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You are not a natural-born procrastinator nor is your perfectionist nature the reason why you're not doing the thing that you know that you should be doing.
I’ve just got home from meeting my accountability buddies. We’ve each got a deadline looming and trying to work out what it is that we need to do.
We all know what we need to do, we have the resources to do it, there is nothing really in the way... however, I need a deadline to force me to get things done. I'm a natural procrastinator afterall.
I am a big fan of Tim Ferris, I read his blog on Procrastination (his TedTalk is entertaining) and had that feeling of:
Oh, amazing – it’s OK I’m just a procrastinator that is normal, I’ll continue to live my life lastminute.com
… pause why I start reading WaitButWhy articles and watching videos that TedTalks are recommending to me…
I was forced to ask myself the real question:
What is preventing you from doing what you already know you need to do?
I’ve mentored over 60 women over the past 2 years who have either been thinking about starting their own business or that have just made the leap into self-employment. I discovered that the things in their way are very similar – and the advice I was giving was fairly consistent.
One bit of advice I found myself giving was:
80% of something is better than 100% of nothing
Just do it - press publish on your website, stop tinkering - (saying with kindness) no one will see it unless you promote it. If you don't launch, how will you gather feedback, if you don’t actually put your crafty item on Etsy you’ll never know if there is demand for it – stop procrastinating.
Anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes with me knows, I bloody love a Post-it, I started documenting the reading, examples, metaphors that seemed to resonate – which provided a handy reference point during a zoom call.
I’ve always thought at some point, I'll document these.
Why is it we delay, put things off, feel there is a base-level of quality and polish that needs to be met before we execute/put ourselves out there? It very rarely is about the task at hand, it is some other nonsense in our heads that we’re refusing to face.
So, as my Start-up Club buddies have been advised in the past "Get over yourself". I am going to start documenting my post-it wall – starting with this one:
It isn’t that you’re a natural-born procrastinator or a perfectionist – if you’re honest with yourself is often that fear of judgment or failure from putting yourself out there.
My post-its have started to get pretty dog-eared - I’m going to start documenting them here, 80% of something is better than nothing – I’ll tidy up the illustrations and copy later.. or not. It's probably fine as it is.
