In a quiet moment yesterday I asked my Twitter network:
“what’s one thing that you have been putting off that would improve your blog? (and what’s stopping you from doing it now?)”
The answers were quite varied – everything from redesigns, to writing E-Books, to posting more regularly to SEO optimization, to monetization.
A number of people reflected that just being asked the question helped them to move forward with things that they’d been procrastinating with – so I thought I’d ask the question again here on the blog.
Of course there can be good reasons for putting things off – timing is important and you can’t do everything at once – but if you’re anything like me there are things that you know you probably should be doing that you’re simply procrastinating about.
For me one of the big procrastinations for me until mid last year was creating a product of my own. I’d always said I’d write an E-Book – but every time I sat down to do it I never got past the planning stage (I have notebooks with about 10 different plans that never eventuated).
Why didn’t I do it? Was it laziness…. or busyness….? If I’m honest about it I’m sure it’d be a bit of both of those things – however I suspect it was also partly fear that held me back.
Fear that it’d flop, fear that nobody would buy it, fear that people would critique me for selling something and not giving it away for free, fear that it wouldn’t be perfect, fear that perhaps I didn’t have it in me to create a product like I wanted….
Actually – saying I was too busy might sound a bit better – I sound very insecure!
In the end – I knew that if I didn’t create an E-Book that I’d be kicking myself later. The time came for me to draw a line in the sand and just do it. I don’t have any secret strategies for getting over the hump of getting myself into gear really.
I did tell a couple of others that I was doing it – I did set aside two days purely to put it together – I did engage the services of someone to help me design it – I did set myself a deadline.
All of that helped me get going but in the end it was a change of attitude that got me over the hump.
“what’s one thing that you have been putting off that would improve your blog? (and what’s stopping you from doing it now?)”
PS: one of the reasons I started ProBlogger.com was to help those of us who procrastinate to be accountable to others. A number of our members over there are setting themselves (and each other) challenges to help them keep moving forward.
For example Paul recently set a challenge for members to create a free report/e-book to give away (that link is only viewable by members). What’s exciting to me is that a number of members have actually got their reports ready and launched as a result of working together in this way rather than just tackling their list of things that they must do alone.
