There's a big difference between being busy and being productive. It's really easy to
spend your time on the things that don't move the needle because the things that
do move the needle might feel challenging. They might require you to use your
brain differently, think differently, or they might require you to step outside of
comfort zone. Welcome to imperfect Action. I'm Steph Taylor. For years,
I read all the books, downloaded all the freebies, and did all the
courses, but it wasn't until I started taking imperfect action that my business had
its first million dollar year. Imperfect action is about doing things before you're ready,
prioritizing consistent action over perfect action, and moving forward even when you're not
sure you're doing it right. On this show, you can expect mindset advice,
actionable marketing tips, and strategies to build a business that brings you more
profit, more freedom, and even more joy. Are you on the list
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up at stephtaylor dot co, forward slash DBB, or at the link in
the show notes. Hey, welcome back to I perfect action. This is
episode seven hundred and eighty. Today, I'm talking about areas where you may
be wasting your time and your energy in your business. I like a lot
of you, came from a corporate background before I started my business, and
in my corporate role, it was all about the appearance of being busy.
We had to look busy, and we it was a good thing if we
worked late into the evening, because then it looked like we were being really
productive. So I ended up filling my day with a lot of really pointless
tasks that didn't really benefit the company I was working for a whole lot,
but it made me look busy and it made me feel productive, and it
filled up my day so I could be appearing to work late. And then
when I started my first business and left my corporate role, and even into
my second business, which is through a couple of different iterations, is the
business that I'm in today, I found it really hard to unbundle busy and
productive. I in my mind, I had linked being busy filling my day
with things as also meaning I was being productive, and I worked so hard
doing all of the things. I was constantly busy in my business and yet
my business didn't move forward. I was working harder than ever, but things
just weren't falling into place. And you know, in the last episode,
I actually talked a bit about my first business and why that didn't work out.
But even with my second business, I was working so hard. I
was being so busy, busy, busy all the time and not seeing that
growth. And that's because there's a big difference between being busy and being productive.
It's really easy to spend your time on the things that don't move the
needle because the things that do move the needle might feel challenging. They might
require you to use your brain differently, think differently, or they might require
you to step outside of your comfort zone. Now, not all of the
things that I'm going to share in today's episode are busy tasks. They might
not even be tasks on your to do list. Some of them are just
areas where you're wasting time and not even realizing it. But they all have
the same end result. All of these different things have the same end result.
They stop you from doing the things that actually move the needle. They
fill your day, they make you feel like you don't have enough time,
and then you prioritize these over the things that move the needle, because it's
easier to do these than it is to do the challenging, uncomfortable things that
actually move the needle. Now you might have heard some variation of the quote.
To get a different result, you have to be willing to do something
differently. I forget I think it was Einstein. Somebody's really smart said the
definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a
different result. And this is exactly what I'm trying to get at here.
So let's cover off on eight places where you are wasting your time and your
energy in your business. Number one, you're wasting your time and energy trying
to make every single piece of content absolutely perfect before you share it. This
might be social media content, it might be a podcast episode, it might
be your sales pages, it might be even your website, or it might
be the email you're sending to your list. And rather than just getting the
raw materials out of your brain and getting it out there, you're editing it
and editing it again, and editing again, and then questioning whether you need
to add more to it. I used to spend an hour on every single
podcast episode. And this was back when my podcast episodes were like maximum ten
minutes. I would spend at least half an hour outlining it, ten to
fifteen minutes recording it, because I would constantly stop and redo things, and
then at least fifteen minutes editing it, editing out every single arm, every
single hour. But then I realized that my audience didn't really care if I
left in the arms and the rhs because I'm human, and it meant that
I saved a lot of time. And now my team edits my podcast.
But there's no way I would have got to six hundred and forty one episodes
if I was still spending an hour on every single episode. The next place
you are wasting time is planning. Too much planning planning planning. It feels
really comfortable because we think if we can plan enough, we'll remove any uncertainty
from the equation. If we can just plan it right, it'll all go
to plan I'm not usually a huge planner, but I noticed this coming into
my life in a totally unrelated, unbusiness related context where for the very first
time I was going on a multi day hike by myself, I was packing
my own tent, carrying my own dehydrated food, cooking my own meals,
all of that, and it was for five days. And before I left,
I had a spreadsheet outlining every single thing. I outlined exactly exactly what
I was going to eat for each meal, exactly how much all of my
equipment weighed down to the gram, because when you're carrying everything on your back,
each gram adds up and it gets very heavy, very quickly, and
then it hurts your knees and your feet and you get blisters. So I
had this massive spreadsheet detailing every single thing, how far I was going to
walk each day, which campsites I was going to stay at, And on
day four, something that I didn't plan for ended up happening. On day
four, I ran out of toilet paper. Not really what you want to
happen on a five day hike, when I also wasn't feeling particularly well.
