Ep 82 Transcript: How to Turn Procrastination Into a Powerful Tool for Business Growth

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors in spelling or inaccuracies in the spoken words.

Shauna Lynn Simon (00:00)

Welcome to the Real Women Real Business Podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon. picture this, OK? Tell me that sounds familiar. It's two o'clock in the afternoon. You have that super important task on your list. And like when you woke up this morning, you're like, that is the thing I'm going to tackle today. And somehow, even though you haven't done that task yet and it's part way through most of the way through your day, you've decided that at this very moment, the most important thing for you to do is.

reorganize your desk drawer for like the third time today or something along those lines. Like, are you a master procrastinator? And you know exactly what you're doing when you're doing it, right? You know when you're procrastinating. You say to yourself, I'm going to focus. And then you find yourself grabbing a snack, taking a bio break, scrolling through social media. ⁓ You know, this is actually your subconscious sending you a message. Did you know?

that according to research by Dr. Pierce Steele, 95 % of people admit to procrastinating. 95%. So like, I don't know who the 5 % are that don't procrastinate, but I would love to meet you. If that is you, please message me. Reach out to me at Shauna Lynn Simon on Instagram, because I want to know who you are and how you're doing it. Because the reality is 95 % of people are admitting to do it. So either the other 5 % has found some magical code that we all need to understand, or they're lying.

And I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but you might be lying. For entrepreneurs, we deal with decision fatigue. We are constantly being bombarded by so many decisions that just wear us out that it's easy for us to put things off even further. that 95 % of people, if there's a lot of entrepreneurs in there, I'm gonna say the entrepreneurs, we're probably 100 % all of us are procrastinating at some time or another. So what if I actually told you that procrastination isn't a character flaw?

It's actually your subconscious trying to protect you. Okay. I want you to really hear me on this. This is your subconscious trying to protect you. And I think we really beat ourselves up sometimes about procrastination, right? Because we know we're supposed to do it. We know that we intended to do it. We had the best of intentions and that should matter, but it doesn't feel like it when we're missing a deadline and someone else is counting on us to do something or maybe it's just something that we feel like we're not moving the needle in our company.

because we've been putting this one thing off. And so first of all, let me just say you're not alone. So I hope you hear me on that. But today I want to help you to recognize the messages that your subconscious mind is actually trying to send you so that you can move forward in a way that's going to align with you and your goals. Okay, so here's how I see it. There are essentially three types of procrastination messages, but it's up to you to start listening to some of these. So the first one.

is the this isn't your zone of genius message. This is your skill gap message. So sometimes it's that task that's just outside of your wheelhouse and it might mean that it's time to offload it. I know as entrepreneurs, we really feel like we need to have our hands in every element of the company and especially when we're first building, maybe we've got a shoestring kind of budget and we're like, I got to bootstrap this whole thing. So I've just got to do all these things myself. And sometimes, yes, that is absolutely what needs to happen.

But I want you to recognize when procrastination is your subconscious way of saying this is not your wheelhouse. Now, does it mean you can't learn it? Sure, you can probably learn it. But will you ever learn it to a point where you're going to feel masterful at it? That's something you want to ask yourself. And, you know, discomfort is is common, of course, when we're learning a new thing. So a skill gap doesn't have to be a problem necessarily. But let's recognize that that's what it is.

and put some things in place to address it. Okay, so the next type of procrastination message is the, need more time to think. You need more thinking time. That's your processing mode. So sometimes it's that you're maybe stuck on a problem. need more time to think through a solution. This is me when it comes to my design plan. So if you're not aware of this, I'm actually an interior designer as well as a part of one of the many hats that I wear. I do still.

do a fair bit of work in interior design. And I tell my clients that even though, like I might quote them, this project is going to take approximately 20 minutes, or sorry, not 20 minutes, 20 hours to come up with their design plans. Okay, so I'm gonna need 20 hours in total and I build them accordingly for it. Maybe 15 hours, 20 hours. And this is the time to create the floor plans, the concepts and so on. So that might seem like, she should be able to fit that in a week or two, right?

