procrastination. One of them is a Pomodoro technique. Other techniques are to set of people around you that will hold you accountable in different ways, actively develop a plan to fight against your procrastination. One of my big ways, my big techniques is ritual. As I mentioned yesterday, it really helps me. I was someone who really struggled procrastination for a long time and the ways I dealt with it. We're number one ritual and number two. I diversify myself across projects. I probably take on more projects that I should. It allows me to work on different things all the time. If I don't want to work on something, I can work on something else. Today. I spent some time writing a new webinar for one of my other niche is one of my other spaces with one of my partners. We spent some time on the phone. I spent some time working on that because I didn't want to work on anything else. I didn't want to start editing another book. I actually have to start writing the next book for another sequence with another partner. The outlines already done, but I didn't want to jump from writing one book into writing the next. So I started working on this webinar that needs to be finished next two days. Anyways, having several projects on the go is one of things that helps me deal with procrastination. I don't recommend that exactly what I recommend is you have several different parts of your business you can work on at the same time. The way to do that is have your block post. If you started podcast, have your podcast episodes have your design elements of your website have the book that you're writing your next Amazon book you're writing. The next thing you're riding have a several different things you can work on in different areas, all about your soul business, and that will give you diversity of task. One day you work out riding. The next day, you work on putting together some slides. The next day you're recording videos. A day after that, you're working on a weapon, or the next day you're running a block post. Have a myriad of tasks in front of you, allows you to jump between different tasks that are equal importance. I have a set of task in front of me, and I'm constantly prioritizing them. So I pushed the most important ones to the front to allow me to fight procrastination. So even when I don't want to work on a project, I end up using my time productively. Don't let procrastination kill your business. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Tuesday with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts. Now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you Tuesday. Thank you for listening to this episode of the serve. No master podcast to find out how I can get a free copy of my new book, Head over to serve no master dot com back slash podcasts right now.