This week has been somewhat of a doozy.
Between website issues, meetings, appointments and unexpected events, it hasn’t been the most productive one.
It happens to all of us. We sit down with our plan, our goals and our agenda and life gets in the way and we get derailed.
All the planning in the world won’t stop these thing from happening—that’s life!—but there are plenty of distractions we can stop from getting in the way of our progress.
If you’re a blogger or creative entrepreneur and want to make more progress, beware of these 5 things killing your productivity!
Consuming Too Much Content
The #1 distraction for so many creative entrepreneurs (myself included!) is the overconsumption of too much information.
Our world is sooooo saturated with info that’s right at our fingertips! It’s so easy to fall down the rabbit hole of consuming more and more.
Whether you’re on Pinterest pinning and then start downloading freebies galore or you’re subscribed to one-too-many irresistible sounding webinars, you have to put a stop to it.
Consuming too much content is not only a huge distraction, but it also stops you from creating your own!
I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve had or other bloggers I’ve talked to who are terrified of just starting because they’re paralyzed by fear and get stuck in education mode.
The Fix: Continuing to educate yourself is important, especially in this fast-changing market! But instead of binge-consuming content, choose one topic to focus on for a month (or a quarter) and ignore everything else that comes your way.
Another way to conquer the distractions is to set time/day limits. I like to use my Friday’s or Monday’s, for example, to read educational things, peruse Pinterest and catch up on my content consumption.
Lastly, set up an email address specifically for those freebies. This way, you can just refer to the content when you need it!
Not Focusing On Money-Producing Tasks
When you run your own business and are responsible for doing #allthethings it’s easy to fall into the trap of being productive, without really being productive.
In other words, you’re focusing on busy work that won’t move the needle forward in your business.
Tweaking your website is fun, but it’s not a money-producing task.
Neither is focusing on things like responding to emails, spending time on social media or updating old graphics.
In fact, I completely stopped my re-brand project when I realized how much of my non-productive time it was taking, and how it wasn’t contributing to my bottom line at this point in time.
It’s still on the project list but took a backseat for the time being as other, more important tasks came to the surface.
The Fix: Make it a point to focus on 1-3 money-making tasks a day.
A few examples of some money-making tasks include:
- Pitching brands or clients
- Writing a blog post promoting your services or affiliate links
- Creating a new opt-in
[Tweet “If the task you’re working on isn’t directly related to revenue, table it.”]
You can grab my free cheat sheet here on money-making tasks to focus on and busy work to avoid.
Not Batching Your Tasks
If you really want to be productive and feel like you’re making progress, you need to focus on batching your tasks.
It’s incredibly hard to switch gears from one thing to the next, and can make you feel a bit all over the place!
In fact, an article in Psychology Today says that switching tasks can cost you up to 40% of your productivity!
You can batch literally any part of your business. For example, I try to practice “Finance Friday’s” where I do my accounting at the end of the week. And I have an entire blog post on how to batch just your blog post writing tasks.
Even that one activity has multiple, tiny activities: research, writing, editing, outlining, graphic design, links, image sourcing—the list is long!
Many bloggers even have writing days or week-long “sprints” where they focus just on that task—writing.
Batching your projects improves efficiency, plain and simple.
And maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to pare down your browser tabs from 35 open ones to…5-10 🙂
Being an Unorganized Blogger
One of the hardest parts of getting started on your blogging journey is finding and creating systems that work for you. It’s an easy step to miss, and probably one of the most important.
There are loads of tools and systems out there to help you streamline your business and make you more productive, but don’t fall down the rabbit hole of trying to find the magic unicorn that will do it all and work for you.
Instead, give the system you’re trying some time to see if it actually works for you and your business.
RELATED: The Ultimate List of Blog Tools I Use
The Fix: At the bare minimum, I recommend you get yourself a blog planner. If you’re a paper planner person, check out this list of the best free blog planners.
More of a digital planner kind of person? They have plenty of digital blog planners on Etsy!
You really don’t need a ton of fancy tools and programs to just get started, it’s more important to actually use what you have and not get distracted by another new system or idea.
When you grow, you can start to look into fancier things like project management tools (Trello) or calendar scheduling programs like Acuity.
RELATED: The Ultimate Blog Organizing Toolkit
Not Taking Care of Yourself
Listen up, ladies: You’ve got to stop putting yourself last! Your business, your family and everyone around you suffers when you aren’t at your best. So this is your call to action to take care of yourself because it will increase your productivity.
It is damn hard to make progress when you’re running on little sleep, eating crappy food and all-around not feeling good about yourself. So take that 15-minute break to stretch, walk the dog, get outside, do yoga, whatever is your jam and then get back to work. It’ll be worth it, I promise.
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What do you think is holding back your productivity? Sound off in the comments below!!
