94. Beyond Later: How to Overcome Procrastination
In the last CEO Summer School episode, you learned about the various ways we postpone and procrastinate and how this delays the goals you want to achieve in your interior design business. Someday Syndrome, as I like to call this phenomenon, takes your focus far into the future. It’s where you might imagine achieving big things without the immediate risk of taking action.
But what about the more immediate things you put off? How are you delaying the daily tasks you just don’t want to get to? Where in your life or business are you prone to saying, “I’ll do it later?”
If you often procrastinate with the best of intentions but find yourself never actually getting to the task, you're in the right place. Whether you’re putting things off in the short term or imagining grandiose plans that you never actually take action on, the truth is both hinder your progress toward achieving the goals you want. Join me today to learn how to recognize your Later Habit patterns and how to conquer them for good.
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What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
The difference between Someday Syndrome and the Later Habit.
Why procrastination persists and becomes a habit.
How to begin recognizing your Later Habit patterns.
The unexpected benefits of putting things off.
How to tap into the motivation to overcome procrastination.
Why extremely high standards can lead to the Later Habit.
What happens when you conquer the Later Habit for good.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you are listening to episode 94. In the last CEO Summer School lesson, which was on Someday Syndrome, I talked about the various ways we postpone and procrastinate and how that’s delaying the goals you want to achieve in your interior design business.
The flavor of Someday Syndrome is more long-range, it’s much farther out in the future and kind of wistful. It’s where you imagine achieving big things without the risk or effort of taking actions. It tends to show up when you’re thinking about those long-term aspirations, both in the things you’ll achieve and the person you want to become.
As I was thinking about this both personally and professionally I noticed, and this is kind of a silly example, but when I’m admiring a friends garden that is bursting with fresh vegetables, I so want to have that delicious soil-filled bed of vegetables with crunchy produce I can walk out the door and harvest. Oh, I can feel the excitement building.
I think about how I would be so on top of the watering and weeding. I mean I would be an amazing gardener. And yet I don’t do it. And usually pretty quickly after I start imagining myself doing those things I get the excitement and then the, oh, I’m not going to do that. This is a someday aspiration I’ve had for at least a decade and I can tell you, I’m not any closer to making that happen.
But then there’s also the more immediate things that you put off. For me, it’s always reviewing things. So like the P&L for my accountant, or maybe a spreadsheet that my assistant sends and I don’t want to look at it. Or the physical therapy exercises I’ve been assigned for my wonky hips. These are things that I’m more prone to say I’ll do it later.
And that’s the topic of today’s episode, those short-term things that you put off with kind of the best intentions that you will do it later but don’t actually get to.
The Later Habit, as I call it, is one of the episode listeners mention the most and I thought it would be perfect to have that concept side-by-side in the podcast feed with Someday Syndrome. That way you can contrast the ideas and see what type of putting off behaviors are showing up for you the most and get some resources and support around how to solve for this because whether it is putting things off in the short term or imagining grandiose plans for the future but not taking action, both are going to hinder your progress towards those wonderful goals that you actually really do want to achieve in your interior design business.
If you haven’t listened to this episode before, I know you’re absolutely going to love it. And if you have listened to this episode, listen again because I know you’re going to pick up something you did not hear last time and it could be a new major a-ha.
I’ll be back next week with a new episode of CEO Summer School, and if you aren’t already signed up, it’s not too late. Head over to desiid.com/summerschool, enter your info and you can get started right away with this completely free series. And if you have signed up and you’re loving it, please send the link to your design friends because it will give you more opportunities to have conversations and insights as you integrate these lessons.
Enjoy the episode and I’ll talk to you again next Wednesday.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you’re ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you’re in the right place. I’m Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let’s go.
I want to start talking about this topic in terms of how it might be showing up for you so you can first have awareness if this is one of your patterns. And I think we all know that little, or sometimes really loud, voice that presents itself when we’re about to do something, right? When we’re planning to do something and we don’t really feel like it. Or you’re planning to do something and something else seems more urgent. Or there’s a difficult conversation with a client you need to have and all of a sudden next week seems a lot more appealing than getting that done today.
That’s more day-to-day, but later also appears when you’re thinking about your bigger goals or initiatives you want to implement in your business. It might sound like I’ll get those systems in place when, fill in the blank. Things slow down, I have more help, I watch this training, right? It’s some type of when this thing happens, then I’ll do that. Or I’ll raise my fees when I feel more confident. There’s always the when attached.
