The Art of Monkishness for the Small Business Owner

Adrian Monk is one of my favorite characters on television, probably because my husband resembles him so much … everything has to be “just so”! I catch reruns of “Monk” on the tube at least once a week, and I love how he uses his OCD mind, which is truly detail-oriented, to solve crimes. It has occurred to me more than once that small business owners could benefit from a little Monkishness to create a more efficient and productive business.

Small Business Owners and Adrian Monk
It’s true that Monk’s OCD tends to hinder rather than help him on a daily basis, since he spends so much time staying sanitary and clean. However, his “devil is in the details” approach is pretty useful for the small business owner.

Why? Well, think about this. How time do you spend looking for stuff (files, documents, phone numbers, etc.) that you’ve misplaced somewhere? How often do you dig around trying to find a business card? How many times have you tried to find that important email in the masses of them stacked in your inbox?

If you are like the typical small business owner, the answer is clear: a lot! The typical small business owner is a business-savvy risk taker who is adventurous but not necessarily organized. Lack of organization results in a lot of wasted time.

A Monkish Example
Let me give you a simple example. At the moment we are in Cancun, vacationing for 5 weeks. We have digital room keys. The first few days, I just carelessly laid my room key anywhere that was handy, often dropping it, along with sunglasses, sunscreen, and lip balm, on the counter or night stand. Sometimes I left it on the kitchen counter or dining room table of our condo. Wherever.

Those few days I spent at least 15 minutes per day looking for that darned key! Not that it makes a big difference on vacation, but it illustrated an important point: not knowing where stuff is wastes a lot of time!

My husband and I decided after a few days to always put our room keys on top of the television so we wouldn’t waste time looking for them. After all, looking for our keys one day made us late for a taco party!

Tools for the Monkish Small Business Owner
Misplacing a room key is a small matter, but throw a few of these “time wasters” into your business day and you’ll easily lose an hour or more hunting down stuff that should be at your fingertips. Luckily, there are a number of useful tools for the small business owner who wants to be more like Adrian Monk. Here are a few of my favorites.

Password Agent
This encrypted software safely stores your login and password information, as well as notes about anything important. If you are like the average small business owner, then your online accounts abound. With this software, when you need to login to a website, all you have to do is open it and access your login information. Because this software is encrypted and lives on your computer rather than in your browser, it gives you an added layer of protection. This software comes in a free “Lite” version, which allows you to store a limited number of records, or a full version which gives you unlimited records. Free downloads are available at Tucows and other software download sites.

Chaos Intellect
I recently purchased this software for contact management and email list management. The software is quite inexpensive and allows you to easily store contact information about customers, vendors, and business partners. Best of all, it allows you to easily group contacts and send emails to entire groups at a time. The email-sending function on this software throttles the sending speed, so you don’t overwhelm your email server. Finally, contact records are linked to documents, emails, and any other form of correspondence, so that each contact record automatically stores a full record of every email or piece of correspondence sent. Compared to better-known but costlier contact management software programs, this program is a good buy.

Memo to Me
I love this online software because through it I can program email reminders to myself, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or on a specific date. I don’t like to have “reminder software” running in the background because it often eats up RAM, but having reminders come through email is convenient, since I check email at least twice a day. The software is available for an inexpensive subscription fee or you can get the free lite version.

I adore all three of these software programs because they keep all my necessary information at my fingertips. If you’ve got some nifty tools that help you be a more Monkish small business owner, I’d love to hear about it. As always, the pursuit of a more productive business life that allows more time for fun is ongoing!

P.S. If you’d like to know why I’m down in Cancun, Mexico for five weeks (and how I afford it), drop me a line. I love to connect with people about this!

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Tags: Adrian Monk, small business, small business owners, software for small business owners

How Five Ideas per Day Might Save Your Small Business

Here is something to think about:

One of the most successful businessmen I have ever had the pleasure to talk to, Bob Block, credits his success in great part to his practice of developing five ideas per day to improve his businesses.

This is a practice he developed when he was just starting out as a salesperson in a mid-western state. He would think of five ideas, every single day, for improving his business.

While he admits that most of the ideas were worthless (about 95% of them), the few that were valuable were fairly priceless.