Theoretically, yeah, I can totally hammer that on a week or two if I needed to, but they're not going to get the best of me because what I need to do is I actually need to work on their plans for a couple of hours and then I need to walk away from it. And one thing I tell my clients and if you're an interior designer, this one's gold. Feel free to steal this one. I tell my clients if they ever balk at the price that I give them, I always tell them one thing I want to tell you that I don't charge you for is the amount of space you're going to take up in my head for the next several months.

I will be thinking about your project when I'm driving, when I'm cooking dinner in the middle of the night. It's not something we as designers can just turn off. And maybe you're not an interior designer, but you're you're still an entrepreneur. And so these ideas that have, maybe it's a business development idea. Maybe it's another client project that you're working on. We need time to step away from those things and let things continue to percolate in our head.

And they're working behind the scenes. They might not be at the forefront, but they're working behind the scenes. And so when it comes to me and my design plans, when I walk away from them, I come back in a focused session and when I return those new ideas just come flooding forward for me. And those are often even better than what I would have had if I just continue to work on a project. I actually just had this really recently with a client I'd come up with. I think it was three or four really solid.

space planning layout plans for renovation project we were going to do. was some demolition involved in it and I thought I'd come up with some really great plans and we ended up having to postpone my presentation with them due to some personal things that I had come up and you know what ended up happening when I went back to revisit them to write some of my notes about things for the presentation I looked at it with fresh eyes and I had a brand new plan that came to the forefront and I just

started spilling it all out into my program. And let me tell you, that is the design that they picked. So the fact that we had to delay the presentation actually worked in their favor. I told them this, of course. Anyway, okay, so then the third ⁓ way that procrastination shows up as a message for you in your subconscious is the, isn't aligned with your priorities. This is like a values mismatch.

Maybe you don't feel deep down that whatever it that you're working on is a really good use of your time based on where your current priorities are lying. And it's not to say that what you've identified as your priorities are actually properly aligned for what you should be working on, but your brain is telling you that they are. And so if you believe your priorities are what you should be focusing on, your subconscious might try to keep you from getting distracted from those priorities and they might not see this other thing that you're supposed to be working on as being a high enough priority.

So those are kind of a few of the messages that you want to be listening for. When we procrastinate, our brain is often trying to avoid the discomfort of uncertainty or potential failure. It's essentially trying to protect us. Research actually shows that 20 % of adults are chronic procrastinators. But for business owners, a big part of this comes from our task switching and our decision overwhelm that makes that procrastination even worse. Sometimes it's just a matter of

not necessarily procrastination so much as we just overloaded our tasks. So the one that we find the most difficult or is going to take the most energy from us, even if it's going to be the most productive thing that we do that day, we're going to push it aside because our brain is just saying that's too hard for us. And so it's not to say that you can just go ahead and skip all of these things instead of just procrastinating on them. let's just eliminate them off our to do list. But I am going to give you some tips, some practical solutions for how you can address these things.

One of the most obvious ones is if this is like not in your wheelhouse, for example, can we offload this? Like for me, it's bookkeeping. I do not enjoy bookkeeping. Never have. I was incredibly fortunate when I started my business that my dad was a retired accountant and was able to take on my books for me. So he got them set up initially. I did bare minimum. Don't get me wrong. I love financials. I love numbers. I love the data that comes out from all of this.

I just don't want to deal with the actual bookkeeping end of it and dealing with the balancing of the books and such. Yes, I want them to be balanced. I just don't want to be the one to do it. So my dad, fortunately, took all this off my plate and he created all the right accounts that I needed and figured out where the journal entries all needed to go and made sure everything was working before I passed it off to a bookkeeper. Later on, when the business started to grow and got more robust and

took a little bit more to navigate than what he could handle. But the point is that he got me started on it. So I never had to get my hands super dirty in that. You might not have someone who's as inexpensive labor as my dad. Every year I told him I would add another zero to his paycheck, which was zero to begin with, because he's my dad. Anyway, that he did this for me and so appreciated it to this day. I'm so incredibly grateful. So you might not have that opportunity. You might not have.

the funds right now to be able to offload things. You might not have members of your team that you can offload things to because maybe you are your whole team right now. But here are some things that you can do. So step one is if there is someone else who might thrive at doing this task better than you, let's explore giving it to them. And then if that doesn't work, here's some other tasks. And even if it does work, some of these are still really useful. So the first one is SOPs, which stands for Standard Operating Procedures.

