How many times have you read an e-mail and decided to answer it later only to find it unanswered in your Inbox 2 weeks later? Or what about the times that you had a great idea, wrote it down on a slip of paper on your desk and it got lost or forgot within a few days?
When we’re new to running a business, mistakes like that can easily turn into bad habits.
While they may not seem like much at first, over the long term, these small bad habits build up into giant pains that can affect your revenue, your energy, and ultimately, your happiness with your business.
5 Common Bad Habits that Are Costing You Time and Money
The good news is that these bad habits have much simpler solutions than you would think.
Bad Habit #1: NOT writing down your ideas in one place
Solution: Create a hub for your ideas
You sit down to write a blog post, realize you don’t know what to write about and one hour later you look up from the screen after falling down the rabbit hole that is Facebook.
Whether it’s social media, e-mail, or reading other people’s’ articles, we will always find a way to avoid the discomfort of not knowing what to do.
Instead of constantly battling with not knowing where to start, you can put an end to this madness by creating a hub for your ideas.
There are myriad tools that can help you with that, but here are two that are great for small businesses.
- Use Evernote: Create a Stack in Evernote titled “Blog Content” and create individual notebooks for things like “Popular Topic Searches” or “Reader Questions.” You can also tag each of your notes with “blog idea”, so you can easily search for them.
- Use project management tools like Asana: Create a project in Asana to keep track of blog post ideas. You can create categories like “Frequently Asked Questions”, “Success Stories”, or “Common misconceptions.” In order to do that, simply put a “:” after each category name. List your ideas under each category. Expand on your ideas in the Description section.
With both of these options, you can set up a space for ideas that aren’t necessarily ready to be implemented, but that you want to keep track of.
Added benefit. When you keep your ideas in one easy-to-find location, every time you sit down to write a blog post, you only need to open your Evernote or Asana for a solid starting place instead of squandering valuable time on less important tasks.
This will make your writing not only more efficient but also enjoyable, which will help you be more consistent.
Other ideas that you could keep track of are:
- Retreat you’ve been dreaming of hosting
- Mastermind program you know has to come to life
- Improvements you want to make to your website
- Potential collaborators
- Tactics or new tools to test
Bad Habit #2: NOT reviewing your ideas regularly
Solution: Add “Review my ideas” task to your calendar
When you write down ideas that you don’t need to return to often, like potential collaborators or improvements to your website, you risk forgetting that you ever thought of them.
In order to avoid allowing profitable ideas and improvements to slip through virtual cracks, revisit them every few months to see if there’s something you’re ready to start working on.
Don’t shy away from deleting something if you no longer think it belongs on the list. Or, at least, move it on a “not now” list.
When you regularly review ideas, you bypass falling into the trap of always working “in” your business instead of “on” your business.
Bad Habit #3: NOT taking action on e-mail before closing it
Solution: If an e-mail requires action, add it to your Task List
As you read through your e-mails, many of them will require an extra step, like checking your schedule, finding requested information, or creating an invoice.
Instead of building the bad habit of deciding to do it later and risk neglecting to confirm an appointment, forgetting to provide the person with requested information, or failing to send the invoice, you can ensure that you take action on that e-mail by adding it to your task list:
- If you manage your tasks using Evernote, forward the e-mail to Evernote. You can automate the step by creating an IFTTT recipe
- If your task list lives in a project management tool like Asana, forward the e-mail to Asana. When you do that, it gets automatically added to your My Tasks list. So, all you need to do is assign a due date and come back to work on this task later
- Use the tools Boomerang or Followup.cc so the e-mail reappears in your inbox when you specify
When you turn your e-mails into tasks, you can feel confident knowing that nothing will fall through the cracks.
Bad Habit #4: NOT finishing the last 5% of the task
Solution: Take literally a minute to finish the task or add “Finish X” to your to-do list
Neglecting to take action doesn’t just apply to e-mails. It also happens when you get a business card at an event and promise to get in touch, but then forget to; or write a launch e-mail, but don’t check the links to your sales page.
When you neglect finishing that vital last 5% of the task, you encounter awkward situations that can be detrimental to business, like seeing the person you were meant to follow up with at the next event and trying to avoid them; or having to re-sending your launch e-mail with “working link” in the subject line.
This habit is easily nipped in the bud by taking the extra minute to complete the task that you set out to do.
If you don’t have time to do it, add it to your task list so you can review it at a different time.
When you take the extra minute or two to finish a task, you avoid situations in the future that could lead to a bad impression of you or your business. You then appear and ARE professional and organized instead.
Bad Habit #5: NOT tracking your recurring online expenses
Solution: Create and regularly review the list of tools you pay for
Don’t let the number of online tools available overwhelm you! It’s easy to rack up six, seven, or eight monthly recurring fees from a calendar tool, a newsletter service, video hosting and on and on.
While you might need some of these tools to run your business, others are often forgotten about and end up being a drain on your bank account.
Avoid that from happening by keeping track of all of the tools and software you’re paying for.
You can do this in Evernote, Asana, or a simple Google document.
Every couple of months, revisit that list and identify the tools you’re not using. Then, decide if you want to cancel the payments.
Keeping track of the tools you are not using and canceling automatic payments in a timely manner will save you money. That frees up funds to invest in more important areas of your business, like your team or the program you’re developing.
Take it One Step at a Time
No matter how many bad habits you want to change RIGHT NOW, just choose one habit to address for a month and then move onto the next one.
Small, consistent actions will always trump inconsistent grand gestures.
Back To You
What bad habit do you want to break?