With small business owners struggling to keep their heads above water, don’t you think this practice might help generate innovative new ways to do small business?

The Value of Five Small Business Ideas per Day
I’ve recently started this practice and I can already see the benefits to my small businesses, and to me as a small business owner. Here are the benefits I have discovered so far:

• I’m forced to think outside the box (all the “in the box” ideas were used up in the first few days)
• I practice making mistakes every day, since most of the ideas are useless and can be considered “mistakes” … thus mistakes become an accepted part of learning to improve my businesses
• I think of things only crazy people would think of, and historically crazy ideas are often the ones that result in quantum leaps in the business world
• Many good small ideas pop up, and these ideas are useful for helping me patch up the “leaks” in my businesses, whether they relate to excess spending or lack of linkage between my online media outposts
• This process prevents me from being lazy and conducting “business as usual,” which I tend to do when I think I’m too tapped-out to do more.

I really like this process and it has produced some excellent ideas for my small business. What about you? Care to give it a whirl?

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Photo credit: Free Digital Photos

Tags: five ideas for small business owners, small business ideas

Small Business Owners: Stop Spending Money on Stupid Stuff Just Because You Can

As the economy slides headlong into the dumper, it amazes me to watch small business owners continue to spend money on stupid stuff … just because they can or just because they always have. I can make this statement with impunity because I’m one of them!

What Constitutes “Stupid Stuff” in a Cash-Poor Economy?
So let me clarify what I mean by “stupid stuff.” Stupid stuff equals goods and services that your small business used to buy but, in today’s economy, which it can no longer afford.

I’ve recently gone through my small business expenditures and come up with a list of “stupid stuff” that my small business is no longer going to buy. I’ve listed some examples below. It is by no means a complete list, nor is in prioritized order, but it does cover a wide gamut of “stuff” just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about. Stupid stuff for my small business includes:

- extravagant holiday gifts for business partners
- fancy business cards
- business services that don’t come with a full estimate or fixed rate
- accounting and other services that could be had for less or for barter
- pretty pens (a weakness of mine)
- impulse buys (who needs a third Palm Pilot?)
- 80% of my business meetings over coffee or lunch (I can meet and not eat)
- colored anything just because they are prettier than white (file folders, for instance)
- office munchies for me and the crew

As I said this list isn’t comprehensive, but it does give you and idea of how my small business could save some cash in this economy. On the other hand, I am increasing small business expenditures in certain departments, despite the economy.

What Isn’t “Stupid Stuff” in This Economy?
Just because I am reducing small business expenses in some areas does not mean that my small business does not spend money on anything. In fact, I have increased expenditures in certain areas of my small business. These include:

- online courses in online marketing
- a small business spending savvy course
- backup equipment to safeguard business data
- software to improve the efficiency and data analysis for my marketing efforts

The ruler by which I measure whether my small business spending is “stupid or savvy” is whether it ultimately goes toward the bottom line. A third electronic gadget, while pink and very pretty, does not qualify. A software package that improves the “white hat” quality of my online marketing efforts definitely qualifies. See the difference?

If you have any guidelines of your own for small business spending which differentiate between stupid and savvy, I’d love to hear about them. Leave me a comment and let me know!

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Photo credit: Free Digital Photos

Tags: small business expenditures, small business expenses, small business spending

How to be an Efficient Little Twerp in Small Business

I’m kind of a manic-depressive small business owner, sometimes super-focused and other times distracted to pieces … not a good personality type for running a small business. I figured this out about myself a long time ago and realized that the only way I would ever succeed in small business is to become this:

An efficient little twerp.

What’s an Efficient Little Twerp?
“Efficient little twerp” is the phrase a friend recently used to describe me in the way that I run my small businesses. Being an efficient little twerp is how I manage to be successful in my small businesses despite my major personality flaws, and boils down to three things:

1. Being good or hiring someone better.
2. Knowing the devil is in the details.
3. Accepting AFGOs as part of business (Another Friggin’ Growth Opportunity)

So these three things make me an efficient little twerp and allow my small businesses to run smoothly. They might help you, too, if you run small businesses and suffer from some sort of personality flaws. For instance, manic-depressive cycles are just one of mine. I’m also a lazy, arrogant, in need of external validation, and a host of other foibles. Any of these sound familiar to you? In any case, here are three little rules to being an efficient little twerp in small business that may help.