And later might sound like next year. Or years from now when the kids are older. Or when it’s not summer or when it is summer. I’ve heard people say all the seasons as a reason for later. So as you can see, the Later Habit shows up in the day-to-day execution of your business tasks, whether that is on your back end or serving clients, and really in the long-term planning of your business as well.
And there’s a reason why the Later Habit shows up and exists the way that it does. And that is because of the way that our brains work. Our brains are so powerful, they’re so helpful to us and they can really hold us back and prevent us from pursuing our goals if we let them go unmanaged. Your brain will often offer up what will seem like a very reasonable reason to do it later. Except if you’re in the pattern of doing it later, your brain just gets better and better at coming up with reasons to do it later.
It essentially strengthens its argument and becomes more persuasive. And what ends up happening then is you lose trust with yourself. When you tell yourself you’ll do it later, you start to actually not count on doing it later. I want you to think about this as if it were a friend or even an employee that you have. The friend or employee who says they’re going to do something and continually flakes out. It’s really frustrating. You start to not count on them. And it’s the same thing when you later yourself.
I invite you to consider what that version of later sounds like and when it’s most likely to show up for you so that you can have that awareness and be onto yourself.
When I work with clients, a lot of them will come to me and they’ll want coaching on this Later Habit. And they’re wondering, I want to do this objectively. I just can’t get myself to do it, I keep putting it off. So I think it’s important we talk about why we say we’ll do it later. And that is because there is a payoff in one way or another for us when we put it off to later.
With any habit that we have, even if it’s one we don’t like and objectively could say it’s not serving us, there is always a payoff. Otherwise, we wouldn’t keep doing it. With the Later Habit, the payoff is often a sense of relief or a dopamine hit. Let’s talk about the relief first.
When you say you’ll do it later and make the decision to do it later, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, you escape not only from doing the task in the moment but also all of the emotion you have created thinking about the task. And this is really why I always end coaching on mindset with a strategy. Because you can have all of the how-tos of how to get that thing done, but if you’re thinking about the task or project in a way that creates dread or resistance or confusion or any other negative emotion in relation to doing the task, you’re going to want to kick the can down the road and get that relief.
You have to develop the skill of noticing when you’re creating that negative emotion for yourself and use your brain for you to generate the positive emotions that are going to get you into action. Positive emotion doesn’t even have to be joy or excitement about doing something, but learning how to create motivation, commitment, determination on demand is critical. It is why the mindset tools I teach in Out Of Overwhelm are so important and vital to you creating success in the day-to-day of your business and in the long run.
You can have attended all of the webinars, bought all of the planners, but if you don’t know how to create awareness of your thought patterns, and in this case meaning the Later Habit, and actively shift your perspective, you will continue to put off what you say you want to do. Or you’re going to have to grit and grind through willpower and force yourself to follow through.
This is an incredibly exhausting way to work and I want to offer you relief from that type of exhaustion. Not this faux relief that you get from latering in your business and saying “I’ll get to it later.”
Now I want to talk about the dopamine hit you get from latering. This is that other payoff that I’m talking about of the Later Habit. Dopamine is a chemical released in the brain and it makes you feel good. It’s something us humans spend a lot of time and money on trying to get more of.
One of the interesting ways that you get a dopamine hit is through planning. When you’re in the habit of later, you often are creating a lot of plans, either on paper or just in your head, and then don’t follow through. And then you go back and you create more plants.
And that planning gives you the dopamine hit. And this costs us so much time without an end result. It feels really good to write down what you’re thinking you’re going to do and then imagine those grand plans playing out. It’s why there’s such a huge market for all of the pretty planners and project management software. And these are amazing tools when we use them in tandem with proactive planning and follow through that really is a combination of the mindset and strategy of time management.
The downfall is that you’re repeatedly creating plans and hopping from one system to the next. You’re giving your brain a reward with that planning, without creating the real reward of a finished project or goal. I know that is not ultimately what you want for yourself. It’s really about that quick, in the moment pleasure rather than the long-term satisfaction of seeing your plans come to fruition.
