Using that christmas feeling to give you a boost

Do you remember when you were a kid and couldn’t sleep the night before christmas because you wanted to wake up and open presents? That feeling of anticipation that lying there is just too boring. Is that the kind of feeling you have about your business?

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

It’s ok if your answer is ‘no’, or ‘not as much as before’. There’s no way you can keep that kind of excitement and energy going for a long period of time. The lower your energy and excitement drop, the less efficient you get. If your mind is engrossed with the same thing for every waking hour of every day, there’s no way around it. Your senses can get dulled.

So what can you do about it?

Mix it up

You’re an entrepreneur. You started your company because you had an idea and it probably isn’t the only idea you’ve had.

1. Pick a small idea that you’ve been excited about but haven’t had the time to think about. It doesn’t matter if it’s related to your current business. In fact, it might be better if it’s not.
2. Take a day or two off and just run with it full steam. I bet it’ll be an extremely productive couple days.
3. After a few days of exploration, you’ll have a better sense of whether the new idea has any legs. If it does, that’s awesome! Or if the idea was really simple, you might even be done and launched after a few days, which is even more awesome!
4. Now you can ratchet back your effort to maybe an hour or two a day.

Finish your dinner before you can go play

There’s lots of reasons why diversions are helpful.

• Sometimes you need a little excitement and reward at the end of the day. Make that your other little pet project and only work on it after you’ve finished all your “real” work. A little pot of gold at the end of every day can make your day’s go by more quickly and efficiently. You’ll wake up early in the morning excited about working on your new idea and power through “work”.
• Dividing up your time puts more constraints on you and that’s a good thing. Try to do what used to take you 12 hours in 10 so you have 2 hours to work on your new idea. Knowing that your time is more boxed can make you use your time more efficiently. When you know you have all day to work on something, your mind can have a tendency to be a little lazy (at least mine does ).
• When you have a mental block or a difficult issue with your business, sometimes it helps to just think about something else. Business is business and by taking time each day to think about a different business that’s at a different stage, you’re keeping your mind fresh and flexible.

Google has a well documented 20% free time policy where people get to work on their own ideas a day a week. New ideas spawn new business and improve current ones while making life a little more exciting. What’s your new idea?

- Justin

Other Two-Bit Posts

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• Yet another sweet sign
• 7 lessons to survive the next dot-com bust
• Learning the ‘art of bootstrapping’
• Desktop blog publishing via Qumana

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