And this is essentially a step by step of how to do something. These are great for procrastination prone tasks, and these are often repetitive tasks that you're going to be creating these SOPs for. Now, repetitive doesn't necessarily mean that it's every day. This could be once a day, could be once a month, it could be once a year, especially if it's only once a year. SOPs can make getting started a lot easier because you don't have to think about the actual steps involved.

Like I said, for me, bookkeeping was always that thing. So there were certain things I still had my hand in for bookkeeping. And so I had solid SOPs for all of it. The other advantage to having those SOPs, of course, is that it allows you to easily pass that task off to someone else should it come down to that, should you have that team member to be able to pass it off to. So having these SOPs created for any repetitive tasks, it's a lot of people think of, I need SOPs when I hire team members.

I will tell you that I have had SOPs since long before I had any team members. And there are still plenty of tasks that I'm the only one who does these. I don't foresee anyone else doing these tasks anytime soon, but I am still doing SOPs for them because they make my life easier. Why do I want to spend the time to think about how did I do this last time? What's step one? It just gets you right into it. So this helps with procrastination. If you tend to procrastinate on some of these tasks,

Having that step by step here step one, it makes it a lot easier for you. If you've ever watched Friends, there's an episode where Chandler is getting married to Monica and he gets kind of freaked out by the whole thing. And so Ross has him just look one step at a time instead of trying to look at the I'm getting married today and walking down the aisle. He just goes one step at a time. So right now you just need to put on your tux, right? And just kind of walk your way through it. And that's what those SOPs will help you to do as well. So if you've got this

Here's sort of your filter that you're going to use. If I find myself avoiding X task for more than, say, two days or a week or whatever that looks like, it needs an SOP. If I find myself doing X task more than once in a year, it requires an SOP. The other thing you can do is if you've got a bunch of these repetitive tasks, can you batch all those repetitive tasks together so that you're taking, say, a focused one or two hours a month and put it or

quarterly even instead of trying to add them in weekly or sporadically sometimes batching them all together like let's just take all the stuff I hate to do and let's put it all into one big lumpy pile. It doesn't sound the most exciting, but maybe you can plan for a nice reward for yourself or schedule that day so that you have a nice break in the afternoon after you get all these tasks done. Some sort of reward type system. I am not above bribing myself. Let me tell you. OK, so the next tip I'm going to give you is

doing a procrastination audit. So maybe you spend about a week or so just tracking the things that you're procrastinating on. And then I want you to look for patterns for these things. So maybe it's the time of day. Maybe it's the type of task. Maybe it's the energy level. Like I said, for me, bookkeeping is definitely something I'm going to procrastinate on. I was quite aware of that very early on, but there's also other things that require me to procrastinate or that lead me to procrastinating.

A lot of times I can even just identify, I just don't have enough information about this. So is there a way that you can get more information about that particular task? Do you have to do that research? Can someone else answer some of those questions for you? Do you know what questions you have? Especially in the age of AI, there are a lot of ways to get more information about something. If you feel like it's the lack of information, I don't have enough information to able to complete this. But so take a look, like do this audit and kind of figure out

Where is there a pattern? Maybe it's that you never seem to have enough information about something. Can someone else be feeding you things once they hit a certain point of readiness as opposed to you trying to take them from the beginning? Is it the time of day? Is it the type of task? Sometimes procrastination will actually reveal tasks that shouldn't be on your plate at all. Other times it's it simply might identify an energy drain based on your routine. So it's your time of day. It's you're hungry. You're thirsty.

