5 things to do when you don't want to anything in your business

Sometimes you only have the time, energy and mental capacity to do the bare minimum in your business to keep the doors open - these are your low-hanging, critical fruits!

Transcript

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Hey, Recovering Perfectionist, I'm Claire Riley, and you're listening to episode 83 of the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast. Today I'm going to go through the five non-negotiables for a successful day in your business. These are my fallbacks when I can't be bothered or when I don't feel like it, but I know that I just have to do the bare minimum. These are the things that I always fall back on and make sure I'm across or make sure that I've made sure that someone else is across on my behalf. So we'll get stuck into that. All of the notes and links will be over at clairey.co forward slash pod forward slash 83. Let's jump in. This is the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast, and I'm your host, Claire Riley. Alrighty, so in past episodes, I've certainly shared about morning and afternoon or beginning of work session and end of work session routines and rituals. I've also shared about how to avoid distractions in your business, especially when you work from home and that sort of thing. And today is a little bit different because I just really want to, I guess, touch on, as I said before, some of the things that I try and do as a real bare minimum. We all know that there's days where we are crazy productive and we're taking care of business and getting everything done. But on the flip side, there's days where we really don't even want to get out of bed and we can't be asked. So this is just a bit of a checklist of what I like to do on those days. Sometimes obviously you don't get through all of it, but if you can have it as a bit of a filter of what are the most important elements of your business or most important functions of your business, these are what I think they are for most people. They obviously can be different for every person. So if yours, um if your business is a bit different, that's cool. I would just invite you to explore that and be a bit reflective on what are some of the things that are not negotiable for you in your business, what are the priorities, what are the key functions if you only had half an hour or an hour to work in your business every day? What would be some of those key functions that you'd want to do? So I'm going to talk through mine. So the first one is having that daily ritual is so important to me in terms of getting set up and just having some grounding and starting my day in a really refreshed way or in a really focused and aligned way. My daily ritual, I like to track my income from the previous day and I do the colouring that's associated with that. I like to do some sort of grounding exercise, whether that is a meditation or yoga, sometimes it's just movement, something that signals to me, like, yes, this is my time, no matter what else has happened for the you know, beginning of the day. I'm in here. This is my bubble, this is my work bubble. So something that physically represents that to me. Um I also like to do captain's orders, some people like to do journaling, but something that just sort of allows me to get all the stuff out of my head that um makes that beautiful space for new things that I need to get into my head. Um, and um, and there's often uh an element of um getting set up with uh with reporting and reflection and forward planning and all of that sort of thing as well. So the first thing is to have a bit of a daily ritual. Um and as I said, there's other episodes which deals with just all, you know, it goes into a lot more detail about daily rituals at the beginning and end of work sessions. The second thing that's not negotiable for me is customer service because a really important part of providing the customer and client experience that I want for my clients and that my clients expect from me because that's my brand and that's what I've promised, is providing excellent customer service. So that can look like a couple of different things, but generally they're not negotiables for me, is replying to emails, emptying out my inbox, making sure that there's no one who's waiting on something for me. Um, also things like uh following up on emails. If there's emails that I've sent and I haven't heard back, is touching base with those people. It could be sending out um uh messages or replying to messages if people have contacted me outside of my working hours and that sort of thing. So it's really just about making sure that everyone who's in my world who's expecting something from me or needs something from me has um had that met. Um, obviously within reason. I'm not going to, you know, sabotage myself or my own health in terms of doing that, but it is a really important part of how I like to work and how I want my people to feel having worked with me as well. The third thing is um sales or money-making activities. Now, this is often one that is the first thing that goes out the door because we feel like, but I've got all these other things and I've got all these things on my to-do list, and I haven't got to those yet, so I shouldn't be asking for money, I shouldn't be sending invoices. And unfortunately, that's a really, really quick way to start really resenting your business is if you're not getting paid. So anything that has to do with the money making or income generating tasks is really, really important. And what that looks like for you will be different for every person. So it may look like checking in on your invoices, following up late invoices, sending out invoices, all of that sort of pieces of work. It could be doing uh follow-up emails from freebies that you've delivered. It could be sending out emails uh like job proposals or um scoping work and all of that sort of thing. It could be as simple as doing your marketing that's on autopilot, making sure that you're you've got those mechanisms that are automated in your business so that there's some sort of functional, there's something that is doing the selling or the um the promotion for you. So, really, really important that we don't leave that one unattended. The fourth one is I'm gonna put a bit of a blanket band-aid on this one and call it anything that's distracting you. So they're all of those things that you know you need to be doing, you know works in your business. And usually they are project-based, like you might be fixing something that's broken, you might be updating something so that it's more helpful and more high quality, you might be uh doing more content and all of those sorts of things. So things that are just those niggly little voices that are still on your to-do list, that are still sitting there, that you feel like I can't carry on with my life or with my business until that thing is done, that could be a really important thing. It doesn't necessarily mean that you need to do it, but you certainly need to address it by either doing it, getting someone else to do it, or deciding consciously that you're going to wait until later to get it done. And also any pressing to-do, so anything that's at the top of your list, which hopefully you planned yesterday when you finished your work session, so that you didn't have to kind of come in and try and work out what was going on when you started this work session. Um, and the last thing is to plan for tomorrow. So, as I've just mentioned, I think a really important part about being productive any day is not having to try and catch up with yourself when you first sit down in the morning. It's not a great energy to sit down and be ready to go and then be like, what was I going to do today? Um, so making it really easy for yourself when you finish your previous work session, whether it was last week or yesterday or two days ago, whatever it is, be kind to future you and jot down what the things are that you didn't get to do or that are your priority or that absolutely need to be attended to next. And then when you sit down for you at the start of your next work session, it's already there. You just have to do it rather than using up that precious brain power on working out what to do as well as doing it, all you have to do is do it. So I hope that's been helpful in working out how you might come up with some non-negotiables of things that need to be done every single day in your business just to keep the doors open and everyone happy. Um, these are, as I said, very, very malleable and can absolutely change for you and what works for you and your business. So just get clear on what those things are for you, jot them down somewhere, and then when you have those blur days, you can just do the bare minimum and then switch off and go watch Netflix for the rest of the day. Totally have my permission to do that. I hope that's been helpful. I always love hearing your feedback on um on the pods and on the blog. So do leave me a comment or shoot me an email. I would love to hear how you're going. I'll talk to you soon. See you on the next episode. Bye.