Just do it!

Man, how often is this used? And overused?

But let me tell you, it is the secret to life success. And I need that forehead smack reminder every single frickin’ day.

And that’s the point of this post. Hopefully it helps you, but mainly, it is to remind me to just take action. Taking action just solves so many problems:

1. Fighting fear? Take action. The act of starting breaks down any reservations you have.

2. Overweight? Take action. Just start walking.

3. Behind on your work? Take action. Just do the first thing on the TO DO list.

4. In debt? Take action. Pay it down by $5. Just start.

5. Want to write a book? Take action. Just write 500 words. Get started.

Ok, the list above – or something similar to it – has appeared in roughly 42,000 blog posts and lifestyle articles. You didn’t really need me to give you these same suggestions. You know all this already.

But yet, too many of us remain stuck. And the main reason why? We just don’t do. We don’t take action. Because we are afraid…

1. Afraid of being rejected.

2. Afraid the customer won’t like what we do.

3. Afraid of success (which potentially leads to more work and responsibility).

4. Afraid that you lack creativity.

5. Afraid you don’t have what it takes.

And yet again…

…you didn’t need the list above to explain why so many of us get stuck. You already know this too. It has been written and spoken about one gabillion times…

But yet, that’s the essence of procrastination.

I will be honest. I love lists. Especially TO DO lists. And a majority of the action items on my TO DO list fall into two main categories:

a. Small stuff that seems to be annoying and a pain in the ass.
b. Hard creative stuff where I fear my output won’t be accepted, liked, or appreciated.

And, thus, I drag my feet on getting through these items on my TO DO list…

But sometimes, I get into a work flow, “in the zone” as others have defined it, and I dive in and tackle that TO DO list with reckless abandon. You know the feeling I am talking about. We’ve all been there.

And every damn time I get into this flow, two realizations occur:

a. The small stuff that seemed overwhelming was way-to-easy to knock off the list. It wasn’t as difficult as I imagined. And once I got started, the momentum to keep going was powerful. I plowed through more than I planned when I started.

and…

b. 19 out of 20 times, my clients LOVE what I produce.

So why? Why? Why?

Why the heck do we all still get stuck? Why do we fear what people think of our work? Why do we continue to procrastinate?

I just saw this post by Leo Babauta, where he writes:

Deal with something once. Do it now. Then it’s off your mind, and you can fully focus on the next matter.

Forehead smack.

Inspired by this list, I knocked off two items on my TO DO list that have been there for weeks. Honestly, I thought about them every day. They bothered me. They nagged at me. They did, in fact, weigh me down.

But I just did them. And it was all over in less then 30 minutes.

Why in hell did I let these two things drag on for so long? I don’t know. But let me promise this, I am going to take Leo’s advice, and I am going to tackle this stuff head on. I am just going to DO.

In fact, when I assign myself a task, I am going to tackle it right then and there, if I can. I am not even going to wait to put it on a damn TO DO list. This crap is never as hard as you think and it never takes as long as you think.

So…what stuff on your list needs action?

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A pic I recently shared on my Tumblr blog...

1. I don’t have time to set up a blog.
2. I don’t know what I’d write about.
3. I don’t have the money to pay a designer and set up a blog.

I have been conducting a personal experiment for the last month.

In my free time, I have been studying and reading about minimalism and the art of simplifying as a way to remove the clutter from my complicated life. And yet, still trying to live an intrepid life. I needed a creative outlet to share what I am learning, and what I am reading.

Secondly, I have been wanting to experiment with and learn Tumblr. So, I created a blog using Tumblr and the focus is on minimalism, simplicity, and boldness. You can FIND IT HERE.

So, here are my simple observations:

1. Tumblr is way cool. I love it. It is easy. And it is fun.

2. It is free.

3. Tumblr makes it very very simple to attach a personalized domain to your tumblr account. All you have to do is own the domain, and the process to assign it to your tumblr blog is idiot proof for non-techies like me…

4. Even the big dogs use Tumblr for their web sites…

5. Tumblr blogs seem to fare well in the SEO-friendly space. I launched this thing on May 16th, and it just recently passed the million mark on Alexa. Not bad for a small, dinky, experimental blog in just under a month…

6. Tumblr makes it SO easy to share other’s work. In fact, many people use Tumblr strictly as a means to showcase and spotlight the work of other writers.

7. And this speaks to my point about the advantages of using a Tumblr blog to address your fear of not having enough to write about. You can easily share the work of others, and “reblog” material that matters to you, to your audience, and is designed to fit into the construct of your blog. This took some getting used to when I first launched mine, but now it is a big piece of the message delivery of mine…

8. When you are prepared to publish new content, Tumblr’s dashboard is set up for you to easily publish your own text, share photos, nicely present quotes, share links of other blog posts, uploads chat conversations, and audio and video of course. Once you select what type of content you intend to publish, Tumblr again makes it idiot-proof.

9. When you are setting up your Tumblr blog, you have hundreds of templates to choose from, with a wide variety of styles. And once you install a theme, it is pretty easy to customize. And, lastly, you do have the option to have a professional designer make serious customizations.

10. I have really enjoyed the community inside of Tumblr. I have met a lot of new people, and that has been a pleasant surprise.

11. I was also surprised to see so many other A-listers present and spending time here. Kevin Rose, Leo Babauta, or Hugh MacLeod for example…

So those are my quick observations after playing around with Tumblr for 30 days. It is a very simple solution for the entrepreneur who doesn’t have the money, the perceived lack of time, or the knowledge base to launch a blog. If you even think a blog will help you market your business, but don’t want to fully commit to hiring a designer to set one up, this is a great tool for you to experiment with!

