Killer Distractions working from home
My recommendation when working from home is to give yourself time. Don’t set deadlines to your success. Don’t stop before you achieve what you want to achieve. Far too often I see folks “giving up” when they are on the brink of success, they just don’t quite realize it.
And I will leave you with one final statement about time.
“You typically will overestimate your results, and underestimate the time it takes to achieve these results.”
Distractions Are The Business KILLER
We all have busy lives. Not a day goes by that I don’t hear about a multitude of distractions working from home that someone has been prevented from achievement. We all have distractions, whether they are preventable (social media, TV, etc), and non-preventable (family commitments).
What I would like you to do is take a moment and outline All the distractions that you have that could in some ways take you away from your business.
So don’t include ANYTHING that relates to your actual business.
LIST OF DISTRACTIONS
- YOUR BIG LIST HERE
Then take each of these, decide which ones are preventable, and which ones are non-preventable.
LIST OF PREVENTABLE DISTRACTIONS
- YOUR LIST HERE
LIST OF NON-PREVENTABLE DISTRACTIONS
- YOUR LIST HERE
This is something that you can do with regularity. I tend to keep these in check when I am feeling overload. Overload is more often than not mismanagement of time, or letting some preventable distractions consume too much of our lives.
Here is how my current list looks:
DISTRACTION
- Family Commitments.
- Spend Time With Daughters.
- Going Out to Dinner.
- Checking Social Media.
- Cooking Meals.
- Hanging Out With Friends.
- Going to Gym.
- Playing Basketball.
- Organizing Renovations for House.
- Vacations.
- Driving to Run Errands.
- Reading (to Learn)
- Watching TV.
- Shopping Online.
- Checking Emails.
- Surfing the Web.
- Reading Senseless Gossip
- Going to Coffee Shop.
- Cleaning.
PREVENTABLE DISTRACTION
- Going Out to Dinner. (less frequently)
- Checking Social Media.
- Hanging Out With Friends. (make some sacrifices when I can)
- Checking Emails. (less frequently)
- Driving to Run Errands. (organize to do all in one day)
- Shopping for Senseless Stuff Online.
- Watching TV.
- Surfing the Web.
- Reading Senseless Gossip
NON PREVENTABLE DISTRACTION LIST
- Family Commitments.
- Spend Time With Daughters.
- Cooking Meals.
- Going to Gym.
- Playing Basketball. (I never take exercise of the non-preventable)
- Organizing Renovations for House.
- Reading to Learn.
- Vacations. (everybody needs a break!)
- Going to Coffee Shop. (I get work done there!)
- Cleaning.
If I were to suggest where I believe most of my waste in my current life is, it is social media, and checking emails. If I could limit my exposure (on phone, desktop), and I could check my emails 5 times per day (instead of 50), through the course of a year I would probably have a few extra WEEKS to work.
A Little Time Waste, Adds Up to Weeks when working from home
Something that has always fascinated me in terms of wasting time, you don’t realize how much it adds up until you do a calculation.
If you spend 1.5 hours on social media per day, and you spend another 0.5 hours checking emails, there is 2 hours.
Multiple that by 365 days in a year. You have 730 hours of “waste” in your year, in other words, you have an entire 30 days of waste in your life. That is an ENTIRE month, 24 hours per day, that you could have been dedicating directly to your business!
Shaving a few distractions out of your schedule can to lead to a massive amount of freed up time which you can then dedicate to your business.
Productivity. Steps to Amplify Your Production
How can you do a lot, in a little amount time. Productivity goes hand in hand with the last topic, distractions. It also has a lot to do with building out list of goals.
I would be lying if I said I was perfect. Far from it. I do believe that even with my imperfections I am able to work much more efficiently than most, and produce more than most.
So what are some main productivity tasks I do.
Goal Setting. This is probably the main thing I do that leads to my productivity, in particular daily/weekly goals. I have found over the years that if I don’t have goals every day, I get WAY less done.
And if I don’t start the beginning of my week without mapping out what I “want” to accomplish in the week ahead, I end up completely scattered and inefficient.
But in order for these goals to be useful, you must not add additional goals to these. Create your list, stick to it, and don’t let “other” stuff find its way into it. If you let other tasks constant overtake your current focus goals, then you are going to also notice a significant hit in the productivity.
Productivity Tip: Set Daily and Weekly Goals. Map them out.
Do What You Hate.
I know hate is a strong word, and I don’t like to do it. But in business there are always going to be tasks that you really don’t love doing. On an almost weekly basis, I spend time doing the things that I a don’t like doing (usually because I am not good at it yet).
In life, we have the tendency to do things that we are good at. If we are good at a particular sport, we usually don’t spend time trying to get good at another. If we are good at one job/career, we typically do not get up and try a completely different career.
The main reason. It’s hard…and we are not good at it….YET.
If you only do what you like doing, you are going to have a tough time in business. A successful business will require you to wear many different “hats” or roles.
Do what you love, but also invest time doing the things that you don’t necessarily love but you know are a critical part of your business. It will lead to a great deal of forward progress and a lot more productivity.
Set Time Limits on Particular Tasks.
Have you ever found yourself spending a day writing an article that should have been an hour job. That is probably because you are not setting strict time limits on particular tasks.
One thing I like to do when it comes to writing is set aside 30-60 minutes where I sit down and just write. No distractions. Nothing else is my focus. No emails. No social media. No research. Nothing.