1. Being Good or Hiring Someone Better
If small business owners are to be faulted in one major area, it’s usually that we believe we are super-heroes and can do EVERYTHING for our businesses. Not only can we do our main area of expertise, but feel we can also do marketing, strategizing, bookkeeping and accounting, customer relations, business development, legal work, and heavy lifting.

Not gonna happen.

We may be able to do all of these things, but chances are that we won’t do all of them well. Part of being an effective little twerp in small business is figuring out what you’re good at, and hiring people to do the rest.

For instance, I’m fairly good at writing, marketing, and online interaction. I suck at legal work, accounting, and phone-based customer support. These I hire out to people, which makes me sane, allows my business to run smoothly, and, of course, makes me the efficient little twerp that I am.

2. Knowing the Devil is in the Details
Having just said that I hire out the work at which I’m not very proficient, I have to now add a caveat. To be an efficient little twerp, I also have to understand something about the work that I’m outsourcing the others. I have to understand the details of the work I hire out, even if I don’t do it myself.

Here’s a prime example: a week before corporate taxes were due, my current accountant (not the new one I’m going with in the coming year) call me up and tell me I owe a few grand in corporate taxes. This did not sound in the least correct to me. I had sent in a payment with my extension early in the year, and didn’t understand why the taxes I still owed were so much higher than the extension. Having done my own corporate taxes for a few years, I smelled a rat.

Instead of just “rolling with the punches,” I pulled up the tax figures I had sent to the accountant and compared them to the corporate return. Bingo. I caught an accounting error where a few income sources had been doubled, which accounted for the major tax I supposedly owed. I called the accountant, got it straightened out, and now have a tax credit.

So even though I hire out my accounting work (because I know I can’t keep up with current tax law), I know enough about HOW small business accounting works to know when something is wrong. The devil is in the details, and this case, not knowing the details could have cost my business a few thousand in unnecessary taxes. Sure, I would have eventually gotten a refund, but why pay the government unnecessarily in this cash-tight economy? Now that would not be typical “efficient little twerp” behavior.

3. Accepting AFGOs as Part of Business
This is a PG-rated article, so I can’t say what AFGO really stands for, but Another Friggin’ Growth Opportunity kind of gives you the idea, right? Part of being an efficient little small business twerp is figuring out when you’ve made a gaffe, learning from it, and then moving on.

A lot of small business owners are good at figuring out that they’ve screwed up, but then they stay in “screw up land” forever. So you screwed up. Big deal. Learn from it and move on. The other day I got myself banned from an online site. Bummer … my online marketing activities really took a hit. I researched the steps needed to get unbanned, but after reading what everyone else had to say, realized that it wasn’t going to be possible in the short term. So what’s an efficient little twerp to do? Move on. There are lots of branches on the online marketing tree, so if one branch gets chopped of, just focus on some other branches for a while. No biggie and no only. It’s how I learn to better run and promote my small businesses. AFGO. It’s a good thing. Really. And every efficient little twerp not only accepts them, but eventually learns to welcome them.

I hope this small rant on the three rules I’ve discovered about being an efficient little twerp in business may in some way bring a smile to your face, give you a giggle, and maybe even help out a bit!

If you have any suggestions on being a twerp, or otherwise running a small business better, cheaper, or more enjoyably, please, leave a comment. I’d love to hear!

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Tags: efficient little twerp, small business, small business owner

Triple Your Small Business Capabilities Fast Without Adding Staff

So there is a small business guy around here I really admire - Mike of All Wet Sprinklers. This economy has been just as tough on Mike as on every other small business owner. People are slamming their wallets shut, and fewer people want new sprinkler systems installed on their properties.

So Mike, being the totally ingenious Italian dude that he is, decided that he would expand the services his small businesses offered so he could get more work. The sprinkler system market was shrinking, so Mike decided to expand into other markets, including landscaping, masonry, supplying firewood, and dog walking (actually, I’m not sure if he actually walks dogs or he’s just pulling my leg).

How to Triple Your Small Business Capabilities
So how did Mike go from sprinkler dude to landscaping, rock-working, firewood dude? Well, he didn’t take on any new staff. Instead, he partnered up with a couple of other small business folks in the area who were also feeling the economic pinch.

