Business or busy-ness?

Sometimes I won’t feel inspired or clear as to what I want to get done in a day. If you operate from that space, you’ll end up doing all kinds of peripheral and non-important tasks instead of the purposeful action that drives you closer to your goals. You’ll just sit there and bang your head against the wall if you try to break through it that way. Instead, try this: remove yourself from that space.

I personally do this all the time. I’ll walk away and take Victor for a walk, go to a coffee shop, or go to the gym. Do what you have to do to get out of there and stop thinking about the problems or challenges you are facing. Your conscious mind is not capable of solving them at that moment, and trying to force it to is very counterproductive.

Go somewhere else that makes you feel inspired and get at it again. With a different environment, you’ll be amazed how much clarity you’ll be able to have on what you want to get done. Start with your highest intention of what you’re trying to accomplish, and then reverse engineer the steps you need to get it done from there. Once that’s done, get started on those steps and get them done as soon as you can.

There’s this myth out there that talks about being the most productive you can be by putting in long hours. It’s just not true. Some of my most productive days are when I put in little or no time working at all. Yesterday was like that for me, when I was completely off the grid and didn’t do anything. But I was still able to get clear about a lot of the things I wanted to get done this week and map out my action plan.

If you find yourself getting stuck in the minutiae once you get back to action, keep in mind that there are only a few things that you can be doing today that are in service of what your ultimate goal is. If you keep the ultimate goal in front of you, those actions are easier to define – that’s why taking a “time out” from your current environment helps you get clarity.

For me, I know that I have three goals as part of the 90 Day Challenge that I want to accomplish in my health, wealth, and happiness. Those goals are set for December 11. Of all the myriad options I have to take up my time in the course of my day, I know that there’s only a few actions I can take that will serve those three goals. When I lose sight of what those actions are, and I’m just not “feeling” like taking them on, that’s when I take a walk and get my clarity back.

Think of a puzzle picture. All the pieces of that puzzle are right in front of you, but they don’t mean anything until you put them together in the right order. Those puzzle pieces are like the actions you need to take towards your goal. The way to figure out what goes where is to back engineer it and start with the completed puzzle in mind. It’s so much easier to build when you know what it’s supposed to look like.

There is nothing more important to an entrepreneur than having a clearly defined set of goals. You have to know what you are working towards. If you don’t have specific goals mapped out, time will come and go and the results will not be there. You might say that employees don’t have to think like this at their jobs, and that’s true. Employees don’t have to be visionaries to get paid. But if you’re an employee, you’re still the CEO of your life, and you have to have a plan about where you want it to go.

This week, we’ll be announcing details of a 10k challenge that’s going to take 20 PRO members to a $10k per month income in January 2013. That’s MY goal for the community. It all started with the why. The “what” and the “how” is what we’ll start to go into this week, but it’s not important without a “why”.

Many people get into the busy work of life to avoid having this conversation with themselves. You can be “busy” all day, but what did you really accomplish that way? The actions that take you closer to your ultimate goals are your business. Everything else is just the “busyness” of life.

Jay Kubassek’s WAKE UP CALL radio show is on Blog Talk Radio every Tuesday at 10:30 am ET (GMT – 5). Join the thousands of entrepreneurs around the world who are waking up to their possibilities every week! Catch this week’s call right here.