Disclosure: If you are going to become a serious business blogger, where you commit to blogging as a major piece of the marketing work that you do, I still recommend WordPress, with the Thesis template (what you see here). But don’t let time, difficulty, or expense be something that holds you back. Tumblr is a great option for you if you can’t pay someone to set up your blog for you…

I was reading Leo Babauta’s e-book about focus recently, and he was talking about the importance of rituals. He says it is easy to get distracted in this modern age, but when you engage in rituals, you are more likely to be focused and in the moment. He writes:

A ritual is a set of actions you repeat habitually — you might have a pre-bed ritual or a religious ritual or a just-started-up-my-computer ritual. One of the powerful things about rituals is that we often give them a special importance: they can be almost spiritual (and sometimes actually spiritual, depending on the ritual). And when they become special, we are more mindful of them — we don’t just rush through them mindlessly.

And I thought, I bet intrepid marketers have marketing rituals. So let’s examine this idea…

If intrepid marketers (CLICK HERE to learn what an intrepid marketer is) engage in rituals, based on Leo’s writing above, we should assume they are focused. On this point, I don’t think there is any argument. The question then becomes, what are they focused on? And thus, what part of their marketing process is cemented into daily ritual…

Are you focused on the customer? It is my opinion that each business needs to be more customer-focused, and thus, we need to devote more time – each day – to thinking about every customer interaction. We often overlook even the little ways our customers interface with our business.

What to do? Setting a ritual where you review these interactions – on a regular basis – is vital to success of your business. How about creating a series of questions you ask yourself – maybe at the end of each day – that help keep you focused and review how each customer interacted with your business, and how you can improve those. Include everything, from products, to voice mail, to your invoicing process.

Are you creatively focused? If being creative is an important part of your work, and it is for most of us, then ritual is probably a very critical element in your creative process. What does it take to get you in the creative mood? Do you need to remove all distractions, such as email? Twitter? Phones? Do you need to use a specific creative space, such as your studio, coffee shop, or the conference room?

What to do? Figure out what you need and then execute on the ritual so you can deliver your best creative work. And don’t let ANYTHING disrupt the ritual process.

Are you focused on process? Or results? These are two very different things, process and results. How you might ritualize to focus on these two would be different in my opinion.

What to do? First of all, do you have your process committed to paper? Can you measure the results of each step in the process? A regular examination of this process, and ritualizing to determine what is working and what can be improved might be a good thing to always be getting better at what you do.

As for results, well, isn’t this what we are after? Most people are more worried about the process than the results, and that’s why they have NO cash flow. It might be helpful to set a weekly ritual where you focus on thinking through all you are doing to be sure they are leading to actual positive results for your business…

Are you focused on conversation with your marketplace? Is interacting on the social web important to you and your business? Well, then you need a ritual. And I am not talking about getting on Twitter and just doing whatever for several hours.

What to do? What is your goal on the social web? If it is to identify and make relationships with new prospects, then create a ritual where you listen for keywords that are of interest to you, and begin a conversation. Then share information with that new contact. This three-step ritual might work for you. Here is what I do to help bring some sense of ritual to one element of my social web activity.

See, I am thinking most small business people don’t have marketing rituals. We are all too busy trying to manage the mundane and time consuming tasks of running our shop day-to-day. But, if Leo is right and rituals are a set of actions you repeat habitually, then we all need to formulate some new rituals. Life is too hectic, and we probably don’t have the discipline to focus our minds – on a regular basis – on the important things related to our business.

What do you think? What are your rituals? What works for you?

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I recently stumbled upon Leo Babauta’s Mnmlist blog, a blog about minimalism and simplifying your life. It has been a profound find, as I am in the process of trying to simplify things in my cluttered life (and I simply LOVE the blog’s design).

But as I was spending time thinking about these things in the context of my life, I got to wondering if there is anything to applying the same concepts to our marketing efforts. Just as it seems to be the case with my crazy life, I oftentimes wonder if most entrepreneurs have a marketing program that is far too complex.

So, here are some minimalist ideas to think about and some important questions to ask yourself:

1. Is your message too complicated? Make it easy for people to remember why you are special.
2. Is your website too cluttered? When people visit your website, make it easy to learn what you do and easier to contact you to do it.
3. Is your strategy on the social web too complex? Your simple online mission is to engage and serve others. That’s it.
4. Is your target audience too scatter shot? Be laser focused on a niche. Don’t try to help everybody.
5. Are you focused on simple storytelling? Do NOT try to communicate one thousand different ideas/messages/concepts/fixes…
6. Can your prospects look at your marketing collateral and easily understand the call to action?
7. Is your diet of new learning focused on the things you need to improve? Don’t read thought leadership on shiny objects (as Seth says) that don’t really advance the goal.
8. Do you have BOATLOADS of pointless busywork? Instead, be laser focused on the important work.
9. Do you experiment with all kinds of new tactical options on a whim? Instead, execute only on new ideas that fall into the scope of your crystal clear marketing plan.
10. Wait, do you even have a marketing plan? Oftentimes, the lack of a road map leads to confusion, complexity and disarray.
11. Are you worried about too many details? Such as inventory, blogging, twitter, facebook, sales, promotions, employees, sick days, cubicles, vacations, graphic design, vendors, invoices, accounts receivable, etc? Instead, focus only on the customer. All the rest will fall into place…

So, minimalist marketing isn’t about cutting back on your marketing, or reducing your marketing budget, or even cutting the time spent on marketing. What I am talking about here is simplifying things so that your program is uncluttered – and can do it’s job.

What do you think? Agree or disagree with this concept? Got anything to add or subtract? Let me know if you have additional ideas to simplify your marketing…

[photo by marmota]