Chris, a stone mason, knows how to build you a giant wall in nothing flat. Mike’s significant other, Candy, works a regular job but knows landscaping like the back of her hand, so she helps Mike with the landscaping plans when she’s off work. And then there’s some other dude I haven’t met who does the firewood thing.

So Mike shows up to give us an estimate on a little irrigation project for our back field. He’s got Chris with him. We find out Chris is a stone mason and we ask him to give us an estimate on putting our patio and planter rocks back together. The rocks were falling so fast we just about needed to put up a “Danger: Falling Rock” sign. Chris and Mike gave us estimates and we gave them thumbs up.

They tackle the irrigation project first. Mike knows all about irrigation so he does most of the planning and buys the right parts. Chris does the grunt work. Then they move onto the rock work. Here, Chris mixes the all-important mortar and Mike does the grunt work. At the end of the jobs, they divvy up my check. Each of them made less on the total job than they would have alone, but each earned more than an unemployment check.

Mike’s now working on getting me some firewood from his buddy. Same deal … split the check, earn less than usual, but bring in solid work in a lean economy.

See how it works? Can you see how that might work for your small business? Got any lean and hungry business associates who might want to partner up?

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Tags: small business capability, small business owner, triple your small business capabilities

Three Crucial Questions for Small Business Owners

There’s no doubt that most organizations, from small businesses to large corporations, are struggling. It’s been a darn hard time for most people. And yet giving up just really isn’t an option for many small business owners since the job market doesn’t offer a lot of hope and many retirement plans have suffered serious setbacks.

But even though the economic situation is less than perfect, it does present us small business owners with a perfect opportunity to ask some penetrating questions. It allows us to ask ourselves what is important about our small businesses. It helps us remember why we started our small businesses, and determine whether those reasons are still important to us.

That’s why it’s important for us small business owners to ask themselves three crucial questions. The answers to these questions will either get you back to feeling great about your small business or clarify the fact that you need to move into some other form of livelihood.

An Example: My Four Small Businesses
For instance, I run four small businesses. Three are well-established and require fairly passive management on a daily basis. The fourth is a startup, not quite a year old, and one that I hope to grow within the next two years. The startup takes some fairly active work to keep afloat, not to mention monetary investment, but I don’t resent the investment or the elbow grease. Having done three other startups, which are now established businesses, I know the length of time it takes to launch a startup. I know the patience required.

On the other hand, there are days when I just want to give up the ghost and call it quits. Some days I get very little done or I’m just too tired to even stagger over to my cigar stash for a relaxing puff. It’s off to bed so I can get up and do it all over again tomorrow. These are the days I ask myself, “Why the hell am I doing this?” These are the days when the two years I’ve given myself to build my startup seem like the equivalent of living in purgatory …forever. These are the days when I have to sit down and reflect on why I have small businesses, and why they are important to me.

Three Questions for Small Business Owners
On those DODs (days of despair, not Department of Defense), I ask myself three questions:

1. What do I get from my small businesses and what do I pay?

2. Are the original reasons I started these businesses still important, and if not, are there new reasons to keep going?

3. Is there a way to change my business model to fit this new economy?

My Answers
It would be too long-winded and boring to list my answers to those questions for all my small businesses, but I will give you the answers for one business, just for grins. So one business I have is an online school that teaches magic (like spellwork and Tarot) and shamanic traditions. Answers to the three questions are as follows:

1. What do I get from my small businesses and what do I pay?
I get to spread this esoteric information to people all over the world, especially in countries where this kind of information isn’t readily available, like Nigeria and New Zealand. I get to play a part in spreading magic into the world. I also get a solid paycheck.

Aside from regular operating expenses, I pay in elbow grease … in the attempt to reach the right audience. The information we offer is for people who really want to learn the art and science of magic and shamanism, not for people who want a free online spell to help them win the lottery. I pay to develop my own patience and tolerance while wading through hundreds of “send me a free spell” emails.

2. Are the original reasons I started these businesses still important, and if not, are there new reasons to keep going?
Yes. Not only do we have a group of advanced students who have been with us for more than a decade and really take part in bringing magic and shamanism into the world, but teaching the classes and creating the materials keeps me in touch with my own spiritual practice.

