Do you have a long list of ideas or projects you have never gotten around to working on?

Entrepreneurs are constantly identifying new opportunities. In fact, a common problem entrepreneurs face is not coming up with ideas, but finding time to follow through with them all.

To solve this problem, I have listed eight steps that will break this habit of procrastinating good ideas, and instead, help to bring old projects back from the dead.

1. Make a list

As entrepreneurs, we are always coming up with new and exciting ideas. Unfortunately, due to previous commitments, these ideas frequently take a backseat and are often forgotten.

In order to revive these dead projects, the first thing you need to do is prevent yourself from forgetting these ideas. To do this, make sure you are keeping an active list of all of your future projects.

There are two additional benefits to this. Firstly, the act of writing the idea down makes it that much more likely to be acted upon since it has been recognized, recorded and is easily referred to.

Secondly, if you have a long repository of ideas you haven’t worked on, you might be motivated to work on the list in order to feel more productive.

2. Prioritize

Some ideas get you more excited than others. This excitement might be your entrepreneurial instinct telling you that a certain idea has potential, or maybe your excitement is from an ambition that will drive an idea forward much more quickly. Either way, allow your excitement to guide you when prioritizing your idea list.

By emphasizing these ideas in your records, you are indicating which ideas are favored. This ensures your time is utilized most effectively since you are addressing your highest potential ideas first.

3. Choose an idea

Now that you’ve gotten into the habit of listing and prioritizing your ideas, you must look through your idea book and identify an idea you want to start now.

Pick a high-priority idea you remember being most excited about. An idea that is easier to start is often a plus.

More effective ideas that are usually easier to start are those that are related to one of your existing businesses. Instead of needing to start a new business, you might only need a new department, staff member or piece of equipment.

The most important thing to remember at this step is that you must look through your idea list and pick one in order to get started. You cannot move forward if you haven’t identified a specific project you want to get to work on.

4. Divide the project into steps, then schedule

You have picked out an idea you feel you will stay committed to. Now you must follow through.

To do this, break up this project into steps you or your staff can take action on right away. You might not know all of the steps, but identifying as much as possible will help to break this project down into simple, easier to accomplish parts.

Now, you must schedule these steps accordingly. Estimate the amount of time each step will take and schedule timeframes and due dates for each. Take NO breaks in between steps.

Remember, to ensure you are getting the most out of each step, make sure these small milestones are Specific, able to be Measured, Attainable, Relevant to the project and has a Timeframe. This is often called having “SMART” steps or goals.

5. Make it a top priority

However your task list is managed for you and your staff, make sure the steps for this project is of top priority.

These steps should be the things you get to work on right away, and must be completed before anything else gets done.

This is extremely important. Since you have gotten into the habit of postponing this project in the past, you need to to force yourself to break this habit by assigning these tasks high priority.

This will take a lot of discipline, so it must be scheduled with high priority consistently.

6. Adhere to the schedule without deviation

In order to break the habit of postponing this project, its high-priority status must stick. Thus, you must maintain discipline in adhering to this idea’s schedule until you naturally recognize this project as an integral part of your business.

Even if this project is skipped for one working day, your old habits will begin to reemerge. Remember, this idea has undergone years of postponement, so this old habit will be hard to break.

It will be extremely easy to suspend this project again unless you fight the habit. You must stick to this schedule tightly until this habit is broken.

7. Continue to identify and schedule new steps as they arise

Adhering to a strict and disciplined schedule is not enough. Because you will not know all of the necessary steps when beginning a project, you must actively identify and schedule new steps as they are discovered.

This is important because you don’t want to allow even one day to go by without working on a step for this project.

As you identify each new step, make sure it is “SMART“, and schedule it right away.

8. Repeat until the procrastination habit is broken

You are trying to break the habit of postponing this project, which is why you have to remain strict when scheduling and adhering to your daily task list.

Eventually, you will condition yourself to habitually assign this project a high priority. This is an indication that you can be less stringent on scheduling these tasks.

