So if you’re having trouble focusing, there’s a couple of things you can do. I would suggest one of the first things to do is to set a stop time, so set an alarm for when the end of work is happening. That’s a time to transition into other activities like reading a book… ideally, not electrical activities, so that you can actually get good sleep. Because I think when it comes to entrepreneurs, one of the biggest contributors to this feeling of overwhelm and frustration and poor decision making is just simply lack of sleep.
So sleep is one of the first places I’d start. On a related note, I’d make sure you’re learning how to breathe properly. Because a lot of entrepreneurs are not breathing properly. We’re over breathing, mouth breathing, etc. We want to just breathe through our nose and we want to breathe a little more shallow than what we thought because this is going to make us more efficient.
And then we want to create a routine. The big myth that I fell for when I went online and left my day job was that I can now do anything I want, whenever I want, wherever I want. But the reality is, then things start to get overlooked or left aside. So what you want to do is really button down and partition blocks of time for yourself during the week. So my weekly schedule is a series of scheduled calls or deadlines that happen on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, which allows me to have the freedom of Friday, Saturday and Sunday away from any scheduled calls. They’re days for swimming with the kids or going to visit family or just doing nothing and not feeling guilty about it.
Because this is another thing that we learn as entrepreneurs: we think if we’re not working, we should feel guilty, because we’ve watched too much of this – some people call it struggle porn, you know, like these hustlers and grinders, and entrepreneur-types who give you this impression that they’re always working. If you’re not working, you’re somehow inferior. Well it’s such a load of BS. I find the morning and the afternoon blocks are the most effective. A good chunk of work very first thing in the day.
So not meditation, not journaling, not looking at the sky or whatever. Doing actual just work, just do an activity first thing and get it done. By 10 o’clock, you’re pretty much free. And then I like to do an activity chunk at the end of the day, where I’ve had my day to collect thoughts to do all the things to have guilt-free time off. And then I can sit down and do my work. But also I’ve got time then to be able to review what the team have been up to in my Slack, which is where we operate as a business. By deliberately having time away from the business when I get to it, I’m hungry for it. And I’m very focused on it. And the big challenge, if you’re not making progress, is you probably don’t know what to do.
So the first thing you want to do there is an activity around identifying what’s actually important. And you’ll discover that not all things are important. There is an 80:20 or beyond that there’s a 64:4. There’s very few things that are actually important. For me, it’s creating the occasional piece of content, and then serving my existing customers, keeping an eye on my team. That’s it. If I do those activities, I’ve got a multimillion dollar business. And I’m happy with that.
Next up, is sometimes we put off hard things, but it is some of the hard things that actually get the money. Strategy is a hard thing. Leadership in the beginning is a hard thing, but it certainly gets easier later on when you get a handle on it. This should help you reduce overwhelm, especially if you start building your team and stepping back. Stop trying to build websites, stop trying to do bookkeeping, stop trying to figure out where the login for all of this and that. Just go to Slack and have your team do everything. I call that one layer back. Stop trying to learn how to run Facebook ads, stop trying to write articles. Figure out who can do these things instead of how to do them. It’s a Dean Jackson saying, I like that, Who not How, and it will free you up.
So hopefully some of these things will help you be a little more focused.
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