There was a time when I did absolutely everything in my business. Most of the work I did consisted of coding, design, and configuration of websites. I learned fairly early that this would have to change if I wanted to grow and scale my business.
And it took a while to change. Obviously nothing happened overnight. But it did work eventually.
So how did I do it?
Basically, I started associating that type of work with a lack of success. Stagnation. Over time I started to really feel that every time I engaged in those activities, I was letting my dreams (and business) slowly die.
And it worked!
Such a visceral reaction to something really does work to make you go out of your way to avoid it. While I still occasionally dabble in very small (or sometimes just complicated) tasks of this nature, I try to keep it very brief and I start to get stressed out if it goes on too long.
That’s usually my cue to just give it to a dev.
Overall, that’s a good thing and it has, in fact, allowed me to grow and scale my business. Without it, I would be stuck doing all of those things and would be limited primarily by the hours in the day.
I also tend to just be bad at being proactive with work like that, too, but that’s a different conversation.
But my thought today is: what are the downsides of this method?
Because there are some. It’s not like I just handed those tasks off and there is nothing bad to come from it.
I think that essentially I built a huge barrier for myself to doing these tasks. Every minute I do engage with them, I am having to overcome a large mental and emotional barrier that is quite draining.
Therefor, in the times when I do end up having to do some of it, it leaves me more worn-out and with less energy to do other things once I’m done.
The exact same task is now considerably more difficult for me to do, essentially by design.
Of course it works out in the end since overall I’m still way more free to focus on more important tasks, but it’s still just interesting to consider these downsides.
I think it’s particularly important to acknowledge this concept because it probably applies to many other areas in my life and business, too.
Off the top of my head, scheduled meetings and phone calls seem to have the same barrier for me. I try to avoid them as much as possible, and as a result, they are actually much more difficult for me to actually do. I’ve create barriers to doing them – which has worked in terms of decreasing their frequency – but now when I’m required to do them, it’s much more draining on me.
I think this process is something that can be performed consciously, and knowing what I know now, I need to be careful about what tasks I apply it to. Some things are inevitable, and it is probably unwise to build large barriers to accomplishing them.
On the flip side, I now know that this process does work, and it might be smart to seek out other opportunities to using it.
The low-hanging fruit would be things that are unquestionably bad for me. I think I’ve already done it with mindless social media usage, but using it for drinking, junk food, and laziness could also work quite well.
I guess I’ll consider this an important tool in my toolkit and just make sure to be very careful about when I choose to use it.