Find a way to recharge yourself if that's the case. Get a snack, get a cup of tea, go for a walk, take breaks throughout your day. You want to, again, if you're identifying what those patterns are, you want to make sure that you then refocusing your energy. So let's say it's ⁓ time of day. By two o'clock in the afternoon, you're done. All right, well, let's schedule some of those procrastination prone tasks for earlier in the day.

Maybe it even needs to be earlier in the week. Maybe it's the time of the week. Like if it's Friday, if you wait till Friday to get some of these tasks done and you've already checked out halfway through the day, you're probably not going to get them done. If it's a matter of just low energy, are there certain days of the week that you get up earlier than others? Or maybe have you skipped a workout that day? Like what is it that might be affecting your overall energy for women, which is majority of this audience? It could also be based on where your cycle, where you are in your cycle currently. Have you ever noticed this that

If you don't track your cycle already, I highly recommend tracking your cycle because it does help you to identify certain patterns and be able to plan certain things around it. Sometimes we don't have a choice as to when certain tasks are going to land on our to-do list, but sometimes we can actually plan them accordingly. So there is nothing wrong with planning some of these around your cycle. OK, I've got a couple more of these for you that we're going to tackle, but we're going to just pause for just one moment to get for this really quick message. And we'll be right back.

All right, welcome back to the Real Women Real Business podcast. And we've covered two of our procrastination techniques for procrastination solution techniques. All right, so we talked about the SOPs, we talked about doing the procrastination audit and identifying what other factors are involved in preventing us from being able to effectively move forward with a particular task. So the next thing is I want to talk about some time management tactics.

above finding a nice time management hack. Sometimes that is one of the best solutions for your procrastination. Because sometimes the answer is you just need to get down and do it. It's just got to get done. So I love a good Pomodoro timer. And I've spoken about this previously. There's actually an app you can download called Flow, F-L-O-W. And it helps you to focus your time in energy bursts. And I believe in that app, it's 20 minutes of working time and five minute breaks. Don't quote me on this, but.

I believe that's how it works. You might just set your own timer for this. Maybe it's a 60 minute work and then a 10 minute break. Maybe it's a 90 minute burst with a 20 minute break. Make sure that the longer you're working, the longer your break is for recharge. If you're only doing a 20 minute work, a five minute break is more than enough time, but it does actually help you to focus on a particular task. So that's one suggestion for getting some of these procrastination tasks done. Another thing that you can do is

The two minute rule. You've probably heard of this one. I'm honestly I cannot give credit to whoever came up with this. I know it wasn't me, but someone else smarter than me came up with this. But the idea is that if it takes less than two minutes, do it now. Now, I understand as an entrepreneur, probably like, listen, Shauna Lynn I understand the two minute rule, but here's the problem. I've got like 30 things on my list that are all two minutes and that's going to take me an hour. Okay, so maybe you're blocking off an hour if you really need to. But really, are they all two minute tasks?

A lot of times I find there's only like maybe 10 or so two minute tasks on my to do list. And so I'll just tackle all of those at once. I just batch them all together. Boom, get them out. The other thing I would suggest is morning. Use your mornings wisely. I want to reframe this as saying use your most productive hours wisely. But the reality is that for most people that really is first thing in the morning.

I know a lot of people will tell me, I really, I really get into the zone in the evening and I've seen it happen. I've even done it myself for that matter. And I was a like true blue night owl for most of my life. And I now get up shortly after four o'clock every morning and it's glorious because I get so much time in the morning before I've even actually taken any client calls. I've cleared a lot of things off of my desk, which is glorious. Now I understand.

This might not be for you. You might be listening to this and be like, Shauna Lynn, there's no way I'm getting up at 4 AM. I got you. I get it. Whatever your morning looks like, though, instead of hammering it full of meetings and appointments, as we sometimes do, can you block off that time instead for yourself, for your procrastination tasks, even if it's only once a week? But ideally, those morning times, those are going to be your most productive times. So see if you can put that into your schedule.

