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Working Through The Haze

I suspect that one of the hardest things to do when you are involved in running a small business is to stay disciplined and focused. And yet those two attributes can be vital to the success of your business.

Yet sometimes those are the very last things that you want to do. A perfect example is this blog entry. One of the foundations of success for a blog such as this is regular postings throughout the day. And experts suggest that the first posting each day should be made at around the same time each day.

Now if you look back over my postings on the front page of the blog you will see that I have been posting at least once a day every day. There are some days when I post twice a day and even some days when I post more often than that.

Unfortunately the real world often interferes with the blogging world and deadlines and other pressures of work often interfere but I have been managing to put out at least one post a day.

The times for that first post have been, up until now, within a reasonable span too. I am always up by around 5am and on at least three days a week I'm up by 3.45am. And today was one of those days but for various reasons I just coasted through the early part of the morning.

I did a little work, I read some of the posts on blogs that are of interest to me and then I just went into some sort of haze where I wasn't motivated to do anything.

I know what has brought that on. I've been working for days on a project that was repetitive and finally began to bore me and that job is finished now. Some personal plans for today got turned on their head and left me feeling disappointed and it's one of those days where it would be so nice to be walking on the beach instead of stuck in the office.

If you're in small business those times are always going to pop up and it's how you handle those times that is important. You can let the mental haze hang around for a day or more or you can push yourself to move through it and get back to work.

Sometimes that haze can be therapeutic. Everyone needs to rest sometime and occasionally that haze can be your brain telling you that you need a rest. Other times though you need to take some steps to get yourself back to work.

Those steps are going to vary for everyone and perhaps you need to sit down and decide what will work for you in those situations. You may not be bothered by those down times right now but that doesn't mean that this is not the best time to prepare for them.

For me it was simply a matter of changing my work environment. Right now I'm sitting out on the back patio enjoying a beautiful sub-tropical winter's morning. The sky is a clear blue, the birds are singing in the trees and I'm still working.

I have my trustee coffee mug sitting on the table beside me and I have my laptop on my lap and my mind is already looking ahead to two other tasks that I had set for myself today.

I'm just about out of the haze and back to being disciplined and focused - the day is beginning to look good.

So what are you going to do when you hit the wall and you still have some distance to travel?

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