When something sparks my interest, I have a tendency to get very curious about the inner workings of whatever it is and to try and “crack the code”. I have a natural curiosity that can be quite difficult to tame at times – it leads me to be easily distracted when my mind gets moving in a particular direction.
Lately, if you haven’t noticed, that curiosity has sparked with respect to self-publishing and having posted my new book on Kindle. I’ve found the whole publishing process pretty interesting and I’m keen to both figure it out and become successful at it.
I’ve spent some time over the last week listening to podcasts, playing around with Amazon’s Sponsored Products PPC platform, buying Amazon specific research tools and even watching courses and reading books on the topic.
It’s become quite an interest for me.
But when you get distracted in your business with “new” things, you’re setting yourself up for trouble.
This is a form of the dreaded, “Shiny Object Syndrome”. You see something exciting and new and you’re attracted to it forgetting about the requirement to execute on the plan you already have.
Ultimately, you end up failing at multiple things when this happens.
Luckily, I spotted this pretty quickly and decided that I would identify my next two projects for completion before I even finished getting the book published. I knew that if I focused exclusively on the book without having my “next projects” lined up that I’d never get to them.
I’ve got a couple of info products that I have to get done and one other internal project that I have put on my list “to do” before I can start working on the next book. Until those things are done, the book stays in the back seat.
This takes a certain amount of discipline, but it certainly helps when you have a real plan written down for what you want to achieve in your online business.
I was pretty slow off the mark this year with getting my plan together and admittedly, I’m not where I want to be with executing the various parts. I’m a bit behind on some specifics, but there’s a plan to follow and that’s the important thing.
In fact, the plan has a gap in it around the middle of the year to catch up on things I’m behind on but also to maybe accommodate some new project or projects that I’d not foreseen back in January.
If you don’t have a plan, then you’re just flotsam bouncing around the sea aimlessly with no control over where you end up.
And here’s the thing… It’s never too late to put your plan together. You can create your plan right now for the next quarter and map everything out for the next three months. You can update your plan from earlier in the year and make sure it is still relevant.
Or if you’re really stuck, just plan out the next week. Put down what you want to get done over the next seven days and go from there.
You have to have a plan though, so make that a priority!