Jan 24, 2022
As business owners, it’s really easy to get overwhelmed by how much there is to do in a day and wind up procrastinating or getting distracted. You can find yourself sitting down at your desk without any idea what to tackle first and never actually managing to do anything. But there are ways to avoid this! In today's episode, I’m discussing how to manage your to-do list, blast through procrastination, and make your work life easier and more productive.
First up, I’ve got some advice on organization and planning, including how to figure out the best organizational methods for you, whether that’s sticky notes (my favorite), paper planners, or phone notifications. I also discuss the importance of setting out your daily tasks, especially the ones that make you money, to reduce the time wasted on figuring out what needs to be done. Following that, I talk about being flexible but organized with your schedule, grouping similar tasks together and creating steps to follow while giving yourself the freedom to stick with inspiration when it hits. Then I tackle procrastination and distractions, with some tough love on self-managing our attachment to screen time and digital notifications. And finally, I wrap up the episode by discussing one of my favorite ways of avoiding procrastination: the 15-Minute Hustle, a fantastic tool for getting over the fear of starting tasks you’ve been dreading and getting them done in fifteen-minute bursts.
You can get more advice on managing your FBA business from the Amazon Files and Mommy Income community by joining our Facebook group with today’s codeword BEGINNER, where you can learn more about bundling, ask questions, and participate in the conversation with other sellers. And if you’re ready to take your business to a whole new level, visit MommyIncome.com/Coach to schedule your one-on-one coaching call today.
This week on the Amazon Files:
- The
rest of the workshop locations for 2022, including a virtual
option
- How to organize your to-do
list
- Setting out your Standard Operating
Procedures (SOPs) and master task
list
- Figuring out your money-making
tasks
- Flexibility in scheduling
- Time blocking (including breaks throughout the
day)
- Managing distractions
- Blasting through
procrastination
- The 15-Minute Hustle
“If you own your own business, you are a business owner, you are a CEO, you are an entrepreneur. And so you can own any or all of those titles. This isn’t just some little, small side gig you’ve got going on. This is a big deal. You started a business, most people don’t do that.”
- Kristin Ostrander
Quotes:
“People that come to workshops usually find the most success when it comes to wholesale bundling because they feel supported. They feel like they have these ‘Aha!’ breakthrough moments where the course was great, but they got the questions asked, they got to build a bundle together with other people and kind of fail and try again and work through things, and realize how normal that process really is when you do it yourself.”
“That’s entrepreneurship, you know, you’re the one in charge, you’re CEO and janitor, you’re going to have to do all the hard things and the easy things and all the things until you can hire help.”
“The reality is, you have to figure out what works best for you that you are actually going to follow through on. Yes, we can create new habits, that’s absolutely true, but you also have to be a hundred percent committed to creating new habits and giving it, you know, six weeks of practice every single day to make a new habit.”
“That’s a lot of where time is wasted and lost when it comes to an entrepreneur, that we’re responsible for so many things that we sometimes sit down at our desk and know that we have a boatload of stuff to do. But we don’t really know what to do.”
“CEOs and business owners and entrepreneurs face decision fatigue all the time, every day, probably. We’re constantly making small and big decisions, and it’s exhausting.”
“Sometimes, we can’t wait for inspiration. We can’t wait for the time to be right where we’re feeling creative. Sometimes we've just got to do it.”
“If we’re constantly trying to handle things while we’re doing our tasks, we’re gonna be all over the place, and all over the place is not where we want to be.”
“Life is all about the miscellaneous, right, so we want to make sure that we have space on our calendars in order to handle this miscellaneous stuff that just randomly comes up.”
“We can regulate our kids, we can put parental controls on there, and we can, you know, block certain things from their phones, but what are we doing to protect ourselves from ourselves?”
“Procrastination is part of everybody’s life. It is. It’s a symbol of a bigger problem, a symptom really of a bigger problem, most likely a combination of fear, ignorance, overwhelm, being uncomfortable.”
“If you only have room for four 15-minute hustles, and you commit to that, you will see your productivity skyrocket. Because you’re being intentional, because you’re planning, because you put it on a thing, and because you wrote it down,”
“Most of the problem is starting the task.”
“We spend more than fifteen minutes scrolling on our phones in the bathroom, let’s just be real about that. You have fifteen minutes. You have more than fifteen minutes.”
“I didn’t feel like it was this big, long, overwhelming Saturday where I had to spend the whole day putting Christmas away. Instead, I just did fifteen minutes at a time. And I knew I had a plan for that. And I knew I was gonna continue executing that. It was freedom. That’s what it felt like.”
Related Content:
- 2022 Workshops - Coupon code: workshop50
- Wholesale Bundle System
- Email questions
- Learn With Us
- Coaching
- The Amazon Files Hub
Grow Your Amazon Business!
Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of The Amazon Files, the show to help Amazon sellers along their business journey one step at a time with Amazon expert and your host, Kristin Ostrander. If you enjoyed this episode, head over to Apple Podcasts, subscribe to the show and leave us your honest review. Don’t forget to share your favorite episodes with your friends on social media! Use the codeword BEGINNER to join us on Facebook. Each week, Kristin hosts a live discussion on how to grow your Amazon business. Don’t forget to check out our website and subscribe to our mailing list for even more resources.