Does your to-do list unravel and fall to the floor like an unruly roll of parchment?
That's a roundabout way of asking if you have too much on your plate.
And it's also rhetorical. You're a small business owner, of course you do.
But that never-ending to do list is doing several things to hurt your productivity.
First, it means you never feel satisfied and the weekdays blend into one.
Second, it leads to procrastination: you find yourself doing the smallest, easiest jobs on the to-do list and leaving the big, difficult, time-consuming ones.
Sound familiar?
I'm a micro-business owner with no business partner around to kick me up the backside, so I’ve had to develop a productivity strategy that works for me. And I wanted to share it with you.
I call it Do One Thing which I’m fairly sure I’ve not ripped off from Nike.
It's one of those things that's so simple, it's genius - and it works like a dream. Every single (working) day, I have to do one thing that progresses my business in some way.
That might be firing off a proposal to an interested party, spending another hour on that landing page that's going to host a new service, getting back in touch with an old contact, or upselling another service to an existing client.
And because I can’t stop work for the day until I have done it, I start planning when and how to do it first thing in the morning.
In a bid to start a minor revolution, I mentioned this to a friend who told me she was struggling to motivate herself to do any exercise, and she nicked it.
She now does one sporty thing per day, even if it’s just running once around the block or doing 20 sit ups on her living room floor (which, of course, triggers the snowball effect).
When everything seems overwhelming, don’t try to do it all, just DO ONE THING.