When we step back, we know exactly what we want. We don’t want that short-term hit. We really want that long-term pride and satisfaction that comes from following through and making progress on goals. So why this is so fascinating is that you might not feel great about yourself when you later yourself, because you probably judge yourself for that pattern. But you do get a type of that replanning fresh start excitement when you later yourself. And that can be really addicting. So I just want to make sure that you understand that that is part of this habit. And not as a way to further judge yourself, but just to understand what’s really going on.
The other way that you create dopamine through the Later Habit is by thinking idealistically about yourself and your future. And let me explain how this plays out. The Later Habit in your brain tells you that there is going to be a better time to do something when the conditions or circumstances or people are ideal or perfect. I’ll do this when, fill in the blank.
And tell me what is it for you? What have you been telling yourself are those idealized conditions or circumstances that you need to have in place before you can take action? You don’t need them to be perfect, but our brains love to tell them that they do in order for us to get started.
The Later Habit mindset also really likes to imagine not just an ideal set of circumstances, but an idealized version of you. Thinking that there is going to be a better version of you who in the future will magically feel more motivated or confident or will be able to do it perfectly. And that’s simply not the case.
In the clients that I work with, I often see a really big link between perfectionism or this idealistic thinking and procrastination. And that’s why there’s an entire module on it in Out Of Overwhelm, because we’re waiting for this perfect time or this perfect version of us to exist. And it doesn’t exist. So we just end up waiting till later and later and later because it never arrives, until we decide now is the time. We’re going to take the imperfect and make it the perfect time for us.
Imagining these ideals in the future triggers that reward center in the brain. So again, here’s where the Later Habit has this payoff and you have all these good feelings while you’re in the fantasy of later, even though there will never be a time when you always feel like doing something or where you’re fully prepared and can ensure that it won’t be a flop. It just doesn’t exist.
Now, when I tell clients this, sometimes they’re a little bit disappointed at first, right? Because that fantasy is going poof. But also I really hope that this can ground you in knowing that you can drop that pressure around perfection.
Now I want to talk about what you do with this Later Habit if you’re recognizing yourself in what I’ve shared. As with any habit that you want to change, the very first step is to have awareness and notice what’s happening without judgment, which was what I was hoping would happen with what I’ve been sharing in the first part of this episode.
So once you see that you have the Later Habit, it’s time to have an honest conversation with yourself. One of the reasons the Later Habit is tricky is that it’s ambiguous. Once you’ve identified what the Later Habit sounds like for you, whether it’s that little voice or you notice actions that you take or don’t take, get honest with yourself on why you’re telling yourself you’ll do it later.
Are you putting everyone else’s desires before your needs and people-pleasing? Are you worried you’re going to get it wrong? Or are you feeling confused about where to start? Are you stuck in overthinking or thinking about what other people will think? Sometimes having this radical honesty with ourselves is all we need to do to shift out of later and back into now.
You can also ask yourself this powerful question, why do I want to do it now? Your brain is going to have all sorts of reasons you should put it off. It’s your job as the CEO of your business to remind yourself of the benefits of taking action now, whether it’s the more immediate future like you’ll be able to finish your day on time, or the bigger picture of your business and how doing this one thing now contributes to your bigger picture business goals.
And if you’re still thinking about doing it later I want you to ask yourself, if not now, then when? And this clues you into a few things. First this calls into question if this is actually something you plan to do at some point. A lot of times you’re telling yourself you should do something you have no desire to do or you know you have no bandwidth to do, or it’s something that you really don’t need to do right now.
If you’re not actually going to do the thing, just drop it and move on and stop telling yourself you’re going to do it later. If it is something you really do plan to get to, then make a doable plan. And that starts with how you’re going to do it and when you’re going to do it. And this is something that clients learn to do in-depth in Out Of Overwhelm, both from the mindset perspective and the strategies to break projects down into really manageable chunks that don’t require you to go hide from your clients or employees for a week to actually get something done in your business.
When you kick this Later Habit, you will save yourself so much time and energy from that planning and replanning like I already talked about, from all those mental negotiations of should I do this or shouldn’t I do this, from the avoidance behaviors you’re using to put things off until later, from all the negative self-talk that you have around putting things off repeatedly. I want you to just think about the impact just removing the Later Habit from your business could have on the time, energy and space you have in your day.
