How to stay consistent as a business owner (when you’ve never felt more distracted)
Audio more your jam? Listen to this post as a podcast episode.
News just in: in 2024, we’re finally cracking through the increasingly less-muddy glass ceiling of success in the entrepreneurial world, and breaking down some of the myths surrounding how apparently successful business owners made it all happen.
The answer? Not overnight.
Muffins, I’m writing this post from the one little pocket of sunshine that my house gets (which just happens to be my office) in the winter. I live at the bottom of a mountain with my husband and two little cherubs, and in winter, our entire family pretty much just hibernates until, you know, the summer arrives. The vibes are very John Snow. Even though we live just outside apparently balmy Sydney in Australia, the position of the sun and the trees behind our house during winter means we are living in a cave for the duration of our lives.
So, that’s me. I’ve just had my coffee, which is, as you know, if you've followed me or listened to me for a while, is very, very important to me. I hope you are doing something similar right now as you snuggle down to read this blog post of mine.
And if you are a solo business owner or service provider in 2024, as you sip on your coffee and read your way through my charming yet slightly waffley… waffle, you might be bringing all sorts of feelings with you. Feelings sparking questions like ‘will I ever feel motivated again’, ‘why can’t I focus on anything for longer than 3 seconds’, ‘there’s so much to do and not enough hours to do it in’ and ‘am I actually meant to make this whole business owner lark *happen*’?
If you’ve read a little about how to be more productive or optimise the way you work or manage your time, you’ve likely come across some smug person broadcasting from their million dollar mansion in Geneva talking about the importance of *consistency* as the key to success. While it’s a positive step that we’re starting to move away from the idea of unsustainable overnight meteoric rises in business, it can be very difficult to see how you can practically integrate habits of consistency in your own business and way of working when it feels like you literally just have way too much to do. How do you *consistently do all the things* when consistently doing all the things would mean never sleeping and/or seeing the light of day again?
How to leverage consistency to be more productive and achieve your goals
In today’s post, I’m going to talk about how you can implement consistency as a practice to help you be more productive and achieve your goals as a solo business owner, even when you’re really time poor.
I’ll take you through:
Why consistency is so important if you’re a service provider who want to be more productive and achieve your goals
What gets in the way of staying consistent for nearly every single solo business owner or service provider
How you can stay consistent and finally start achieving the goals you set for yourself
Is consistency the new productivity hack for solo business owners?
Consistency creates momentum. It’s like pushing a snowball uphill (channeling the winter theme here): it can feel painful and slow at first, but once you reach the peak, it gains unstoppable speed and size as it rolls down the other side. (I mean, I’m guessing. I’ve never actually pushed a snowball up-hill).
Small, consistent actions compound over time. Staying consistent can help you make hay-uge progress toward your goals. Think about it like a garden (we’re switching the analogies up, people). If you doused the seeds you planted in bucket-loads of water for a week and then stop, it’s like the seeds might sprout but will, well, probably die a slow, resentful death. If you water the seeds a little bit every day for a month, you’ll probably have yourself some pretty happy herblings.
Being consistent helps you combat the inevitable dips in motivation and energy you’re likely grappling with on any given day if you’re a solopreneur working from home. Consistent routines and habits sound hella boring and the opposite of free-spirited and fun, BUT they’re actually what keeps you moving forward and leave you with the space for freedom and fun. Especially on days when you’re not feeling particularly inspired.
For a solo business owner juggling all the weighty balls (ew), consistency offers an anchor for your big ole distractable brain.
The two biggest hurdles that are standing between you and your goals right now.
Trying to do everything:
As a business owner rolling solo, at any one time you might be trying to service your clients, market your business, do your own accounting, figure out how to structure your business, build your own website, create your own content, on top of you know, raising a family, being a friend, being a semi-decent partner, looking after the cat - it’s a lot, petal. It’s a lot.
And when we really dig down into the depths of this mess, we’re faced with a glaring belief that we still haven’t broken free from: the belief that we can and should multitask. We should be able to do all of the things at once. For example, if we're looking at say, creating content, we should be able to start an Instagram, write a blog post, record a podcast episode, email our mailing list and DO ALL OF THIS ON REPEAT EVERY SINGLE WEEK WITHOUT FAIL. By ourselves.
