Procrastination in Your Business: Why It's Always Quotes and Bookkeeping You Put Off

Why do you put off quotes and bookkeeping when you work all day?

These tasks ask you for something routine work never does: a judgement. In a quote you set a price, and that price can be turned down. In your bookkeeping you see figures you might not like.

Almost everything else in your business gives you an answer straight away. The email is answered, the delivery has gone out, the team's question is settled. A quote gives you back nothing but an open question at first: will the customer say yes?

So you do everything else first. You're not working less. You're working on whatever answers you quickly. Hard work isn't the problem. The order is.

Is procrastination a time problem for the self-employed?

Usually not. If you were short on time, all your tasks would pile up evenly. Check whether everything piles up for you, or always the same two or three tasks.

For this I rely on one week of observation, not a new system. Every evening you write one line: which task you postponed and what you did instead. After five working days you have five lines. If the same task shows up three times, it's one you keep pushing back.

Here's how that can look: Monday, postponed the quote for the new customer, called suppliers instead. Wednesday, postponed it again, sorted the stockroom instead. The "instead" column is the real finding. It shows you where you escape to, and every one of those escapes feels like work to you.

How can you overcome procrastination on tasks that call for a judgement?

You give the task a fixed time and decide on the first move in advance. The fixed time spares you the daily question of whether today is the right day. The first move turns the big task into a small one.

For your bookkeeping that means: Tuesday, 8 a.m., open the receipts folder and sort the week's receipts by date. For the quote: Thursday, 7:30 a.m., copy the line items from your last similar quote.

You're thinking: too small. That's exactly why it holds. The discomfort sticks to the whole task, not to the first move. "Write the quote" sets off more in you than "copy the line items". Why that discomfort comes up at all is explained in Procrastinating Because It's Unpleasant. Once you've sorted, you can already see the next step in front of you.

Your next step: write the first line tonight. Which task did you postpone today, and what did you do instead? After five days you'll know which task gets the first fixed time.

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