So suddenly here I was where the scenario that popped up and it didn't fit
in with my plans of how long I was going to walk each day and
where I was going to camp, and I figured it out. My solution
was I ended up walking the last two days in just one day So on
day four, I walked thirty seven kilometers, which is roughly twenty twenty to
twenty five miles roughly, so pretty far to walk in one day, but
I had to, and that was something I could never have planned for.
So rather than planning for everything and hoping that that removes the uncertainty, remember
you can never remove the uncertainty. There's never a guarantee that something's going to
go to plan. But what you can trust in is your own ability to
figure something out when it doesn't go to plan. Okay. The third place
you are wasting too much time is waiting until you have more clarity or more
confidence before you take action. You might be sitting there like, oh,
I want to do this one day, but I'm just not clear on it
yet, so I'll just wait and the clarity will come to me. Or
I want to do this thing, but it feels really scary right now,
so I'm going to learn more. I'm gonna research more, I'm going to
plan more, and then I'm going to feel more confident and then I will
do it. Clarity comes with action. Confidence also comes with action. It's
not until you take those first steps that the path begins to reveal itself.
It's really hard to see what the entire path is going to look like until
you start to take those steps. Same with confidence, you don't wait.
You don't build confidence by waiting to do. You build confidence by doing.
Recently I got back from America where, for the first time ever, I
had to drive on the wrong side of the road. I knew I'd always
put it off whenever I've gone overseas, I've always resisted hiring a car in
places where they drive on the right hand side of the road. But for
this trip I had to. And before the trip I did so much research.
I was like googling, how do I drive on the right hand side
of the road? Which way do I go around a round about? Who
do I give way to? Who do I yield to? And in all
of that research, it didn't make me more confident. It made me less
confident. It actually made me more overthinking. It made me more scared.
And then when I sat in the car on the wrong side of the car,
because is normally we sit on the right hand side of the car and
drive on the left hand side of the road, and everything's flipped, so
I'm sitting on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the
road, freaking out because I can't stay in the lane because it's I'm trying
to align myself up. But then a few hours after doing that, I
started to get the hang of it. I started to feel confident. And
that's because I actually sat in the car and drove it out of the rental
car lot and started to feel comfortable on the wrong side of the road.
Confidence comes by doing same with podcasting. People are like, oh, you're
so confident at podcasting. I wasn't when I first started. If you go
back to like the first ten episodes, you'll notice such a difference in how
I speak and the content and episodes they were fully scripted. These are now
more of a bullet point outline. Those first probably fifty episodes were fully scripted.
Okay. The fourth place that you are wasting time and energy in your
business is over complicating things and feeling overwhelmed as a result. Now overwhelm is
this beautiful blanket feeling of like I just don't know what I'm going to do,
and I don't really want to think about all of the different pieces.
So I'm just going to tell myself that I feel overwhelmed, and then I
don't have to poke and prod into this uncomfortable thing. And a lot of
the time it comes because we are over complicating things in our mind. We
think that there are all of these different steps involved. We think that it
has to be a certain way, and we build it all up and it's
spinning around in our head and then we're like, oh, too hard,
basket, I'm not going to deal with that. I really loved Tim Ferriss's
book Tribe of Mentors, and in his introduction for the book, he talks
about how he felt a little bit daunted at the prospect of writing this book
about all of the people who are high achievers in their fields, and how
he asked himself this question, what would this look like if it were easy?
And he decided that the answer to that question was to simply interview people
who are absolutely killing it at whatever they do and turn those interviews into the
book. So I still use this question, what would this look like if
it were easy? What is the minimum viable version of this scene? You
know someplace where I know that many of you get stuck is if you're thinking
of creating an online course and then you think about all of the different pieces
involved in the course creation, in the course launch, all of that,
and it just builds up in your head as this mucky cloud of different things
you need to do. And I always say, well, what's the minimum
viable version that you could do? Could you teach your online course as a
live workshop first? Would that be easier than pre recording all of these different
modules? Yeah, most of the time it will be. And then once
you create that live workshop and you teach it, you've already done a huge
step and then it becomes easier. So you know, this fits in really
nicely with the waiting until you have clarity. I think with action, overwhelm
also starts to fade. Okay, the next thing where you are wasting your
time is saying yes to things you don't really want to do. You know,
you know, the ones coffee catchups, networking events that you don't want
to go to, collaborations that don't really excite you, all of those things
that fill up your calendar that when you said yes to them a while ago,
they felt like a great idea. And then you sit down and you
want to do some work, and you look at your calendar and you're like,
huh, where is all of the free space? Because I just have
back to back calls all day. I really loved the question would I say
yes to this if it were tomorrow? If it were happening tomorrow, would
I say yes to this? It's very easy for us to say yes to
something when it's in four weeks time or weeks time, and then when it
actually turns up tomorrow or today, we regret it. So would I say
yes to this if it were tomorrow? You don't have to say yes to
everything, and no is a full answer. You don't have to justify it.