You are going to get so much more done and be more effective when you’re working so that you can actually take time away from your business and enjoy it. When you get rid of the Later Habit, you also get so clear on your goals. And that’s because of the self-trust piece.
When you trust yourself to not put things off until later, you take an honest look at your original planning and at what you’re committing to because you know that if you decide to make that commitment, you’re going to follow through. You’re so much less likely to be putting random things on your to-do list or on your plan for the quarter when you’ve taken the time to consider if it’s something you really want to commit to.
This builds a strong relationship with yourself where you know you can count on you, which is going to make a huge impact in your business and as a person, right? When you know you can count on you, that is a gift you give to yourself and to everyone else you interact with in your life. Putting things off until later is a habit and it’s a habit that you can break.
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Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
The flavor of Someday Syndrome is more long-range, it’s much farther out in the future and kind of wistful. It’s where you imagine achieving big things without the risk or effort of taking actions. It tends to show up when you’re thinking about those long-term aspirations, both in the things you’ll achieve and the person you want to become.
As I was thinking about this both personally and professionally I noticed, and this is kind of a silly example, but when I’m admiring a friends garden that is bursting with fresh vegetables, I so want to have that delicious soil-filled bed of vegetables with crunchy produce I can walk out the door and harvest. Oh, I can feel the excitement building.
I think about how I would be so on top of the watering and weeding. I mean I would be an amazing gardener. And yet I don’t do it. And usually pretty quickly after I start imagining myself doing those things I get the excitement and then the, oh, I’m not going to do that. This is a someday aspiration I’ve had for at least a decade and I can tell you, I’m not any closer to making that happen.
But then there’s also the more immediate things that you put off. For me, it’s always reviewing things. So like the P&L for my accountant, or maybe a spreadsheet that my assistant sends and I don’t want to look at it. Or the physical therapy exercises I’ve been assigned for my wonky hips. These are things that I’m more prone to say I’ll do it later.
And that’s the topic of today’s episode, those short-term things that you put off with kind of the best intentions that you will do it later but don’t actually get to.
The Later Habit, as I call it, is one of the episode listeners mention the most and I thought it would be perfect to have that concept side-by-side in the podcast feed with Someday Syndrome. That way you can contrast the ideas and see what type of putting off behaviors are showing up for you the most and get some resources and support around how to solve for this because whether it is putting things off in the short term or imagining grandiose plans for the future but not taking action, both are going to hinder your progress towards those wonderful goals that you actually really do want to achieve in your interior design business.
If you haven’t listened to this episode before, I know you’re absolutely going to love it. And if you have listened to this episode, listen again because I know you’re going to pick up something you did not hear last time and it could be a new major a-ha.
I’ll be back next week with a new episode of CEO Summer School, and if you aren’t already signed up, it’s not too late. Head over to desiid.com/summerschool, enter your info and you can get started right away with this completely free series. And if you have signed up and you’re loving it, please send the link to your design friends because it will give you more opportunities to have conversations and insights as you integrate these lessons.
Enjoy the episode and I’ll talk to you again next Wednesday.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you’re ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you’re in the right place. I’m Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let’s go.
I want to start talking about this topic in terms of how it might be showing up for you so you can first have awareness if this is one of your patterns. And I think we all know that little, or sometimes really loud, voice that presents itself when we’re about to do something, right? When we’re planning to do something and we don’t really feel like it. Or you’re planning to do something and something else seems more urgent. Or there’s a difficult conversation with a client you need to have and all of a sudden next week seems a lot more appealing than getting that done today.
That’s more day-to-day, but later also appears when you’re thinking about your bigger goals or initiatives you want to implement in your business. It might sound like I’ll get those systems in place when, fill in the blank. Things slow down, I have more help, I watch this training, right? It’s some type of when this thing happens, then I’ll do that. Or I’ll raise my fees when I feel more confident. There’s always the when attached.
And later might sound like next year. Or years from now when the kids are older. Or when it’s not summer or when it is summer. I’ve heard people say all the seasons as a reason for later. So as you can see, the Later Habit shows up in the day-to-day execution of your business tasks, whether that is on your back end or serving clients, and really in the long-term planning of your business as well.
And there’s a reason why the Later Habit shows up and exists the way that it does. And that is because of the way that our brains work. Our brains are so powerful, they’re so helpful to us and they can really hold us back and prevent us from pursuing our goals if we let them go unmanaged. Your brain will often offer up what will seem like a very reasonable reason to do it later. Except if you’re in the pattern of doing it later, your brain just gets better and better at coming up with reasons to do it later.