I also want you to ensure that you are managing your energy. So with this audit, you might have found there's certain times of the day that you're doing better than others. There is certain times of your month, of your cycle that you're doing better than others. I want you to try to match your task to your natural energy rhythms. Anytime we're trying to go against our natural rhythms, that's often where we end up getting stuck in some of these procrastination traps. And I want to help you to be able to avoid some of that. It's not a perfect science, of course, but do pay attention to your body.

and where you're working best and manage your energy accordingly. Okay, so I want to also address the shiny object system. So this is one of my other practical solutions for avoiding procrastination and that is the shiny object system. So here's what ends up happening. Tell me if this one sounds familiar because if you're an entrepreneur, I can promise you shiny object syndrome is quite likely a thing with you. And if you say it's not,

I'm also going to once again say I think you're lying. Okay, maybe you're not, but here's the thing. Here's the stat for you. Entrepreneurs have 23 % more ideas than the average person, but they often struggle with the execution and you're probably like, yeah, of course I do. I get it because I got 23 % more ideas and how the heck am I supposed to get them all done? And here's the thing. They can come at you like an absolute tidal wave.

And they come at you so powerfully. We're like, my gosh, if I don't address this right now, I'm going to lose it. I'm going to forget it. I get it. And I've got you because the reality is that this ends up taking us off course. It derails our entire day when we allow ourselves to go down that shiny object syndrome rabbit hole. So instead of doing that, I want you to create an idea parking lot.

It can be digital or it can be physical, whatever is going to be easiest for you. So this could be a Google Doc that you can pull up on your phone or on your desktop, wherever you are. It can be a physical notebook, but you got to make sure you got it with you at all times. It can be voice notes. I got to say most people I talk to voice notes are really difficult because the voice notes just go into the voice note. They don't come out of the voice notes. So unless you've got a system where that's being tracked again, AI is great for this. If you've got an AI note taker, give that your voice note and have that.

have it throw that into a document. So there's ways around this. I'm not going to get too involved into the tech. But the idea is I want you to have an idea parking lot where all of these great ideas go. And then I want you to review them weekly. What's urgent, what's interesting, and what's irrelevant? Because sometimes we look at that idea later on like, oh, that sounded really good when I came up with it. But now that I'm looking at it, I don't really think that's the direction I want to go in. Or I don't really think that aligns with where I was thinking of going. There's others where we're like, this is

This is interesting. I'd like to explore this more. I'm going to schedule some time for this. And then there's the urgent like this is gold. I got to get on this right this moment. So then we're going to carve out some time for it sooner than later. The idea is to do a bit of an audit of these ideas weekly. But then I also want you to review them quarterly and see which parked ideas actually still excite you. Sometimes sitting on them for a while, they lose a little bit of that shiny luster.

And so maybe you're just going to eliminate them off that list altogether. Other times you might take them and move them into your strategic plan. But now you're scheduling time for those ideas. This will help you to avoid getting lost in them. Because again, this is also why we're procrastinating. Because a new, more fun, shinier idea just came up that's got us all excited. And so we're just going to run with that. And I can tell you, I almost did it actually earlier today. I came up with this great idea. It's still a great idea.

But I started working on, first of all, a couple of things came to mind. One is I am not the best person to be doing this because there's some technical behind the scenes stuff that unfortunately I'm really good at. But just because I can doesn't mean I should. So I also identified this would be really great for my VA to do. So I'm going to pass it off to her for the time being. So I'm going to put together the instructions for her to be able to take it on. But then I also looked at it said I can do a smaller version of this right now to get it implemented.

and then implement the more full version of this that I really want to do down the road. But I don't want that to keep me from launching it right now because it is a really cool idea, but it doesn't need to be this super robust version of it that I'm envisioning, which is going to be awesome. And maybe one of these days I'm going talk about it on the show because it is really cool. It's something I'm putting into my Real Women Real Business Mastery program. It's kind of a bit of an audit of their business and it's going to.

give them very specific resources based on how this audit comes out. But for the time being, it's just going to help them to identify some things and won't give them a lot of specifics based on where they're at necessarily. It'll give them a little bit of direction, but it's not going to be this automated sales funnel, essentially, not a sales funnel. It's the wrong way of putting it. But the idea is that they would get put into an email sequence that would send them some tips to keep them on track with pursuing fixing some of those areas in their business.

