Small Business Idea

Regardless of your opinion on the subject, everyone has basic instincts that trump the myriad of trivial business requirements that typically fill our days.

For example: while in the midst of a leisurely swim on a tropical vacation, you may find yourself wondering about how nice your new bathing suit feels, if you paid too much for your hotel room, if you remembered to unplug the toaster before leaving home, and so forth.  However, when you’ve been underwater just a few seconds too long, you suddenly get 100% interrupted by an unstoppable urge that says, “get me up to the surface for more air, NOW!!!”  Its your survival instinct which, without, none of us might be here.

Similarly, while in the midst of a productive brainstorming session, business plan meeting, or some other small business operation, it is totally possible to suddenly have your business focus 100% sideswiped by an evolutionary urge like “Why is my child screaming in the other room?!  Must save progeny!!” or “Man, its almost the weekend again, and I still haven’t heard back from [name of person you took to dinner 3 weeks ago]…  this is driving me CrAzY!!!” or “I am soooooooooooooooo thirsty…  who cares about this business detail I’m working on?  What I really need to do is find me a bevy…” and so on.

While this kind of instinctual reaction to keep ourselves alive may be good for our survival, it can also kill your business productivity in no time.

That’s because our bodies and minds have been programmed to prioritize some things, like eating and other survival skills, above more abstract 17th century principles like value creation, completing a year-end, or doing adequate business planning.

In a split second, its virtually impossible to choose a low-priority business task over an apparently high-priority, survival-dependent task. This is true even when your survival is really not actually threatened, such as ‘needing’ a snack an hour after breakfast or ‘needing’ to check on a child when you know they’re being well cared-for.

To deal with this, we have to try to deal with the instinctual/survival/evolutionary issues beforehand.  That way, hopefully, we can physically survive and get that business plan written.

To accomplish this, here are a few things you can do to instantly improve your small business’s productivity, assuming you have not already done so:

• Have basic snacks available near or at your desk
• Keep a large glass or container of drinking water on hand at all times
• Unless absolutely necessary, keep your workspace and your parenting space separate
• If you haven’t already got this under control, learn how to get a date so you can concentrate on your work
• Clear all bee hives, roaming bears, and angry squirrels from the vicinity

With these basic aspects of life and “survival” under control (and unlikely to distract you 9 minutes for every 10) your business productivity should improve markedly.

For at least 90% of your day, you now only have to worry about everything else in life!

At least this gives you a fighting chance of concentrating on the tasks your business needs to have completed in order to thrive, instead of just getting overrun by the tasks you need to survive.