A side benefit to this practice is that future disregarded projects will be more easily prioritized and revived without being forgotten again.

Are there any other tips for breaking habits of procrastination or the postponing of good ideas?

Do your business operations need a boost? You can do this easily by getting a good handle on the fundamental rules of business.

A few weeks ago I wrote about one of these fundamental rules: that you must convert inputs into more valuable outputs.

As I had mentioned, converting inputs into more valuable outputs (let’s just call this a key rule) can be applied to all different disciplines of business.

If you apply this concept to all of your operations, you will learn how they can be improved, or how many options you really have to work with.

Pricing strategy

Converting inputs into more valuable outputs has a definite application to pricing. One clear one: the use of premium pricing or cheaper pricing.

You can either charge a higher price and gain a greater profit margin at the expense of reduced sales, or you can sell at a cheaper price and sell more units at the expense of making less margin per unit.

This key rule never specifies which pricing strategy is the preferred method, since as long as the inputs are converted into an output of ANY greater value, the rule has not been broken.

Both strategies meet this goal, they just use two different ways to generate greater output value. It is important to remember this so you can consider both strategies as viable options when designing your marketing strategy.

Competition

Whenever you use less inputs to gain the same level of outputs as your competitor, you have the advantage.

If you are spending less advertising dollars, losing less customers, producing at a cheaper price, reducing fixed costs, etc… while earning the same level of revenue (or more), you are the stronger competitor. You are making it harder for your competition to gain an advantage on you since you are utilizing your resources more efficiently.

Think about it–less customers lost, less advertising dollars spent to sell the same amount of product, cheaper cost of goods sold all means more money for your business to spend on even better client retention, improved products and services and greater advertising.

This is why it might not be a bad idea to survey your competition in terms of what resources they have to work with, so you are well aware of an advantage when you have one.

A simple business model

See my article: The Power of a Simple Business Model for my explanation on how this applies to this key rule of business.

Having a simplified business model is advantageous on many counts:

• Cheaper operations
• Ease of running
• Ease of managing
• Ease of adaptation to change
• Ease of expansion
• Greater leeway to add complexities without becoming too bloated

The list can go on and on.

Other than being lean, flexible and saving money, a simple business model also has competitive implications as well. Whenever you have a simpler business model than your competition, you are better equipped to adapt to change or weather difficult environments than your competition is.

In the face of difficult change, you are smoothly gliding through the difficulties, while your competition is much more apt to get tripped up and twist their ankles.

Gains can be evaluated in multiple ways other than cash

Keep in mind that this key rule never says that you have to use cash to evaluate increased value.

If you are able to barter services or products for others much easier than paying with cash, it might be advantageous to do so. It could save you money, staffing expenses, equipment, etc…

The important thing to remember is to keep an open mind when considering how you can increase value and save money for your company.

Time, productivity and value per hour

This is probably the most obvious of applications. Ensuring that your employees output is more valuable than their salary expenses is very important.

Consider their productivity and their output. If things can be sped up without lowering morale, do it. Sometimes increasing productivity can even raise morale.

Ultimately, you want to consider if each of your employees are adding value to your company. Again, this doesn’t have to be in terms of cash. Ensure you consider each’s impact on your business and provide incentives accordingly.

Waste and defectives

Another obvious application. Defective products are expensive. Wasted materials are also expensive. They provide no value for your business, yet take up time and money to handle.

Thus, the output is less valuable than the input. The objective here is to eliminate as much waste as possible as well as ensuring that there are as little defective products as possible.

Ensure you are implementing quality inspections on the production line and that wasted materials are reused whenever reasonable.

Minimizing downtime

No value is being produced during downtime. This is a black hole for value generation for your business. Minimize downtime whenever you can.

For example, if you run a retail store, and the store is presently empty with no customers, find something else for your staff to do, even if it is something simple like stuffing envelopes.

The important thing to remember here is you want your staff producing value for the business as much as possible without ruining morale or disrupting motivation.

