Feeling Successful and Productive Makes You More So

This last week I was working through my to-do list and I was quite productive and completed many important tasks, including some that had been delayed for quite a long time. I felt good about everything I was doing and the direction I was taking.

And then I felt excited about the future and the prospects for my business and even started to have new, profound ideas about how best to improve things going forward.

I feel like for the last couple years I’ve sort of gotten stuck in a cycle of “keeping up” with everything. I’m barely on top of things and the best I can hope for is generally just to complete the backlog of urgent tasks.

And when you do that, you don’t feel good or accomplished. You feel like you did the bare-minimum poorly.

Which is exactly how I feel quite often when I’m working. Almost all the time, actually.

Now, I’m probably doing a better job than I think and I certainly have high standards. I know I’m not burning my business to the ground and I have countless happy clients.

But I’ve felt like I’m doing the bare minimum and that’s what’s important because it affects all of my actions.

It’s also absolutely true that I haven’t done much beyond maintenance of my business. I’ve probably spent an average of maybe 10 minutes per week in the last two years “on my business”, working on new ideas and on ways to try to grow. That’s… Nothing.

As a result, I haven’t felt as excited as I should be about things and I’ve gotten stuck in somewhat of a vicious cycle where my lack of initiative and time spent on these critical functions has further hurt morale and initiative and results in me doing them even less.

But I feel that coming back.

As I’m finally starting to tackle these backlog items and projects that should help grow the business, I feel more invigorated and excited about the future. I’m exploring new ideas and genuinely putting effort into making things happen.

So I think it absolutely works both ways. Just like with most things, good behavior begets more good behavior. Or you can do a bad job and get more and more stuck over time.

Obviously this post can serve to simply encourage me to stay on top of things and focus on activities that grow the business, but I think it’s important to put a more-actionable suggestion in here as well.

Going forward, I think I need to make it a point to do something every day that feels like it will help grow the business or improve things significantly in some way. It can even be something tiny.

This is important to do even on days when I’m overwhelmed. It needs to feel like, every day, I am making important progress in my business and never that I’m simply keeping up with what I have.

That’s critical.