It essentially strengthens its argument and becomes more persuasive. And what ends up happening then is you lose trust with yourself. When you tell yourself you’ll do it later, you start to actually not count on doing it later. I want you to think about this as if it were a friend or even an employee that you have. The friend or employee who says they’re going to do something and continually flakes out. It’s really frustrating. You start to not count on them. And it’s the same thing when you later yourself.
I invite you to consider what that version of later sounds like and when it’s most likely to show up for you so that you can have that awareness and be onto yourself.
When I work with clients, a lot of them will come to me and they’ll want coaching on this Later Habit. And they’re wondering, I want to do this objectively. I just can’t get myself to do it, I keep putting it off. So I think it’s important we talk about why we say we’ll do it later. And that is because there is a payoff in one way or another for us when we put it off to later.
With any habit that we have, even if it’s one we don’t like and objectively could say it’s not serving us, there is always a payoff. Otherwise, we wouldn’t keep doing it. With the Later Habit, the payoff is often a sense of relief or a dopamine hit. Let’s talk about the relief first.
When you say you’ll do it later and make the decision to do it later, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, you escape not only from doing the task in the moment but also all of the emotion you have created thinking about the task. And this is really why I always end coaching on mindset with a strategy. Because you can have all of the how-tos of how to get that thing done, but if you’re thinking about the task or project in a way that creates dread or resistance or confusion or any other negative emotion in relation to doing the task, you’re going to want to kick the can down the road and get that relief.
You have to develop the skill of noticing when you’re creating that negative emotion for yourself and use your brain for you to generate the positive emotions that are going to get you into action. Positive emotion doesn’t even have to be joy or excitement about doing something, but learning how to create motivation, commitment, determination on demand is critical. It is why the mindset tools I teach in Out Of Overwhelm are so important and vital to you creating success in the day-to-day of your business and in the long run.
You can have attended all of the webinars, bought all of the planners, but if you don’t know how to create awareness of your thought patterns, and in this case meaning the Later Habit, and actively shift your perspective, you will continue to put off what you say you want to do. Or you’re going to have to grit and grind through willpower and force yourself to follow through.
This is an incredibly exhausting way to work and I want to offer you relief from that type of exhaustion. Not this faux relief that you get from latering in your business and saying “I’ll get to it later.”
Now I want to talk about the dopamine hit you get from latering. This is that other payoff that I’m talking about of the Later Habit. Dopamine is a chemical released in the brain and it makes you feel good. It’s something us humans spend a lot of time and money on trying to get more of.
One of the interesting ways that you get a dopamine hit is through planning. When you’re in the habit of later, you often are creating a lot of plans, either on paper or just in your head, and then don’t follow through. And then you go back and you create more plants.
And that planning gives you the dopamine hit. And this costs us so much time without an end result. It feels really good to write down what you’re thinking you’re going to do and then imagine those grand plans playing out. It’s why there’s such a huge market for all of the pretty planners and project management software. And these are amazing tools when we use them in tandem with proactive planning and follow through that really is a combination of the mindset and strategy of time management.
The downfall is that you’re repeatedly creating plans and hopping from one system to the next. You’re giving your brain a reward with that planning, without creating the real reward of a finished project or goal. I know that is not ultimately what you want for yourself. It’s really about that quick, in the moment pleasure rather than the long-term satisfaction of seeing your plans come to fruition.
When we step back, we know exactly what we want. We don’t want that short-term hit. We really want that long-term pride and satisfaction that comes from following through and making progress on goals. So why this is so fascinating is that you might not feel great about yourself when you later yourself, because you probably judge yourself for that pattern. But you do get a type of that replanning fresh start excitement when you later yourself. And that can be really addicting. So I just want to make sure that you understand that that is part of this habit. And not as a way to further judge yourself, but just to understand what’s really going on.
The other way that you create dopamine through the Later Habit is by thinking idealistically about yourself and your future. And let me explain how this plays out. The Later Habit in your brain tells you that there is going to be a better time to do something when the conditions or circumstances or people are ideal or perfect. I’ll do this when, fill in the blank.
