Women Entrepreneurs: Which "P" Rules Your Day?

Often when small business owners speak of productivity we mean labor efficiency, which can be measured by quantity of output per time spent on a particular task.   The effectiveness of doing a particular thing. 
Image by candrews
When was the last time this happen to you? ….

As I was about to write this blog post, (a totally different topic) the seemingly harmless thought “let me jump on Twitter first” came to mind; I quickly caught myself and closed the Twitter tab in my browser and opened up Microsoft Word.  Surely these thoughts of hesitation aren’t unique to me, so for all the women entrepreneurs who can relate to these types of subtle thoughts that, if entertained could potentially throw your entire day’s tasks off course, read on. 

The thought to jump on twitter before settling down and writing today’s post was not strictly about the love of Twitter, even though I happen to have a love-affair with that super-doper social media platform. This morning’s hesitation had everything to do with Procrastination. Yes, I said it!  We have all experienced it and it presents itself in different ways!

Let’s have a real conversation about this “P” word.  Procrastination is not about laziness; there are days when we are extremely productive. However, we procrastinate for different reasons; we procrastinate out of fear, perfectionism and/or being overwhelmed.  All of these reasons lead to inaction and as Dale Carnegie puts it; inaction breeds doubt and fear…. 

 “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage…..” 
-Dale Carnegie 

One of the steps I highly suggest you take to curtail procrastination is Listening. Listening to your self-talk while paying attention to how you go through your daily tasks will give you an honest snap shot of the “P” you are serving, which will lead you to examine the reason.  If you are procrastinating, figure out why. Are you procrastinating out of fear, perfectionism or are you overwhelmed?  For example: This morning’s hesitation had to do with perfectionism, my thought process went something like this “It will take about  a half an hour to write the blog post or even longer for it to be done just right, I’ll just spend a few minutes on twitter first”.  Who says that it has to take me a half hour or that it had to be a perfect article? What is perfect anyway? Had I taken those innocent “few minutes” to jump on Twitter first, potentially it could have led to surfing the internet for an hour and not staying on task! Twitter has its place on my daily-to-do list and staying on task and getting things done in order of priority for each day is much more productive.