Productivity goes through the roof. I can usually polish off 2-3x what I would be able to accomplish with this focused “time limit” approach. Try it out, it works brilliantly well.
Avoid Being a Multi-Tasker.
People that say they are “great” multi-taskers tend to be those that are the least productive and the most inefficient. Those that can sustain focus throughout a task, are those that can accomplish a great deal more.
Want to write an article, write it. Don’t try to research, manage social media, text on your phone, and eat your dinner (as I mentioned in the last section). Focus JUST on writing an article. Close all other tabs within your browser and focus on just that one task.
If you want to build a solid ad campaign in Bing Ads, Google Ads or Facebook Ads. focus on just that. Nothing else.
Start doing this I think you will be surprised as to how much more efficiency you have in your life.
Work Your Butt Off!
There will be ups and downs in your business, but don’t ever let yourself get beat as a result of lack of effort.
That I would say is the #1 contributor to failure I have seen after working with 100,000’s of folks online. Effort, and sustaining a high level of effort over time will have a profound and very positive impact on your success.
Effort alone will take you wherever you want to go within the online business world.
Fear Being Scared is Healthy.
In terms of your online business, what are you scared of? I am not talking spiders, or gremlins, rather tasks that you can associate directly to your business. Is it creating content? Is it building a website? Is it code? Is it failure? What exactly is it?
Let’s address this right now. If you are not currently successful, create a list of things that you are currently scared of happening.
I am scared of ___________.
If you have 10 things, that is fine. If you have one, you have one and that is fine as well.
These are typically all related to the fear of “not knowing”. Although I am not a fear and anxiety expert, I can tell you how I have overcome the idea of fear in business. I intentionally fear one, and only one thing.
I Fear My Own Inaction.
The worse thing I feel I can do is not doing anything at all. If I am stagnant, so will my productivity, my success, and my ability to establish any level of expertise at anything.
Doing nothing is easy. That is the route most people elect when they are faced with something that is difficult, and that is optional. I mean, really. You don’t have to be great at anything if you don’t want to, it is up to you to take onus of your own actions and achieve a great deal of success.
Fear Tip: So my suggestion when it comes to fear in business, fear one thing. Inaction.
Fear is not always a bad thing.
A certain level of fear is OK.
I personally have always been scared of failing in business. I have a lot riding on the success of my business, including my livelihood, disappointing those around me, and also disappointing my business partner (Carson) if i personally underperform in my duties. I also have great respect for the impact that I can have on other people’s lives through the content I create, so I fear not delivering to you.
But I don’t let this stop me from taking action. In fact, it drives me to take MORE action and selflessly provide more. It has the opposite impact for folks that have created success in their lives. It can lead to more practice, more diligence in what you do, more effort, and ultimately more resulting success.
There is a famous Michael Jordan quote that I like to reference and that I have naturally let have an ongoing impact in my life since I was 14 years old.
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Let that resonate for a second. The greatest player, and potentially the greatest athlete of all time failed a lot. He failed when it counted most, and so a lot. But the reason for his success, he attributes to his ability to fail and his lack of fear when it came to failure at something the most critical moments in his career.
That is what success is made up of. Let fear drive you to do more, and do it with more frequency.
Expertise. You’re Not Yet, and That’s OK.
What are you great at something? To be honest, it doesn’t really matter.
You don’t need to answer this, because it is NOT about what you about what you ARE great at something, your success is driven by what you WANT to be great at something.
Again, your success is not dependent on what you are great at something at something this current moment. It is what you are going to be great at something in the future and the path to you working towards that greatness.
If you look at something any very successful person, regardless of their trade, one characteristic that you will find to be consistent with all of them is that they are experts at something what they do.
The other day I had to call an arborist to my house, for those that don’t know what it is, it is someone that cuts down trees in a surgical sort of way. Often times it will be for trees that pose a risk to a structure, like a house or risks falling down and hurting someone.
Before they got started, the owner of the company came to my house and did a walk-around of the work I wanted to be done.
He knew every type of tree, shrub, soil, and the surroundings, His knowledge of how they grew , the source of water they required and the strength and integrity of the trees and shrubs. He knew how to trim branches, naturally and understood the idea of sunlight, and maximising that, while sustaining shade when needed.
In my case, I had some very difficult trees (or so I thought) to cut down. He was not only the expert, but he was able to talk to me in a way that I understood.
I was intrigued by what they did. The tools they did, and how they could leave the property in a way where I couldn’t even notice they were there.
These are things that, as a company, they learned over the course of 35 years. You become an expert with time and as you educate yourself about your niche. An good level of expertise can be established with the amount of information we have online, and the amount of expert help/resources that we have access to.
Don’t doubt your own ability. Every single expert, every single billionaire, every single famous person, every single person you look up to, once started with no skills at what they do. They established those very skills with time and enter into the online business world with the idea that you WILL become the expert. Many people will look up to you one day. Many people will view you as the expert.
It doesn’t take TIME to make money. It takes time to establish expertise and authority, and then MONEY happens with frequency and efficiency. Just remember that.
Whew…that’s it. A bit of a brain dump, but I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you found this post about the distractions of working from home insightful and of course, share any insights you have learned in your own journey through business. We all establish different skills, at different speeds, and use certainly tricks of the trade (often times without knowing it).
You have a bright future ahead of you within the online business world, if you want it and you are willing to overcome and master the main “business stuff” that nobody tells you about.
Good luck working from home!