And tell me what is it for you? What have you been telling yourself are those idealized conditions or circumstances that you need to have in place before you can take action? You don’t need them to be perfect, but our brains love to tell them that they do in order for us to get started.
The Later Habit mindset also really likes to imagine not just an ideal set of circumstances, but an idealized version of you. Thinking that there is going to be a better version of you who in the future will magically feel more motivated or confident or will be able to do it perfectly. And that’s simply not the case.
In the clients that I work with, I often see a really big link between perfectionism or this idealistic thinking and procrastination. And that’s why there’s an entire module on it in Out Of Overwhelm, because we’re waiting for this perfect time or this perfect version of us to exist. And it doesn’t exist. So we just end up waiting till later and later and later because it never arrives, until we decide now is the time. We’re going to take the imperfect and make it the perfect time for us.
Imagining these ideals in the future triggers that reward center in the brain. So again, here’s where the Later Habit has this payoff and you have all these good feelings while you’re in the fantasy of later, even though there will never be a time when you always feel like doing something or where you’re fully prepared and can ensure that it won’t be a flop. It just doesn’t exist.
Now, when I tell clients this, sometimes they’re a little bit disappointed at first, right? Because that fantasy is going poof. But also I really hope that this can ground you in knowing that you can drop that pressure around perfection.
Now I want to talk about what you do with this Later Habit if you’re recognizing yourself in what I’ve shared. As with any habit that you want to change, the very first step is to have awareness and notice what’s happening without judgment, which was what I was hoping would happen with what I’ve been sharing in the first part of this episode.
So once you see that you have the Later Habit, it’s time to have an honest conversation with yourself. One of the reasons the Later Habit is tricky is that it’s ambiguous. Once you’ve identified what the Later Habit sounds like for you, whether it’s that little voice or you notice actions that you take or don’t take, get honest with yourself on why you’re telling yourself you’ll do it later.
Are you putting everyone else’s desires before your needs and people-pleasing? Are you worried you’re going to get it wrong? Or are you feeling confused about where to start? Are you stuck in overthinking or thinking about what other people will think? Sometimes having this radical honesty with ourselves is all we need to do to shift out of later and back into now.
You can also ask yourself this powerful question, why do I want to do it now? Your brain is going to have all sorts of reasons you should put it off. It’s your job as the CEO of your business to remind yourself of the benefits of taking action now, whether it’s the more immediate future like you’ll be able to finish your day on time, or the bigger picture of your business and how doing this one thing now contributes to your bigger picture business goals.
And if you’re still thinking about doing it later I want you to ask yourself, if not now, then when? And this clues you into a few things. First this calls into question if this is actually something you plan to do at some point. A lot of times you’re telling yourself you should do something you have no desire to do or you know you have no bandwidth to do, or it’s something that you really don’t need to do right now.
If you’re not actually going to do the thing, just drop it and move on and stop telling yourself you’re going to do it later. If it is something you really do plan to get to, then make a doable plan. And that starts with how you’re going to do it and when you’re going to do it. And this is something that clients learn to do in-depth in Out Of Overwhelm, both from the mindset perspective and the strategies to break projects down into really manageable chunks that don’t require you to go hide from your clients or employees for a week to actually get something done in your business.
When you kick this Later Habit, you will save yourself so much time and energy from that planning and replanning like I already talked about, from all those mental negotiations of should I do this or shouldn’t I do this, from the avoidance behaviors you’re using to put things off until later, from all the negative self-talk that you have around putting things off repeatedly. I want you to just think about the impact just removing the Later Habit from your business could have on the time, energy and space you have in your day.
You are going to get so much more done and be more effective when you’re working so that you can actually take time away from your business and enjoy it. When you get rid of the Later Habit, you also get so clear on your goals. And that’s because of the self-trust piece.
When you trust yourself to not put things off until later, you take an honest look at your original planning and at what you’re committing to because you know that if you decide to make that commitment, you’re going to follow through. You’re so much less likely to be putting random things on your to-do list or on your plan for the quarter when you’ve taken the time to consider if it’s something you really want to commit to.
This builds a strong relationship with yourself where you know you can count on you, which is going to make a huge impact in your business and as a person, right? When you know you can count on you, that is a gift you give to yourself and to everyone else you interact with in your life. Putting things off until later is a habit and it’s a habit that you can break.
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