The “results/time trap” is a phrase I’ve made up to describe the false belief that creating significant results in your business requires a lot of time. It came out of some client calls I had this week, in which my clients were considering some new business ventures and determining where to invest their time, energy, and resources.
Yes, careful planning is important, and strategy is crucial.
But I often find that it’s too easy for my clients to get stuck in thinking at the expense of doing.
Stated another way, they get stuck in thinking that they have to invest a lot of time to create a lot of results. So they keep trying to think their way to a solution, spending time there, and then, because they’ve spent so much time thinking, they feel they have to implement carefully, which takes more time, and then, ultimately, they can’t remember why they were so passionate about this idea at one time when now it just feels heavy and draggy and overwhelming. I call that feeling “swimming in molasses”.
When this happens, it’s not that the idea might have changed or become less attractive; it’s more likely that the pursuit of the idea has become unattractive because of the way in which it’s being pursued.
The way in which you pursue your ideas has a direct impact on how excited, alive, and passionate you feel about them. The ideas which fire you up the most are the ones most worthy of focused attention- leading to clear decisions- and big action. In less time.
Ideas which are excited, alive, and passionate must be met with that same energy in the way they are carried out. This is where sometimes we get lost as entrepreneurs. Sometimes, maybe, we’re scared of our biggest and most alive ideas, so we put on the brakes and try to slow things down so we don’t get rushed along and overwhelmed.
But then, to our dismay, we end up thinking so much, getting paralyzed in our analysis, and that feels painful too.
We’ve gotten caught in the trap that time and results are somehow related.
Yes, certainly, there are times where persevering with a project for a longer time will give you better results. But, just as often, there are ways to accelerate your decisions and actions to match the energy of your idea.
And that is where big things begin to happen.
In my life and business, I’m working on reducing the amount of friction and delay in between a good idea and it’s execution and outcome. One way I’m doing that is setting up a series of 30 day goals. I’m defining one important business goal, and one important personal goal, and I’m seeking to achieve both within a 30 day window. Right now, I’m working, personally, on improving my diet and taking better care of my health. I invest a lot of time and energy each week working out with my personal trainer and going to the gym; I am ready, now, to accelerate those results through a stronger focus on sleeping more, relaxing more, and making better food choices. That’s my personal goal focus for this current 30 days.
My business goal focus for this 30 days is to write my business book. I don’t have a title determined yet, but the book is about how I work with clients to help them build profitable popularity online. I have been working on it sporadically over the past months, but, since it was taking so long to get traction, I started to lose interest and to feel like maybe the topic wasn’t that interesting. My business goal is to draft this book in total by the 20th of this month. I’m just about halfway to doing that. What’s working really well for me is to set aside about 2 hours per day to work on my book. This means I’m making the necessary adjustments in my schedule to accomplish this goal. With such a short time frame, I feel like I can maintain this pace for the next couple of weeks, and, after that, I’ll celebrate my book’s drafting by taking a few days off, maybe heading out of town to nearby spa.
The point is, my energy and capacity are both high right now because I’m taking big action in a smaller time frame. So far, I feel excited and enthusiastic, and believe I will really like this pattern of working hard for 30 days, taking a few days off, setting the next 30 day goal, working for that, taking a few days off- and so on. I think it’s going to help me greatly accelerate my results and productivity this year.
If you find that you’re feeling stuck in bringing your good ideas to life, try shortening the time frames around your decision-making and action taking. Test out this idea of big results in less time.
I think you’ll be surprised at how much you can achieve.