3. Is there a way to change my business model to fit this new economy?
Definitely. Offering the information in different online forms, from YouTube videos to webinars, is the way I’m going. It makes the information more readily available, and can be transmitted at the speed of light. It takes work to convert the material to online form, but it’s happening little by little.

What About You?
So those are my answers, good, bad, or ugly. What about you? How is your small business treating you, and how are you treating it? Is it time to re-evaluate your reasons for owning a small business? Is it time to change the way you run your small business? Most importantly, do you still remember what is important about your small business?

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Tags: small business owners, small business questions

Finding a Good Small Business Accountant

A while back I wrote a blog post on finding a great accountant for your small business. Recently, I decided to take my own advice. I have used the same accounting service for almost a decade, and have always had a great relationship with them.

However, I found that as my small business focus shifted away from a “bricks and mortar” city environment to an online environment mixed with country living, I needed an accountant with different specialties and skills.

Where to Find a Good Small Business Accountant
I’m of the generation who “Googles” everything first. It hardly ever occurs to me to peel open a phone book if online access is just a few clicks away. Digging around on Google, I found several “accountant search” sites, and entered my request on several. Most sites asked for the following information:

- number and types of businesses I owned (sole proprietor, S-corp, etc.)
- number of employees and contractors I employed
- average revenue numbers
- accounting specialties being sought (home business, agricultural, government contracting, etc.)

I was surprised and pleased to receive both an email and a phone call from a representative at GoodAccountants.com. Shahana Faridi, my representative, asked several questions and said she would get back to me within a week with one or more suitable accountants. In fact, she got back to me within a couple of days, and set up an appointment for me with some local accountants.

I had thought she was setting up a phone appointment, and marked it as such in my calendar. Boy was I surprised when Denise and Janni showed up in person! The interview went well, and I will soon be finalizing my agreements for them to handle my small business accounting needs in the coming year.

Is It Time To Reconsider Your Accountant?
The difference between a suitable accountant for your small business and an unsuitable one can be vast. It can be the difference between paying in a huge chunk in taxes every year versus paying a much smaller sum. It can be the difference between sleeping well at night knowing your accountants will back you up with the IRS should the need ever arise, and sweating at night wondering if the other shoe is going to drop soon.

For me, an accountant suitable for my various small business enterprises means someone who knows about home business, the livestock business, the publishing business, and S-corporations as well as C-corporations. I asked a number of probing questions, all of which Denise and Janni answered to my extreme satisfaction. It was a good time to change accounting services, and I am looking forward to my new relationship with Denise and Janni.

What about you? Have your small business accounting needs changed in the recent past, and is it time to re-evaluate your accounting relationship?

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Tags: good small business accountant, goodaccountants.com

Now is a Time for Mavericks and Old-Fashioned Values

It pays to be a maverick these days because nothing seems to work like it used to. Sure, a lot of people are doing their best ostrich act, sticking their heads in the sand and hoping that when the alarm beeps in the morning the world will have returned to its normal order.

Not gonna happen, folks. “Business as usual” isn’t going to cut the mustard in this new economy, this time of prolonged uncertainty. By the way, did you know that prolonged uncertainty is one of the greatest causes of stress a human being can suffer? They’ve done studies that prove it. So here we are, in a time of prolonged uncertainty, and we are, well, uncertain.

We live in a strange emotional mix that resembles those multi-layered cocktails: hope floats on top, “business as usual” hovers somewhere in the middle layers, and at the bottom is the dismal swamp of despair. We try to drink in only hope, but if you’ve ever tried drinking one of these layered cocktails, you know that as soon as you tip the glass you get a little of each layer. So we swallow the hope with the despair and end up doing “business as usual.”

Maverick Tricks and Old-Fashioned Values for Small Business Owners
As small business owners, we may not know what we need during these times, but it’s not the usual stuff. If you’re doing business by rote, stop! Times have changed, and your small business needs to as well.

I’ve recently been on some teleconferences and webinars offered by small business leaders who are expert in everything from online marketing and social media to accounting and cash-flow generation. While the topics of these seminars are all different, a peculiar theme is emerging in all of them:

… small business owners need to both become mavericks and return to old-fashioned values …

This may seem a contradiction, yet it is what those who are successful are saying.