Anyway, again, I'll say that for another day. I'm also getting off track. So then the last thing in terms of being able to address your procrastination and manage and navigate it a little bit better is to simply automate wherever possible. So this kind of goes back to those repetitive tasks. Yes, we want to create SOPs for them. But if they're repetitive, is there a way we can automate them to some extent? Sometimes you might not be able to automate them completely. But are there elements of that task that can be automated? And if so,

Let's work on implementing that so it takes a little bit of the pressure off of you. Now, here's where procrastination can actually be strategic for us, though. So I don't want to I don't want to be thinking about this as a negative thing because it's really not. Sometimes our subconscious mind just knows that we're not ready for something. So I want you to be listening to what your subconscious is telling you about things. Remember that I told you already, procrastination sometimes is just your mind protecting you from the uncertainty and the discomfort of things.

But other times it's actually saying, you're not quite ready for this yet. Have you ever had something that's come up for you where you would get this really cool idea, but you don't move on it right away? And then maybe a couple of years down the road, you revisit it you're like, ⁓ it's a good thing I didn't try to do this two years ago. I'm in a much better position now for it. So sometimes that procrastination is actually a really good thing. There is a difference also between that productive procrastination and pure avoidance.

But productive procrastination is like what I talked about with sometimes our brain just needs more time to process some things and needs to sit with things a little bit. It's actually really funny. I'm going to do two television references in this episode. And the reason why this is really funny is I barely watch TV. But there are some shows that I have seen. And one of them is The Big Bang Theory. You've probably heard me quote that on here before. And Sheldon actually takes a job, an unpaid job at the Cheesecake Factory.

because he's working through a problem that he gets stuck on. And so he identified that he needed to be doing something that was mundane and didn't require any actual brain activity from him in order for the answers to come to him. And that's exactly what he did. And that's exactly what happened. And this is so true. How many times do you have those bright ideas when you're in the shower, when you're making dinner, when you're driving? So sometimes your brain just needs to rest a little bit. And that's the difference between productive procrastination

avoidance. There are other times where we're simply avoiding it. But again, I want you to to allow your brain if you're thinking, okay, I just need to think a little bit further about this. Maybe that's exactly what you need. And that is some permissible procrastination. And so you want to make sure that you're listening to this, you know, when should I push through this and just get it done? Set that Pomodoro timer, schedule into your calendar first thing in the morning and get through it. And when should you listen to the pause? And I think

when it comes to listening to the pause for some big ideas, especially like if it's just a repetitive task like your bookkeeping or something, no, you don't need to pause on that. You don't need to think any further about it. You're going to know which ideas really do require thinking through. Here's what I would encourage you to do, though. Don't completely avoid them. Work on part of it. See how far you can get and then allow yourself to take a break. OK, I don't want you to necessarily completely avoid.

doing the task altogether and saying, oh, but Shauna Lynn told me that I could totally avoid doing this task. That's not what I'm saying. OK, some red flags as to when procrastination can be problematic. If you're missing deadlines that affect your clients and or your revenue, OK, those are non-negotiables. If that is happening, are you overloaded with things? Is it procrastination or are you simply overloaded? Is it time to hire some team members to be able to support things? Sometimes we're the doer doing too many things.

and we need to be more of the CEO in our business. So I want you to watch for that as a potential red flag for things, because the reality is we do need to make money in order to stay in business, right? You might be avoiding financial tasks. Now, I did talk about how much I hate bookkeeping. That doesn't mean that I try to avoid financial tasks. I will tell you, I have to force myself to do these sometimes. It can be very dangerous, for your business health. So it is incredibly important that you stay on top of this. Maybe you are procrastinating on growth opportunities due to fear.

