5 Action Steps to Break or Avoid the “When is Now” Cycle

Yesterday, I talked about the “when is now” cycle and how detrimental to your life it can be. While I gave a sort of vague solution in that article, I felt I needed to go into more detail.

Knowing how to identify the “when is now” cycle is just part of the solution. You need to learn how to stay out of the cycle or break free from it if you’re entangled. So, here are 5 steps to accomplish this goal.

5 Actions Steps to Break or Avoid the “When is Now” Cycle

1. Have no fear. Look, if you want certainty, then die. That’s the only certainty in your life—no taxes aren’t, but that’s another story. Business is about risk. Even the best plans can fail. If that’s a problem, business isn’t for you.

2. Be willing to make mistakes. Perfectionism will kill you. There was a time in my life where I might not be writing this to you. I’d be too nervous about it not being perfect. Could I have said more? Is it an amazing article? And on and on. Mistakes happen and that’s a fact. I’ve yet to make a mistake that killed my business. Yes, some of them were more serious than others, but you keep moving forward.

3. Don’t spend most of your time on large-scale projects unless you’re financially secure. Sure, we all want to be the next CNN or something, but unless you can afford to spend all of your time making $0 a day, stay far away from any project that is too big. You can still do them, but try to keep those larger projects consuming no more than 10% of your time and resources. Instead, focus 60% of your time on anything you can put in action today or this week. Spend the remaining 30% of your time on ideas that are weeks to a couple months out at most.

The exact percentages can be changed. It really depends on your financial goals and position. For example, if you’ve got enough stable passive income coming in that you’re comfortable with, you could increase your long-term time expenditure from 10% all the way up as far as you want to take it. The main point is to categorize your actions to ensure your actions potentially satisfy your immediate goals—make more money this month, pay a bill by Friday, take a vacation next week, etc.

4. Limit your education resources. I love learning. Growing up, I’d read a business book every day. It was my passion. Today, I read books, watch lectures, etc. In fact—I hate admitting this—I still own all my books from college, even my geology book. On my iPad, I have a huge library of books and training materials. Point is, you can easily lose a lot of time learning, but never doing. Don’t spend all of your daily time learning and don’t spend a majority of your money learning.

Yes, there are things to learn, but you need to pace yourself. There’s nothing wrong with taking a week off to go absolutely nuts with education so you can emerge a Super Hero, but many people get into an “information obtaining” pattern that ends up consuming their days.

5. Don’t try to do it all yourself when options exist. I can do a lot of things fairly well. One activity I enjoy is programming. Here’s the problem. When I spend many hours or days or weeks programming, I’m nothing doing too much else. Sure, I get the job done and it’s great, but at what cost? Understand, your time is money. Don’t be fooled into the concept that by not spending actual currency on something you’re working on that you’ve somehow occurred no cost.

Learn to hire people to do tasks you either can’t do quickly, don’t want to do or shouldn’t do. At first you might have to handle a lot on your own, but the key to growing is to get more done faster. You can only work so fast and you only have enough hours in the day.

I hope you found this article informative, inspirational and helpful. Got any thoughts about it? I’d love to hear from you.