Productive Procrastination

Episode 87 transcript: Productive Procrastination

When avoidance looks like hard work

Hey there, and welcome to episode 87 of Your Fun and Profitable Online Business. This is the podcast that helps you build a business that feels as good as it looks. I’m Wendy Muzzy, and I help women entrepreneurs create fun and profitable businesses by simplifying what’s making their business harder than it needs to be, and helping them focus on the work that actually moves their business forward.

Last week, we talked about what you can do if you have endless energy to build the thing, create the template, design the quiz, or put together an entirely new offer, and then suddenly have absolutely no desire to sell it. And we talked about why it makes sense. Building gives you novelty, progress, and checkboxes. But on the other hand, selling gives you uncertainty, delayed rewards, and the possibility that someone might actually say no.

So today I want to take this a step further, because sometimes we can create an entire cycle that lets us avoid selling while still feeling incredibly productive. And that right there is a dangerous little combination, because procrastination is fairly easy to recognize when you’ve been watching Netflix instead of working. But it’s a whole lot harder to see when you’ve been working for six hours straight, especially when you have something impressive to show for it. So today we’re gonna talk about productive procrastination. All right, let’s get to it.

The build, recover, build again cycle

Here’s a pattern I want you to see if you recognize. You get this brilliant idea, and you get excited, and you go into a flow state, and you start building the thing. And because you’re excited about it, maybe you work on it more than you normally would. Late nights, or the weekends, or a giant push to get it done. Then you finish, and you’re exhausted, which makes complete sense. You need a break. So you recover. You step away for a couple days. Maybe you catch up on everything else that you ignored while you were so intense on building. And by the time you feel ready to work on something exciting again, you have a new idea. Oh, this one is really good this time. So you start building that. And somewhere in the cycle is the first thing that you finished that’s still just sitting there.

Now, I want you to be really careful here. And I want to be very, very clear here. Because needing recovery is legitimate. If you spend a week on a giant creative sprint, of course, you need some breathing room. The problem here isn’t the recovery period. The problem is what happens after it. Because that little gap between finishing it and selling it can become the place where the entire sales process disappears. And if you’re someone who gets energized by new ideas, there’s always another idea available to fill that space.

So you stay productive. You keep creating. You might even have an enormous library of genuinely fantastic things out there. But the revenue doesn’t match the amount of work you’re doing. And that’s worth paying attention to. Because your problem might not be that you need another thing to build. You may just need to sell the ones you already have. So how do you know if this is happening? And more importantly, how do you interrupt it? Let’s go through six things.

1. Learn what productive procrastination looks like for you

Number one, learn what productive procrastination looks like for you, and you specifically. It’s sneaky because the activity itself can be completely legitimate. Maybe you reorganize your systems. That’s useful. Maybe you improve your sales page. Also useful. Maybe you add a new lead magnet. Yep, that definitely helps too. And maybe you learn a new platform. Yeah, that can make a difference.

The question is, why am I doing this now? And maybe an even better question is, what am I not doing while I’m doing this? Because if you spent four days improving the sales page, but you haven’t actually sent it to anyone, that’s information. If you’re learning a whole new email platform before you send them one sales email, that’s information. And if you’re starting offer number seven, while offer number one through six have barely been mentioned to your audience, you guessed it. That’s information. The work isn’t necessarily wrong, but the timing might be.

2. Redefine what finished means

Number two, redefine what finished means. Now, I think this is one of the biggest shifts you can make. A product isn’t finished because you just finished building it. I know that’s very rude. I get it. But think about this. If you’re building something for your business, what’s its job? It’s probably to generate revenue, or to bring new people into your world, or to help your clients get better results. Whatever the goal is, building the thing is only one part of the process. If you create a course and nobody knows it exists, you’ve completed the course materials, but you haven’t completed the business product.

Marketing isn’t the thing you get to do after creating the offer. That leads to selling, which is part of completing the offer. It’s changing that whole cycle. And this means your project plan doesn’t end with just uploading the modules. It could end after you do the sales emails, or after you invite 25 people, or after you follow up and review the results. Now we have a completed business project. And I think this is a really useful reframe for those of us who love building. I put myself in that category, because we love completion. So stop allowing yourself to mentally mark the project off complete before the selling happens. Make it part of your process.

