International Practice: Articles: How to Accomplish Tasks you Dislike

By Biana Babinsky, the online business expert, author and consultant.

Many entrepreneurs I know get into the business so that they can do what they love. Many have told me that at their corporate jobs they usually spent 40-50% of the time doing something that they actually enjoyed, while the rest of the time was spent in meetings, planning, writing TPS reports, and engaging in all sorts of corporate administrivia.

Naturally, newly minted entrepreneurs think that the only business activities they will have to participate in are the ones they actually like. Unfortunately, they are in for a rude awakening. As they start operating their businesses, new business owners are chagrined to discover that they will have to engage in some activities that are very similar to those they were doing at their corporate jobs: accounting, marketing, PR, and administrative work for their businesses. In fact, new entrepreneurs discover that they end up having to perform even more uninteresting activities than they did in their corporate jobs. Unfortunately, completing these tasks is a must. Your business will not do well if marketing, accounting, and administrative items are not taken care of.

Naturally, faced with doing tasks they don't like business owners procrastinate and become very good at wasting copious amounts of time. At the end of the day, nothing gets done. Not even tasks that are fun.

AvocadoConsulting.com has created a plan designed to help you identify and conquer unpleasant activities. This ensures that they will get done and you won't spend any more time on them than it is absolutely necessary:

• Identify tasks you dislike doing. These are the ones that make you cringe just from thinking about them, take you forever to accomplish, and rev your procrastination mode into high gear

• Decide on what it will take to accomplish them:

  1. Break them up and do them for just one hour (but do them!) every day.

  2. Pick a special day of the week (Monday is a good candidate, since it doesn't have a good reputation already) and allocate it to tasks you dislike. Spend the rest of the week completing other activities.

  3. Identify rewards you can give yourself when you complete each one of these tasks. Give yourself an hour off to go out and get a cup of coffee, eat a piece of low-fat chocolate cake, or read that magazine that you've been neglecting for a month.

• Outsource. You can't get someone else to go to the dentist for you (and get the same effect), but you can get someone else to perform many of your business tasks. Get an accountant to do your accounting. Hire a professional organizer to help you organize your office and your documents. Find a virtual assistant for help with administrative tasks.

About the Author: Biana Babinsky is the online business consultant, author and entrepreneur. She works with coaches and consultants to help them fill up their practice, gain clients all over the world and create passive income streams. Visit http://internationalpractice.com/free_newsletter.html to subscribe to her newsletter full of tips about promoting your practice online.