Maverick Tricks for Small Business Owners
Let’s take the maverick part first. The webinars and teleconferences are all about maverick-ism — how small business owners need to do things differently. For instance, one webinar covered 13 new ways small business owners can ask for and get paid by their clients more quickly. This is important because cash flow means the difference between staying alive and closing the doors on your small business. Are these methods always polite, conventional, or socially acceptable? No, a lot of them are not. But these are new times and small business owners and clients alike are adapting to maverick ways of doing business.

Another webinar introduced the maverick idea of creating your own hedge funds in your small business. Southwest Airlines has been hedging fuel prices forever: they pre-buy large quantities of fuel when it’s less expensive, and then take delivery of that fuel when prices go up. Small business owners can create hedge funds in a slightly different manner. Instead of pre-buying something in bulk, you stash money away in a hedge fund when prices are low, say for inventory items. Then when the prices go up, you use the money in your hedge fund to keep your cash flow going. So there are a lot of ways to use new maverick techniques to keep your small business afloat.

The Value of Old-Fashioned Values
At the same time that these experts are teaching maverick methods for small business owners, they are also talking about a return to old-fashioned values. In a word, they are saying that we have become lazy. Recent studies show that more people believe that they can “get rich quick” with a small business than ever before.

Despite the wise words of business leaders like Robert Kiyosaki, the majority of people who start small businesses today expect to “make it big” within a year or two. Kiyosaki warns small business owners to set aside at least 5 years before expecting a pay back. Back in the day, it was expected that a small business was a lifetime endeavor, not a get rich quick scheme. “Get rich quick” is a bad idea … it’s how we ended up in this financial mess to begin with.

So if you are starting a small business or you already have one, prepare to dig in. Don’t spend all of your resources at once, preserve cash and cash flow, and give your business at least five years to start paying you back for your efforts. Those are the old-fashioned values that made the U.S. of A. one of the strongest economic forces in the world. To those values we will need to return if we want to maintain that status.

The Maverick in Me and My Small Businesses
As for me, despite all the flak I’ll probably catch for saying this, I’m profoundly happy about this economic correction. It has forced me to make changes I have wished to make for years, but have never had the motivation or necessity to make. I am grateful for the outer economic forces that provide the motivation for the changes I am making to my small business and my personal financial situation. So be it!

What about you? See any sunshine yet?

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Tags: maverick, old-fashioned values, small business owners, small businesses, Southwest Airlines

3 Time Management Tips for Small Business Owners

Time is one of the most precious commodities for a small business owner. Between business development, client work, employee or contract worker management, marketing, and fire-fighting, there’s hardly enough time for coffee and bathroom breaks.

In fact, recent studies show that time management issues are among the main obstacles to small business owners being successful and keeping the doors to their businesses open. So what’s a small business owner to do? Here are some time management tips I recently gathered from a workshop sponsored by my local chamber of commerce.

Tip #1 - Decide What is Important
Most small business owners go to the office and fall into a black hole of disorganized chaos from which they emerge, sometime late in the day, having done a lot but made questionable progress towards definite goals. The time management expert at the seminar suggested that we small business owners plan our work weeks before they start … like on Friday afternoon or during the weekend.

We should decide what major goals we wanted to accomplish during the week, and what amount of time we were willing to commit to each goal. Then we need to schedule that time into our calendars, carving chunks of time when we did not allow disturbances like phone calls or checking email.

Tip #2 - Check the Calendar
A calendar is only useful if you check it and follow it. The time management expert stressed that while some small business owners are good at making plans for the week, they are terrible at following those plans. She suggested we check our calendars first thing in the morning, mid-morning, at lunch, mid-afternoon, and at the end of the time. While this may seem a little anal retentive or remind us too much of Adrian Monk, it seems that most small business owners easily get derailed without this level of persistent checking. So make your calendar, and then check, double-check, and triple-check to make sure you are following it.

Tip #3 - Avoid Fire-Fighting
I love this part. The time management expert gave us a mantra: “A lack of planning on someone else’s part does not constitute an emergency on your part.” I like this. Small business owners who do their own planning usually end up fighting fires because someone else forgot to plan. Whether it is a client, an employee, a friend, or a business partner who forgot to plan, learn to ignore it. Follow your own calendar because fire-fighting equals lost time, which means poor productivity on your part. Unless the emergency means a loss of thousands of dollars of revenue, learn to walk away!

