What We Can Learn From Businesses To Help Combat Procrastination
Photo by Clemens van Lay on Unsplash
2023 Has Started
Perhaps a time for reflection, or continuation of what was 2022. For many, the start of a new calendar year is a signal for change: typically stopping one thing and (or) starting another. Objectives (goals) can range from exercising more, eating healthier, spending less, networking more or starting that project.
These goals are not identified through some epiphany or enlightenment. They could have been known weeks or months before the start of 2023. They could have even been goals that were set at the beginning of 2022 (or in previous years).
The next series of words and paragraphs are not about forming good habits, you can read (or listen) to Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit. It is also not about overcoming the challenges of implementing change for which there are hundreds of articles and methodologies (most likely a topic for a future post).
What’ll you read next is how to start working now towards your goals, by applying proven business concepts. Let’s get started.
Perfection can often be a ‘prerequisite’ to getting started (from personal experience). Do I have everything in place? The right gym shoes, clothes and gear, the correct ingredients, recipe and containers for food prep, or the idea for a new article, book or product completely sketched out. Operating with a condition of all ‘figured-out’ can be associated with procrastination, and often leads to inaction.
Businesses avoid this ‘trap’ by using pilots, agile methods, and test-and-learns. A pilot, more commonly known in the television industry, is an option to test (understand) the audience's (customers, typically studio executives) acceptance of a new show (product). Agile methodology is a concept borrowed from software development, which uses an iterative (continual) process to build a product or service that is already being used by customers. Test-and-learn, as the name implies, is an approach to test a new product or service in a controlled environment e.g., in a specific region or with a group of users (customers or employees) to learn what is working well and what needs to change.
The common theme across these approaches is that progress is being made towards a goal, in the absence of complete information. While there may be risks with this approach, they can be mitigated and are outweighed by the benefits.
If a product is not completely developed or tested, customers can become upset. Managing expectations is how this issue can be avoided. You’ve heard about Beta versions? Well, this is essentially how businesses manage or control customer expectations. Businesses provide ‘upfront’ communication to the users about the stage of development (or incompleteness).
Learning is the benefit that businesses gain when they use pilots, agile methods and test-and-learns. Businesses learn which features of the product are more valuable to customers. They learn which part of the process for a new service is too complicated. Before businesses invest in a ‘complete’ solution they use these approaches to acquire customer feedback and, ensure that the product or service meets customer needs and is competitive.
Back to plans for 2023: you can look at yourself as the ‘business’ and the ‘customer’. The business recognizes that change is necessary and knows it needs to act. The business knows that perfectoin is a fallacy and starts to act, despite not knowing everything. The customer’s expectations can be managed by accepting that the benefits are greater than the risks and realizing that imperfect progress is better than complete inaction.