3. Stop treating tiny amounts of data like a verdict

Number three, stop treating tiny amounts of data like a verdict. Now, here’s a pattern I sometimes see. You create something, you send one email, there’s crickets, nobody buys, and then you might think that nobody wants it. No, you don’t have enough information yet. One email is not market research. This connects directly to what we’ve been talking about over the last few episodes. You need enough invitations to actually learn something.

Yes, sometimes the offer needs work. Sometimes the price isn’t quite right. Sometimes the messaging isn’t connecting. And sometimes you’re talking to the wrong people. These things happen. It makes sense. But you can’t diagnose any of that from limited data. And building something new every time the first offer doesn’t immediately take off means you’re constantly resetting your data to zero. You’re not learning. You’re starting over again and again.

4. Audit your graveyard

All right, number four, audit your graveyard. Okay, I have to be honest here. This one’s a little fun for me. It could be horrifying for you, I get it. But I enjoy making a list of all the things I’ve already built. The templates, the guides, the services, the videos, the mini offers, the programs, the bundles. Whatever it is that you’ve created, put it on that list. And I don’t just mean the things that you currently list on your website. I mean all of it. Go through your Google Drive and your email platform, your Canva account, and your checkout pages, and look at the folder called Final Final Version 2, Use This One For Real. You know that one. You know the one I’m talking about.

Then next to each one, ask yourself, did I actually sell it? Not, did I mention it? Not, did I put it on my website? Not, did I send an email about it two years ago? No. Did you actually give this thing a reasonable opportunity to sell? You might discover you have an entire little graveyard of excellent ideas that were not bad ideas in the least. They were just under-marketed ideas.

5. Find the shortest distance to an invitation

All right, number five, find the shortest distance to an invitation. Now that you have your list, I want you to look at it. I don’t want you to choose your favorite thing. I want you to determine which of these has the shortest distance between where it is right now and you making the real invitation to buy. Maybe the checkout page already exists, or everything’s already completely recorded. Whatever it is, choose the shortest path. Because we’re trying to break your pattern of build, build, build, build, build. We’re creating a new pattern. Use what I have, make the invitation, get information, improve, repeat. That’s a much more profitable cycle.

6. Try a no new building allowed rule

And number six, try a no new building allowed rule. Yes, we are doing this. For a specified period of time, you’re not gonna build new offers or new things or new freebies or new digital products. No random templates that just pop into your head at 11:45 at night. I want you to just write them down. Now, you know I love an idea parking lot. You’re absolutely allowed to have the idea. You’re just not allowed to build it yet. Instead, your job is to sell what already exists.

Maybe your rule’s for two weeks. Maybe it’s 30 days. Maybe you decide that before you’re allowed to build something new, you need to make 20 invitations to something you already have. Now we’re putting some guardrails around that beautiful, gorgeous, creative brain of yours. Not because your ideas are the problem, but because ideas don’t automatically earn that right to become a project. And creating more is not always what your business needs. Sometimes your business needs to stand behind something you’ve already created long enough to give it a real chance.

Your action step for this week

All right, with this in hand, let’s get your actions done for this week. Now, go make that list that we talked about. Don’t judge it. Don’t decide whether it’s good or bad. Just make the list. Then decide which one has the shortest distance to the real invitation. Choose that one and put it in front of people this week. You don’t need to rebuild it first. You just need to make the invitation.

And if you just mentally pictured 47 abandoned Google Drive folders, I have something for you that can help. It’s my idea parking lot, and it’s designed exactly for this problem. It gives your idea somewhere safe to go, so every exciting thing that pops up doesn’t automatically become the next thing you build. Because you don’t have to stop having ideas. You just need a system that helps you decide which of your ideas needs your time right now and which ones can wait. And sometimes the best idea for your business isn’t a new idea at all. It’s finally doing something with the ones you’ve already built. Go grab it at wendymuzzy.com/parking.

All right, that’s it for today. Until next time, happy building your fun and profitable business.