Apart from this feeling like a full time job in itself, the problem with this is that most of us are likely doing a lot of these things for the first time in our lives. Content creation or marketing, for example, might not be something that you are used to doing. It’s new for you and you know who else it’s new for? Your brain. Anything new, any new area or skill or practice ups the ante on the challenge factor for our brain. So we've got all of these things that we’re trying to stay consistent with as a business owner who wants to grow that are completely foreign to us.
On the flipside, if you’re in a full-time or part-time role working for another company owned by someone else, you likely haven't had to use that mental energy to channel into all of these new areas of business and work and generating income. You’ve just gone to work, done the tasks associated with your role (that you’re likely somewhat skilled in), and gone home.
The mental load that comes with all of the things we do on the daily to make our businesses… business - is HUGE. Huge. Even if some of these things aren’t new for you.
Trying to do everything at once is the fastest way to sap your mental energy. And this, petal, is often why we struggle to stay consistent with the tasks we know we need to do to achieve the things we want to achieve. It’s not a you problem. It’s an energy problem. We can only sustain the level of energy required to produce and do and make and create all of these things at the same time for so long before we flop over in a heap.
This is often why we can blog for a couple of weeks really consistently, or post on Instagram every day for a week before we fall off the hashtag wagon. We haven’t learned how to support our brains to sustain the mental energy to hold all of these things in our brain.
Productivity often feels really personal. When we’re not doing, producing, ticking things off, getting things done, we can really feel like we’re failing somehow. You might start to question whether you’re ever going to be able to bring your goals to life.
You absolutely are. You absolutely can. You’re not a failure. Your brain is just carrying a lot. And we're gonna work through some things you can implement to support your big old brain, increase your mental energy and help you stay focussed and consistent in this post.
Distraction:
‘I'm so easily distracted. My brain can't focus. Why can't I focus? Why can't I concentrate? Why am I so easily distracted? Why do I keep picking up my phone?’
Like our capacity to be productive, we often make how susceptible we are to distraction about us. We make it personal. And once again petal, distraction is is not personal - it is situational. We live in a time where our brains are having to deal with more distraction than ever before. The rate that it is growing is astronomical. According to a study appearing in Science Express, our brains are dealing with processing the equivalent of 174 newspapers’ worth of information per day. PER DAY.
We are bombarding ourselves with so many different sources of information, so many different source of stimulation, so many devices, so many things pinging and dinging and buzzing and emailing and calling and texting.
Gang, it is so not personal. It’s just so, so difficult for our brains to maintain focus when we’re dealing with literal firehoses, often every few minutes or even every 30 second. Your level of distraction is a result of your situation, our current societal situation. But unless you're going to go live off grid somewhere, if you want to have a successful online business, be a service provider, work for clients, promote digital products or create leveraged income or whatever it is you want to do: at some point you will need to participate in and use the platforms and digital devices that are so distracting to us.
So how do you make it easier for your brain to do that?
This is the question I’d like to invite you to ask yourself, rather than why am I so easily distracted? How can I make it easier for my brain? How can I eliminate and prepare for distractions before they come in to my orbit?
3 ways you can leverage consistency and finally start achieving the goals you set for yourself.
So how can you actually support yourself to stay consistent with what you want to do, or what you want to achieve?
Pick one thing.
If you want to start introducing consistency into how you get things done, how you work, what you create: instead of trying to do all the things at once, pick one thing. One thing that you are going to concentrate on to implement consistency in your week.
For example, if you’re wanting to market to or attract more clients, you might have this whole big marketing strategy in your head. You might be metaphorically staring at your strategy and blinking. How am I going to do all this? Create Instagram reels, write the blog post, do the podcast, show up this networking event, do this speaking gig. Instead of making your strategy the thing, pick one thing, one task, one activity, from that strategy that you want to stay consistent with. Using this example again, you might pick writing a blog post every week. Your new consistency goal might be: ‘I am going to write a blog post and post it every week, and I'm not going to worry about how consistent I am with my Instagram for the moment’. You are going to focus on establishing and maintaining your consistency by doing your one thing: creating a blog post a week.Experiment with your routine:
For example, if you're a service provider who works as a virtual assistant or a social media manager, you might explore implementing a consistent process each week. For example, you might trial allocating certain clients to certain days of the week.