And the challenge with this is, you going to actually miss out on a really important opportunity because that fear is holding you back? is this a your brain saying, I don't have enough information, or is your brain just a little bit scared because there's some uncertainty to it, in which case maybe we should just push ourselves forward a little bit. Twenty five percent of business failures are actually attributed to poor time management and task avoidance. So I want you to avoid.

falling into that potential trap when it comes to your procrastination. So the more aware that you are of your procrastination, what you're procrastinating on and listening for why you might be procrastinating on those items, the better position you're going to be in in order to be able to address those things. Okay, let's start wrapping some things up. So here's what we're going to do. You are going to start tracking some of your procrastination patterns. Okay, so maybe do your weekly audit this week.

I want you to identify maybe your top three procrastination triggers. Is it a particular time of day? Is a particular type of task? What does this look like? And choose one solution to implement immediately. So what are you going to do to get through this task? Is it going to be the Pomodoro method? Is it going to be scheduling it in the morning? Is it going to be delegating or automating it or just create an SOP to make it easier to get through it? Whatever that looks like. And come up with your own ideas, too. I've given you some great tools here.

but find something that works for you as well. And then I want you to set up your idea capture system, that parking lot for all those great ideas, set that up this week as well. And that will, you'll see a ⁓ solid difference in how often you get completely derailed. I'm not gonna pretend that I still don't get derailed sometimes, of course I do, but having a parking lot system has been really, really helpful for it. All right, so I did mention that I've got this great tool that I've got for my...

team that are sort of for my real woman, real business mastery program members. And here's what I'm going to do. You can actually get this same assessment, not in the same pretty new functional format that I'm setting up for my, for my members where they're going to get specific resources based on where they're out in the assessment. But I want you be able to do this assessment and see where some of the gaps are in your business, where some of your knowledge gaps are, maybe where you could use a little bit of help. ⁓ So.

I want you to check it out. Simply go to aboutshaunalynn.com/CEOQuiz That's Q U I Zed because I'm in Canada. See if you're in the U.S. I got I got you. So check it out. It's a really great tool. This is just the PDF version of it's not an interactive version of it, but it's still going to give you some really great results that you can actually apply right away. It's going to tell you where you're currently at in your business, where some foundational gaps are.

and what you should be doing as some the immediate next steps to move forward. OK, so a few other stats that I wanted to mention. Did you know that 88 % of the workforce procrastinates at least one hour per day? So I want you to keep this in mind if you have team members as well. Maybe you're going to support some of your team members in helping them to overcome some of their procrastination. Instead of punishing them for procrastination and saying, why didn't you get that done, let's try to understand what's potentially keeping them from getting that task done. Do they have the information they need?

Do they need an SOP for it? Is it just not in their wheelhouse and we need to find someone else to take care of it? Even if you can't do that right away, it's something to work towards. So I want you to be really aware of this, not just for yourself, but for your workforce as well. Procrastination costs the average business owner 21.8 % of their potential income. So I would like us to regain that 21.8%. I could use, I don't know about you, but I could use an extra 22 % of revenue in my business.

So if that means something to you, then I want you to work on implementing some of these techniques today, this week. All right, listen, if what I'm saying here today has resonated with you even just a little bit, I really hope that you will tune in again next week and allow me to continue to be a part of your entrepreneurial journey. We drop new episodes every Tuesday at 7 a.m. Eastern time. Don't forget to hit subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform.

and leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts as well. Those really do help us not only with our ratings, but to help other people to find us. And of course, as always, the best way that you can show your support not only for the show, but for your fellow women entrepreneurs is if you know someone who can really benefit from this episode. And let's face it, we all know someone who's suffering from procrastination who could really use this episode. I ask that you share this episode with them. It's going to make their day. It's going to make my day. And it's going to make us all so much better.

and able to raise each other up. And that's what we're all here to do, right? All right, ladies, until next time, keep thriving.