There are several recent discoveries from the world of psychology that entrepreneurs can use to help manage themselves to be more productive and successful. As a side benefit, using these techniques might also make you feel more in control and less stressed.
If you run a small business, you probably have a marketing plan that outlines your goals for driving sales growth. If you are like most entrepreneurs, though, there are probably some goals in that plan you have been ignoring for awhile. Entrepreneurs, like everyone else, sometimes need help keeping ourselves on task so that we can accomplish our business objectives. The problem is that while you know your goals, but you can’t “do” a goal. You can only “do” an action. Since you don’t have a boss to answer to, your job as the entrepreneur is to identify the action steps that will help you accomplish your goals. It takes thought and planning to identify these actions, and then it takes a motivation and measurement system to help you keep performing the actions and stay on track to the goal.
Of course, the ultimate goal is to close sales and realize the benefits of success in your business. But we all need a little help with motivation now and then, especially during those periods when we are working toward long-term goals, such as in a marketing and promotion strategy, where the results of our actions are not bearing fruit right away. These tasks can be hard for entrepreneurs to motivate themselves to tackle on a regular basis. Let’s explore a few concepts from the psychology labs that you can use to improve your self-management and drive your sales higher.
Pre-commitment
The concept of “pre-commitment” is one of his best-known ideas of Thomas Schelling, a Nobel prize winner and one of the world’s greatest experts in conflict. In his work on international conflict, Schelling demonstrated that one party in a conflict can strengthen its strategic position by cutting off some of its options to make its threats more credible. An army that burns its bridges, making retreat impossible, is a classic military example.
Later in his career, Schelling applied his theories to helping individuals manage their own internal struggles. His theory is that we all suffer from a split personality. One “self” wants to lose weight or attend those networking breakfasts to grow your business. Let’s call this the “ambitious self.” The other wants to eat dessert or sleep a little later that day. We can call this your “indulgent self.” Both selves are equally valid, and equally rational about pursuing their desires, but they don’t exist at the same time. So how does your ambitious self convince your indulgent self to let you accomplish your goals?
Schelling’s solution to this problem was for “ambitious self” to take a decisive action at some point in time that will essentially force you to make certain choices later, when the “indulgent self” may be in control. In the weight loss example, a dieter might try force himself to make good eating choices by committing to write down everything he eats. A more extreme pre-commitment would be joining an organization that does weekly, public weigh-ins. Both of these dieting approaches have been proved to dramatically improve weight loss compared to less structured systems.
Now let’s consider how you can use this information to “raise the stakes” and force yourself to accomplish your marketing and sales objectives. The mild approach might be to make a written plan of the marketing actions you commit to take during the coming week, and promise yourself you will document your results and review them at the end of week. In this scenario, it might be a good idea to promise yourself some “reward” for accomplishing your goals or a “punishment” for failing to achieve them. A more extreme, and probably more effective, method would be to schedule monthly meetings with an outside advisor, perhaps a board member or business mentor, and review the plan and then the accomplishments with that person. Several small business organizations, including SCORE, provide this type of periodic review, either with mentors or peers, to help entrepreneurs stay on track and accomplish their goals.
Decision fatigue
“Decision fatigue” is the term, coined by social psychologist Roy Baumeister, to describe the phenomenon of mental energy stores being “used up” as we make decisions throughout the day. Almost every waking moment, you’re making decisions. Do you want to eat eggs or cereal for breakfast? Wear a dress or slacks? Take the parkway or the surface streets? And those are the easy ones, before you even get to work. While each decision by itself is simple, the cumulative effect of trying to make the “right” choice for many decisions can eventually deplete your energy and motivation.
You can use this information to schedule your time to ensure that you have the energy to get the outcomes you want. One of the most effective productivity techniques, spelled out in detail by David Allen in Getting Things Done, is to commit to focus an hour or two each week catching up on little tasks and planning out your “to do’s” for the coming week. If you do this on Sunday afternoon, when you are fresh and you haven’t already had to make a ton of decisions that day, it will be easier to make all the key decisions that go into such planning. Then when the chaos of the workweek is upon you, you can calmly move through your action items without having to drain your energy by making decisions about what to do. You can just do them!
The same concept shows that our “willpower” is used up in the same way as our ability to make decisions. So if there are tasks you know you don’t care for, schedule them for the morning when you are still fresh and full of resolve. As one colleague put it, “if you have to eat a frog, do it first thing in the morning.”
Susan Massey is a volunteer business counselor with SCORE . To meet with Susan or another counselor, sign up for a free consultation at www.SCORECentralOregon.org. SCORE also offers short individual walk-in chats at the