Managing

It is rare to have as many managers as employees. Usually there is a ratio of one manager to several employees. This is for a reason. One manager successfully managing multiple employees meets the objective of our key rule, but it can be taken a step further.

You will need even less managers if your employees learn to self manage and self motivate. This can easily be done by creating an energizing and empowering culture. Giving your employees autonomy and the willingness to self manage will mean you require even less managers.

This means that the input (managers) will be even less and the output (employees managed) will be even greater. The benefit here is increased productivity and motivation and less manager salary expenses.

Advertising and marketing

The greater response rate to an advertisement, the better. If you have one ad that can be made that much more effective without increasing the ad cost, you have met your goal.

This is why it is vital to constantly test and improve your ads and marketing whenever possible. Greater conversion rates means increased sales without increased marketing expense. Therefore you should always test and tweak your ad copy for optimal results.

Less ad costs = more cash. More sales = even more cash!

Human resources

Recruiting and training is expensive. Retention will save you a lot more money. While at least some turnover is good for your business, you want a high employee retention rate.

Hiring a new employee costs 5 times the salary of an existing one due to recruiting costs, training costs and loss of productivity.

Utilize your HR inputs (recruiting efforts) as efficiently as possible by minimizing turnover rates and keeping the outputs (employee retention) to higher levels.

You can do this by ensuring during the hiring process that there is a good candidate, job and culture fit. You don’t want the job or the culture to chase the candidate away, nor do you want a candidate who can’t perform or mesh with the culture, and who ultimately gets them-self fired.

Investments in assets and equity

Any investments you make, be it in new equipment, loans, real estate, anything, you want to be as certain as possible that your rate of return will be an attractive one.

Choosing an attractive rate of return is up to you and beyond the scope of this post. However, taking some risk while having a good understanding of the investment you are considering taking on is very important.

Being educated about the investment decision you might take will ensure that your investments will yeild attractive returns as often as possible.

Are there any other useful applications to this key rule of business? Any thoughts on these applications?

A few weeks ago, the blogosphere was abuzz about the pilot of a new TV show, Trial by Fire, featuring The 4-Hour Workweek author, Tim Ferriss.

Regrettably, I missed the show, however, based on his book, his blog postings and what I have read about the TV show I have noticed that Tim, above all things does one thing and does that very well: learn.

Tim has won dancing and martial arts competitions, speaks several languages, is extremely proficient in business, writing and blogging and yet finds the time to do more and more.

How? It seems as if he has gotten a good handle on how to learn.

Not only has he mastered the art of learning, but based on the trailer for the show as well as some of his blog posts, he strives to learn things quickly.

He doesn’t look to learn things the old fashioned way where you study, read and memorize, but he learns by doing. He looks for shortcuts and he challenges the way things are traditionally done in the interest of reducing time invested in an activity to get results faster.

I think we can all learn from this. Tim challenges the status quo when learning something in order to get results faster.

While I am a big advocate of using your larger competitors as a guide to your own marketing, that doesn’t mean I believe you should blindly follow what they are doing. Rather, you should, like Tim does, challenge the status quo by testing, then measure the results.

By challenging the status quo, you can uncover new, more efficient and effective ways of doing something that your competitors may not have noticed before. And by testing, you aren’t tying up too much of your budgets to a technique you aren’t sure will work.

Entrepreneurs are constantly challenging the status quo every day by innovating and creating. We shouldn’t let our innovation and creativity stop with product/service development. Incorporate these competencies into your marketing and operations as well.

All businesses should become in-tune with the way we learn, react, adapt as well as retain information. The more intimate of an understanding we have in our business’ ability to do these things, the better we can position our businesses to move faster, especially through redundant and costly processes.

But in order to do this we must first recognize that the status quo isn’t necessarily ideal. There just might be a better way of doing something and it is vital for our competitive edge that we question what is “normal” and act on it.

We profit by challenging the status quo, why can’t we market and operate by challenging the norm as well?

