Unplugging from the Matrix: What Distractions Do You Need to Remove from Your Life?

Do you ever have days where it feels like you struggle to finish anything? You have a mountain of work to get through, but you cannot find the motivation to get started?

You know these days … The ones where you take the path of least resistance. Perhaps you scroll the news or social media, or listen to talk radio. You interrupt your own meetings to take the group down useless tangents. You aimlessly walk the halls of your office to avoid the mess in your email box or on your desk. Or perhaps you don’t even show up to work at all. By the end of the day nothing is solved, but every deadline is one day closer (or one day more past due).

You’re the owner. You call the shots.

There’s nobody telling you that you can’t waste time.

But at the end of the day, you don’t feel great.

It’s the same feeling we get from laying on the couch watching TV all day.

It’s hard to get out of the rut once you’re in it, but at the end of the day we feel sort of crummy when we utilize our time this way.

As a high performing business owner, you’re going to have these days (and you're going to need your down time). You have a lot of responsibility and it’s always there waiting for you.

But distracting ourselves from what needs to be done gets us nowhere. So if these types of days are inevitable, what can we do about them?

How to Avoid Distraction as a Business Owner

Practice Awareness

The best place to start is to become aware of when you’re headed down the path of distraction.

Can you sense when you’re headed into “killing time mode”?

Do you know when you’ve entered “overload land” and the avoidance tactics start to come out.

For most of us, this is easier to see after the fact than when it’s coming on.

Self awareness is a very difficult skill.

One way we can address this is to ask someone we trust to keep us accountable.

We can also brainstorm our distractions and do our best to ask ourselves the question, “Why am I doing this?” whenever we start to indulge in those activities.

Are we on vacation or are we supposed to be working?

Context is important.

Develop Coping Skills

If we can develop awareness, then the next step is to develop effective coping skills.

It’s possible that we cannot step into our email just at this moment, or jump into solution mode for a big challenge.
But what we can do is impact something positive rather than just killing time.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I love to write.

If I’m feeling overwhelmed, I’ll take the time to write something out.
That’s productive as I’m getting my ideas one step closer to sharing with the world.

Another might positive step forward could be to reach out to some friends or colleagues you’ve been meaning to connect with.
Rather than scrolling social media, you can connect with real people in your life.

In other words, if you can’t jump into solving that big issue, it doesn’t mean you can’t work on moving the needle on something else.

Whatever it is, I’m sure we can all agree that obsessing about the news cycle, world events, and politics is not going to help any of us achieve our goals for ourselves, our families, and our businesses.

In the context of planning your exit, if you can become aware of and then remove these distractions, you can make room for the activities that will ultimately help you one day depart from your business the way you want to.

Reach out to us if you’d like to learn more about the small yet meaningful actions you can take to set your business up for a successful exit in the future. We’d love to connect.