Or, it might be something like trialling creating all your client social media content on a Monday, and website work on a Tuesday, and so on. Experimenting with implementing consistency via the power of routine is especially helpful if you’re struggling with constantly getting interrupted or pulled from one thing to another.
If you’re nervous about making a dramatic change to your week, again start with one area. It might be that you start with scheduling one client on a certain day of the week before rolling it out to all your clients.Start a proof bank:
Starting small with the things we’ve talked about is really powerful because it gives your brain proof. Tangible proof that you can consistently do the thing that you said you would do. Your brain looks at what you’ve done and smugly nods. ‘I've nailed this one little process for three weeks, four weeks, six weeks’ or ‘hey look, I've created my blog post every week for two weeks, four weeks, 3 months’. No I haven't consistently Instagramed or YouTubed and whatever else, but I have nailed a blog post every week. Which, potentially, might be more than what you were able to do when you were trying to do all of the things at once.
As you build your proof bank showing your brain that you can stay consistent: you have made it easier for and supported your brain in giving yourself one thing to focus on at a time. The next step is leveraging this proof that you have for your brain to snowball your consistency with other things. You might introduce a second thing that you want to stay consistent with. A third. A fourth. Before you know it? Hey, you’re one of those consistent people who made their goals happen. Go you.
Bonus consistency power-ups:
At first, challenge yourself with something really incrementally small. Start with something that you are confident that you will know that you can get done or that you know that you are going to be able to to sustain. This will make it easier to create proof for your brain. Once you have that proof and you have that confidence, you will then be able to introduce bigger things that you can stay consistent with. Challenge yourself to stay consistent and it'll become really exciting to you to see these things happening.
When it comes to consistency, productivity, your time, how fast you’re growing, your goals or anything really: please stop punishing yourself for not being able to do all of the things at once. We are not supposed to be able to do all of the things at once. We are carrying an immense load, immense, can I say that again? Immense. Our brains have never had to carry as much as they are carrying right now. So please stop punishing yourself. We are not meant to do all of the things perfectly all at once.
Ditch the perfection: be consistent, but you absolutely do not have to be perfectly consistent. Again, make it easier for yourself to make the thing happen. Be kind to your brain. Don’t punish yourself because you sent your weekly newsletter on a Wednesday instead of a Monday.
One of my goals is to share girl, productive, my productivity newsletter with my subscribers weekly on a Monday. It’s my morning inbox injection for solo business owners and service providers where I share unconventional productivity tips and mindset hacks, things that have helped me work better observations. Last week, I sent my newsletter out on a Wednesday.
Pre-consistency Kat would have completely shamed myself, slammed my laptop lid shut and shouted into the abyss: if I can't get this out on a Monday for more than two weeks in a row, who am I even anyway to be sending this newsletter? I want to encourage you… not to do this. Don’t berate yourself for not doing it perfectly every single week, especially when you start out. The likelihood that your audience gives two shits, whether they receive your newsletter on a Wednesday versus on a Monday is really, really, really slim. And if they do, do you really want them on your list? #justsaying
If you liked this post, you might also enjoy:
My Productivity Energy Audit Notion worksheet for service providers and solo business owners is coming!
It’ll include my framework for auditing your energy, changing how you work through your day, what you can improve, how you can optimise your energy so that you are not working all of the hours and help you introduce more space.
Ultimately, it’s designed to help you help the people you want to help, do the things you want to do and bring back some of that free spiritedness and fun into your day to day life. Because there’s no point in a freedom-filled business if you don't get to enjoy any of that freedom, right?
I’ll be sharing the worksheet with my newsletter subscribers. If you want to be among the first to grab it, subscribe to girl, productive.