As a business owner, you have a mountain of work that needs to be done. Most of it can be delegated, automated or outsourced, but some of it only you can do.

With all of the important things you need to do in order to bring your business profits, there are a number of tasks that entrepreneurs will undertake that serve no productive purpose, and often are done to delay getting to the real important work.

To help you understand what you absolutely should not be doing, I compiled a list of some of the most important tasks to avoid.

1. Thinking about anything else other than sales

This really encompasses all of the other points in this post. As a business owner, especially at the early stages, your primary goal is to organize and lead projects that will bring in revenue.

For new businesses, you may have one product, so these projects may be more basic, but this point still stands regardless. The bulk of your time should be spent finding ways to bring in more revenue for your business, hiring the right people to head up revenue-producing projects (namely, marketing) and making sure that everyone understands that sales is the top priority. Michael Masterson, author of Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat, describes this concept further and is a recommended read to any business owner.

2. Cleaning/Straightening up

This is a known procrastination technique. In order to avoid working on marketing and sales (something that takes a lot of trial, error and failure), business owners will instead focus on the cosmetics of their business: cleaning their office, buying new equipment, reorganizing, etc…

As much as you want to be looking at a clean office, this is by no means a priority. Sales and revenue generating activities should be your priority, not a clean and organized office with the latest equipment you can’t even use yet.

That said, I will mention that disorganization can be a distraction to many people and staying organized is very important. However, I want to draw a distinction between staying organized and organizing.

Spending the day to organize and clean your messy office is not prioritizing properly. However, taking active steps to staying organized: putting things in their place when you are finished with them, etc, will keep you organized. This will ultimately save you time because you will never need to spend the entire day cleaning up. If organization and simplicity are areas of interest to you, I would suggest you check out the blogs: Zen Habits and Unclutterer.

3. Manufacturing/Servicing, doing technical work

There is a definite exception to this rule, which I will explain below. However, I have mentioned this point in a previous post. As business owner and entrepreneur, you are the leader and visionary of your business. As important as the technical aspects of your business are (by technical, I mean the actual act of producing the product or performing the service that your business sells), they are NOT what you should be doing.

This isn’t because these tasks are below you, or anything like that (and it is important that your employees know that), it is because you have an equally important job (if not more so). I quoted Michael Gerber (author of E-Myth) previously on this topic, and I will do it again: you need to “Work ON your business, not IN your business”. Working ON your business will allow you to steer your company in the right direction, pursue the right projects and avoid the wrong ones.

Working IN your business, however, only leads to perpetual work and not enough progress for your company.

4. Ignoring the needs of your employees

You should NEVER ignore the needs of your employees. This is pretty much common sense, but it still needs to be said. One of my degrees is in Management and I can tell you that most of what I learned was common sense, but somehow it still needed to be said.

If your employees needs are ignored, they will lose motivation and not work hard for you. This means lost productivity, sales, a poor workplace culture and a lack of quality in the products or services that your business sells.

This is where the exception to the previous rule may come into play. During the earlier stages of your business, chances are you will not only be the entrepreneur, but you will also be the manager of your business. Since there are only two levels in your business’ hierarchy at this point (your employees and you), you need to make sure your employees know that you are willing to get your hands dirty.

As long as they know that you are willing to help them and that their needs are important to you, they will be tolerant of you spending most of your time doing the leadership and visionary work.

5. Worrying/Stressing

I have mentioned this in previous posts before and I am going to mention it again. Worrying and stressing are inevitable: we are all human and we all do it (especially me). However, it is important to know that it brings in unnecessary doubt and it does not help at all with the success of your business.

It’s impossible to cut worry and stress out of your life entirely, but it is important to recognize it when it comes, and try to develop a habit of fighting it and stopping it as soon as you can. It will make you more confidant and work will be more relaxing.

These are just a few of the things you shouldn’t be doing with your time. This list is by no means comprehensive and there are certainly many, many more that can be added to this list. Do you have any tasks that you would suggest business owners NOT do? What other tasks would you suggest is a MUST for business owners?