(This is an oldie, but  a goodie so I’m reposting it!)

I  can see it now…..

A room full of grizzly looking, sleep deprived entrepreneurs sitting around wondering what happened to their dreams of success.

One by one they start to share their stories:

“Hi, I’m Amy.  I am an email addict.”  I sit down to work on the projects that would make me money, but every time that email alert pops in, I’m bouncing to check on who could have possibly contacted me.  So by the end of the day, I’m drained, overwhelmed, and have accomplished nothing!.”

Next is Dave, who has the tell tale dark circles under his eyes.  “Hi I’m Dave, and my life has become unmanageable as a result of the distraction of email.  My problem is that I can’t sleep until I know every email is done, sent, or responded to.  Its freaky…in fact, if I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, or can’t sleep, I will head straight to my computer to finish off the email that came in when I was away.  And can I share my biggest shame?  I secretly get a little bummed when it’s about one in the morning and I hit the send/receive button and nothing comes.  I’m a mess.”

But the saddest one of all is Ray, who sits in the corner, barely able to hold his head up.  “Hi, my story is sort of similar but it’s not just email that’s causing me to get off track and waste hours and hours and hours.  Mine is that damn Facebook and Twitter.  In the old days I’d give myself about thirty minutes to ‘surf the web’ as we used to call it back then, but with the inventions like Tweetdeck, I’m screwed!  Now it takes all the energy I can muster to get anything done.  And you want to know the worst part of it?  As a coach, when I’m supposed to be listening to my clients on the phone, I secretly pop in and check on the tweets while I should be listening to them.  They are paying me good money, and I can’t even be present because I’m so addicted to distractions.  What they heck should I do?”

Now obviously this is a fictitious “12-Step meeting for email addicts” but many of you will read your own story in the three characters above.

The fist thing I want you to know is that you are probably (unfortunately) among the norm.  We love distractions!  Our cell phones have alarms, our Outlook tasks pop in to alert us, we get reminders of teleclasses, and all sorts of things that intrude on our space.  So what’s a ‘focus challenged’ entrepreneur to do about all this?  I have a few suggestions below.

1.  Turn off the email alert -yes….in Outlook you can stop the function that tells you every time an email pops in.  You may notice a huge void, but that’s the goal!

2.  Discover the cost of being interrupted constantly – I recently heard a statistic that every email distraction can cost up to 64 seconds.  Multiply that by the countless times we go chasing the rabbit down the hole and you wonder why things aren’t getting done????

3.  Schedule chunks of time for distractions – Give yourself certain hours where you’ll be on Facebook, certain times you’ll tweet, and certain times you will check your email.  It really is about discipline.   Have you planned your time?  Do you set up a schedule the night before of what needs to be accomplished, or do you just jump on the computer and just start responding to emails?  That is the kiss of death for any hope of productivity, so START NOW.  The deal is that you control your time, and not other people’s calls, requests, or emails.  Think like a singulary focused million dollar business owner.  Would they ‘twitter’ their time away?  Probably not.

4. Get your social needs met – I haven’t done a formal study, but one of the reasons why email (and Facebook) are such distractions to me is because I’m an EXTROVERT.  Meaning when I’m sitting home working by myself, there’s that part of me longing for connection.  So it’s easy to take a break to see what the cool kids on FB are talking about.  Getting your social fix will solve this and allow you to be more focused. And for the introverts reading this….please let me know your experience here as well.

5.  Purge, purge, purge -  Do you really need 67 ezine subscriptions?  Take one whole week and everything that you would be tempted to say, “I’ll get to this later” …GET RID OF!!!! You can always re-subscribe, but the enormity of getting hundred and hundred of emails a day leads to overwhelm.  (Don’t want to hurt someones feelings by unsubscribing?  Here’s a trick – set up a message rule in Outlook to send their email directly to the delete folder.  That way you don’t have to see it, and they don’t have to know you left their list.)

6. Have an assistant handle your email -This is where I am.  And truthfully, I am FIGHTING this one!  Because I admit that I’m like a crazy email junkie- the more the better in my book.  But I know what it costs me in terms of productivity.  Not quite ready yet to release this one.  (Maybe there is really that 12-step program for those of us unwilling to surrender our crazy addiction.)  How do you do it?  Let’s all share what works for us with navigating the email craziness.

Those are my six tips.  Make a comment on the blog and and share if you have any other ideas cuz we are all in this together!

Blessings,

In my last post, I gave some background about my relationship with my dog, Kailee, and Kailee’s trainer, Susan. I had been struggling with the dog training process. Kailee, Susan, and I had been out walking together when I had the thought, “This is the feeling that I used to have before I outsourced all the areas of my business that I don’t like and I’m not good at.”

I was having a de ja vu moment that all entrepreneurs go through when they hit the wall from not working in their strengths. With my clients and those I teach, I always talk about creating a business that you will love. And doing tasks that are not in your skill set will drag you down faster than anything.

In that moment I knew why I was such a champion of outsourcing.

I said to Susan, “If this were my business, I’d outsource this because it’s not fun, and I’m not doing a very good job at it. Plus I’m super frustrated!” If it were a business task it would definitely be a thing to turn over to a trusty VA, don’t you think? That was so powerful because truthfully I have such an outsourced business today, that there are very few things that I do that I don’t love. So in that moment, I felt the pain that many of you may be going through if you don’t have a team to take away some of the tasks that are dragging you down.

Now let’s fast forward. The next time Susan was over I proudly shared the parallel that dog training and delegation meant to me. And she had a brilliant response the deepened my entrepreneurial connection and understanding of what to give away. She said, “Yes Therese, you can outsource having Kailee exercised…

“But you cannot outsource being the leader.”

In that moment, it all shifted for me. I had recently watched a colleague’s business almost go down the drain because this person didn’t embrace being the leader when things got hard. And I realized that we are all at risk if we take this too far.

I’m excited to share with you in my next post the final lesson that I was able to take away from this experience, and how it has impacted my business.

Blessings,
Therese