There were a lot of other time management tips offered at this seminar, but these three seemed to be the most relevant and interesting, hence they are included here.

Do you have some time management tips to share with small business owners? If so, please share!

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Tags: small business, small business owners, time management tips

Do a Dreaded Task per Week - Improve Work Productivity, Decrease Procrastination

Doing a dreaded task once a week is a big time key to success in business and in life. Now don’t get me wrong … most of the time I’m a huge believer in positive thinking and an enthusiastic outlook on life. But, like most people, there are certain tasks associated with my business that I dread. I’d rather muck horse manure for 8 hours straight than do some of these tasks. I’d rather join Mike Rowe for a stint on “Dirty Jobs” than tackle these dreaded tasks. And that’s silly, considering that most of these tasks take an hour or two to complete. Can you say procrastination?

Why Doing a Dreaded Task Weekly Improves Work Productivity
There are many reasons that simply facing and doing a dreaded task is a huge key to success. There is, of course, the common sense reason that the dreaded task usually must be done. It is a requirement. It’s not a “want to” kind of thing.

For instance, in business, this might be something as monotonous and regular as calculating and paying the quarterly sales tax for your business. Is it hard to do? No. Is it boring? Hell yes. Is it easy to get distracted? Totally! And yet, if it doesn’t get done the penalties are, well, unpleasant to say the least. You have to pay a fine, for one thing, and then there’s the extra paperwork that has to be submitted in triplicate with the fine. And that doesn’t even cover the humiliation of being called on the carpet by the state government. Yuck. So on a common sense level, doing the dreaded task is a good thing. Procrastination is a bad thing.

On a psychological level, doing a dreaded task gives you the equivalent psychological satisfaction as finally cleaning out your sock drawer and throwing away all the lonesome socks that have lost their mates. Vacuuming the lint receptacle in your clothes dryer runs a close second in terms of psychological satisfaction. And when you are a psychologically satisfied small business owner, your work productivity is sky high. Your employees will breathe a sigh a relief, thereby saving you from some kind of random employee-generated harassment lawsuit that might otherwise come out of the blue.

Then there’s the third reason to do a dreaded task rather than fall back on procrastination: it will save you time later. Here’s a perfect example of this. For a long time now I’ve needed to upgrade my contact management software. I needed something that included some more up-to-date features, like mail merge, integration with document and financial software, and the ability to handle multiple client contact lists. I had avoided researching, buying, and installing such software because it required a lot of focused attention from me. You know, some days as a business owner I get up on the wrong side of the bed, and I’d rather be flipping hamburgers for a living than running a business.

But after a lot of “I’d rather be flipping burgers” procrastination days, I finally got around to researching and installing said software. True, when all was said and done, and the software was installed with the data fully migrated, I ended up investing about 12 hours into the project. But boy was it ever worth it. With a couple of clicks of my mouse, I can select a financial document, share it with select contacts, monitor their reply, and have an auto-response waiting in the wings. It takes all of 3 minutes to do all of that. So for 12 hours of dreaded activity, I have a future of efficient work … which is good ’cause I get up wanting to be the hamburger girl pretty often these days.

Pick Your Dreaded Task of the Week
Every single Sunday, yes that lovely Sabbath before the hectic work week begins, I take a few minutes to contemplate my dreaded activity of the week. I’ve gotten so used to this that I actually look upon this choice as a kind of torturous meditation. It’s like the medicine your mom used to give you — it tastes so bad but the results are soooo good. So I pick my task, and I put that task on my calendar, with a big “D” next to it, for the word Dread. Then, when the appointed day comes around, I do the dreaded task. I grunt, groan, moan, and complain, but it has netted some spectacular results in the work productivity department. I’ve done this for long enough now that people close to me know what when D-day hits, they should leave the office until I’m done.

Now doesn’t that sound like fun? Have you got a big D that you do every week? What kinds of things make your Dread List? Drop me a line — I always take comfort in that sort of communication because, as you well know, misery loves company!

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Tags: procrastination problem, productivity solutions, small business