If it's something you don't want to do, you can say no.
The next place you are wasting time and energy is researching tech and platforms.
This comes up a lot. Every time I survey my listeners, this comes
up a lot. I'm trying to decide the best email platform, I'm trying
to decide where to host my course. I'm trying to decide which is the
best podcast host. I'm trying to decide blah blah blah blah blah. There's
a lot of different tech out there, absolutely, but for the most part,
they're all pretty similar in terms of pricing and in terms of features,
and when you're just starting out, you don't need the most advanced features.
Like I talked about this in an episode a while ago, where this is
putting the cart before the horse. This is a classic example of putting the
cart before the horse. If you're creating a course or a membership, for
example, if you are letting the fact that you haven't chosen where you're going
to host your course hold you back from actually deciding what the course is going
to be about and who it's for and what you're gonna how you're gonna position
it, then that is putting the cart before the horse. Okay, because
once you know who the course is for and how you're going to position it
and the messaging and all of that, great, now we can start to
Now you're going to feel more excited about getting your course out there, and
it's not going to matter so much which platform you choose, as long as
you choose one that works for you. And if somebody asks me, where's
the best place to host the course, where's the best place to build my
email, all of that, I just say, just go with Kajabi,
right, I love Kujabi. We're in the process of moving some of our
sales pages onto Kujabi because our websites previously or website is on a different platform.
And I really think that if you are new, or even if you
already have been running your business for a while, being able to have it
all in one place is such a massive advantage because then you don't have to
duct tape all of these different platforms together, and it removes the risk that
something's going to break. So I love Kajabi. You can grab a thirty
day free trial. Have a link for a thirty day free trial at Steph
Taylor dot co slash kajabi. You can sign up, you can test it,
take it for a test drive, all of that before you have to
actually pay for it. Okay. The seventh place where you might be wasting
your time and energy is by not knowing what to focus on. When you
don't have that particular focus for what you are working on on this year,
this quarter, this month, this week, it can lead you to chasing
shiny different ideas. You can feel a little bit scattered, You feel like
you're not really moving forward. You don't really know where you need to be
spending your time, so you just do what feels most exciting or most urgent
right now. Having focus gets you to where you want to go a lot
faster, but you first need to have clarity on your vision and on your
business model, because when you know what you're working towards, then it becomes
a matter of every decision you're making is either getting you there faster or it's
slowing you down. And you can ask yourself, is this getting me to
my vision faster? Or is this building out the business that is my future
business model I want? Is it getting me there or is it slowing me
down? I create a free workbook for you called Escape the Messy Middle,
and you can grab that where it'll help you to get complete clarity on where
your business is heading, so that you can grow your business with intention,
with focus, rather than trying to do all of the things and chasing the
shiny objects and exhausting yourself in the process and not getting to where you really
want to be. So you can grab that at Steph taylor dot com slash
EMM. There will be a link for that in the show notes as well.
And then number eight. I want to say the final, but it's
definitely not the final because there's plenty of other places you might be wasting your
time and energy. But the eighth place you might be wasting your time and
energy is consuming too much content. Now, this might be social media content,
it might be other people's podcast episodes, it might be reading things online.
Consuming too much content is really using up a lot of your brain energy,
and it can be really distracting. At its best, it might be
wasting your time, and at its worst, it might be creating comparisonitis.
It might be creating feelings of not enoughness. You know, I'm not posting
enough reels because my competitors are posting more, or I should be doing this
because my competitor is doing this, and then we feel like we're just not
doing enough, and that's not a great place to run your business from.
You are doing. You're doing the best that you can, and you don't
need to be looking at what other people are doing. You don't need to
be researching based on what other people in your industry are doing rather than consuming,
switching to creating, creating from where you feel inspired and aligned rather than
consuming based on what everybody else is doing. So there you have it.
Eight places you are wasting time and energy making your content perfect planning too much,
waiting until you have clarity and confidence before you take action, over complicating
things and feeling overwhelmed as a result saying things, saying yes to things that
you don't want to do, researching tech and platforms, not knowing what to
focus on, and consuming too much content. Now, one of the things
with podcasting is a lot of the time it's just me talking into my microphone,
and I don't get to see or hear from the people who are listening
to this show. So if this show has been helpful for you at all,
I'd really love it if you could take thirty seconds to leave a quick
rating and a review, say hello, tell me something that you love about
this show, because I do read every single one of them, and you
know, when you're creating more than seven hundred episodes of talking into a microphone,
it's really kind of nice to know that there are real humans listening to
this and that this is making a difference in some way. So please do
let me know if you're listening to the show, say hello in the reviews,
And if you have any friends who think might like this podcast, please
hit the share button, copy the link and send it over to them,
because it's how I get to help more people. Thank you so much for
listening. Catch you next time.