The 5 tiny habits that have changed my business for the better

You've probably heard the quote that you are a product of your habits, or maybe the other quote, your thoughts create your feelings, your feelings create your actions, your actions create your habits, and your habits create your life. It's all true, right? We are what we do consistently and regularly.

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5 little habits that have improved my business

Our habits are something that can really shape not just our lives, but our businesses as well. And I've really picked up on a lot of small little habits in my business that have completely changed it. So in this post, I'm sharing five of those with you.

 

#1. Deliberately being terrible with emails

I have no problem with being somebody who doesn't reply to emails quickly because if it's something important, then you'll follow me up or you'll message me, or you'll call me, or you'll get in touch with me some other way. And most of the emails I get are not important, and when they are important, I generally reply straight away. So I have no problem with being terrible because I'm lucky that I do have a team to pick up the slack with the other emails. I no longer have a public facing inbox. There's not very many people who have my email address. And if you email the other inboxes, you, most of the time will get a different team member, not me. So I have been very, very lucky to step out of the email inbox.

And being able to step out of it has given me a lot more time to be proactive in my business and a lot less time to be reactive. I don't spend as much time being reactive anymore. And it's that activity I found that really filled up my mental load, it drained my creativity, and it made it really hard for me to move my business forward. And I think that's where a lot of business owners are stuck is that place of reactivity where you're getting emails into your inbox and then suddenly you're like, “Oh, I need to do that. I need to do that. I need to do that,” rather than consciously deciding, “What do I need to do today that's going to move my business forward?”

 

#2. Being hopeless at admin

The second tiny habit that has changed my business is deliberately being terrible with doing admin tasks. I'm hopeless with admin tasks. I have started spending a lot more time on my business to the point where I don't do very much admin anymore. And again, it's taken a little while to get to this process, slowly trusting my VA more, slowly trusting my team more to offload a lot of those admin tasks that I was spending a lot of time doing. And now that I don't worry about it as much, or now that I don't have them on my plate as much, I tell myself, “I'm terrible with admin. I don't do that.” And I give it to somebody else to do. That has been a big shift because now, again, I'm spending that time on tasks that are proactive, they're not reactive. They don't feel boring so I don't procrastinate them. I was forever procrastinating admin work. Little admin tasks that takes somebody else 15 minutes to do, I would procrastinate it for three hours and that's not a great use of my time.

 

#3. Asking the question, “How can I make this as easy as possible?”

I think I'm quite a lazy person. I personally think I'm really lazy. And by using that laziness to my advantage, I've actually really been able to simplify and streamline my business quite well. So by making everything as easy as possible, I save time. I get things out there a lot quicker. Sure, not everything is 100% perfect. Sometimes we make typos, sometimes my videos and my podcasts aren't perfectly edited, but that's cool because I'm impacting a whole lot more people than I would be if that content was never out there in the first place.

 

#4. Learning and getting inspiration from outside the online business world

Tiny habit number four was learning as much as possible from people outside of the online business echo chamber. So I see a lot of the same books getting recommended over and over again. I see people all doing each other's courses and there is an extent of this where it's like, “Yeah, this is awesome. You're going to learn a lot.” But for me, a really good habit has been learning from other industries. Reading books that aren't directly related to business and picking up, “Okay, what can I take from this book and apply to my business?” And honestly, I get more inspiration from non-business books than I do from business books. Same with non-business podcasts, non-business courses.

 

#5. Saying “no” to lots of things

I reckon at least once a week, I get invited to speak at somebody's summit and I get promised that I'm going to get in front of hundreds of thousands of people if I only promote the summit to my entire list. And I always say no to these because firstly, I'm super protective of my list. But secondly, the more things that I say yes to, the fewer things that I want to do, I can do. So it kind of pushes me away from my goals. If it's not helping me get closer to my goal, then saying yes to it is actually pushing me further away from my goals. So I've started saying no to a lot more things. I no longer teach at every single online event that I'm invited to teach at.

I no longer contribute to every guest article I'm asked to write, and you know what? It saves me a lot of time and I haven't actually noticed a difference. Sometimes when we think we're saying no to an opportunity, we're actually saying yes to something bigger. And I know there's a lot of talk about, “You've got to say yes to every opportunity. You've got to grab every opportunity,” but sometimes there's a bit of magic in not grabbing every single opportunity and to just chill. Just be like, “Okay, I'm going to focus on this goal right now. And if an opportunity presents itself that's going to move me closer to that goal, yes, I will take that. But otherwise, I'm just going to say no, even though it could be a good opportunity.”

 

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