4 Ways Busy People Sabotage Themselves

You’ve left an important task undone for weeks. It’s hanging over you, causing daily anxiety. And yet instead of actually doing it, you do a hundred other tasks instead.

Or you’ve been feeling guilty about not replying to an email, even though replying would only take 10 minutes.

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Or maybe the last time you needed stamps, you went to the post office to buy a single stamp because you couldn’t find the 100-pack you purchased a few months ago. You know it’s around… somewhere. But you just don’t have the time to clean your desk to find it.

These self-sabotaging patterns maintain a cycle of always having too much to do (or at least feeling like that’s the case). If you’re chronically tapped out of the immense amount of mental energy required for planning, decision making, and coping, it’s easy to get lured into these traps. Let’s unpack the problems in more detail and discuss solutions.

1. You keep ploughing away without stepping back and prioritizing.

When we’re busy and stressed, we often default to working on whatever has the most imminent deadline, even if it’s not particularly important. Stress causes our focus to narrow to the point where we’re just keeping going, like a hamster on a wheel. We respond to emails and go through the motions of getting things done, without actually stepping back and considering what’s most important to work on. You might find yourself spending several hours on a task that wasn’t that important to begin with, even though you have a mountain of other things to be doing.

The solution is to step back and work on tasks that are important but not urgent. Use the “pay yourself first” principle to do items that are on your priority list first, before you jump to responding to other people’s needs. You might not be able to follow this principle every day, but aim to follow it for several days of the week.

2. You completely overlook easy solutions for getting things done.

When we’re stressed, we don’t think of easy solutions that are staring us in the face. Again, this happens because we’re in tunnel vision mode, doing what we usually do and not thinking flexibly. Especially if you’re a perfectionist, when you’re overloaded it’s likely that you’ll find yourself overcomplicating solutions to problems. For example, lots of busy people don’t keep enough food in the house. This leads to a cycle of stopping in at the grocery store on an almost daily basis to pick up one or two things, or a restaurant habit that ends up being expensive, time consuming, fattening, or all of the above. The solution seems horribly complicated: hours of meal planning, shopping, and cooking.

To get out of the trap of overlooking easy solutions, take a step back and question your assumptions. If you tend to think in extremes, is there an option between the two extremes you could consider? (To solve my no-food conundrum, I bought a $150 freezer and now keep at least a dozen or so healthyish frozen meals in there, as well as frozen bread and other staples. I’m not Martha Stewart, but neither am I grabbing takeout for every meal.)

On a broader level, breaks in which you allow your mind to wander are the main solution to the problem of tunnel vision. Even short breaks can allow you to break out of too narrow thinking. Sometimes, a bathroom break can be enough. Try anything that allows you to get up out of your seat and walk around. This can be a reason not to outsource some errands. They give an opportunity to allow your mind to wander while you’re physically on the move, an ideal background for producing insights and epiphanies.

3. You “kick the can down the road” instead of creating better systems for solving recurring problems.

When our mental energy is tapped out, we’ll tend to keep doing something ourselves that we could delegate or outsource, because we don’t have the upfront cognitive oomph we need to engage a helper and set up a system. For example, say you could really benefit from some help cleaning your house, but finding someone trustworthy, agreeing on a schedule, and training them on how you like things done feels more taxing than you can deal with right now (or ever). And so you put it off, week after week, doing the work yourself — even though even reallocating the time spent on one cleaning session would realistically be enough to hire someone else to do it.

Remedies for recurring problems are often simple if you can step back enough to get perspective. Always forgetting to charge your phone? Keep an extra power cord at the office. Always correcting the same mistakes? Ask your team to come up with a checklist so they can catch their own errors. Travel for work a lot? Create a “master packing list” so that trying to decide what to bring doesn’t require so much mental effort. Carve out time to create and tweak these kinds of systems. You might take a personal day from work to get started, and then spend an hour once a week on it to keep up; author Gretchen Rubin calls this her once-a-week “power hour.” When you start improving your systems, it creates a virtuous cycle in which you have more energy and confidence available for doing this further. By gradually accumulating winning strategies over time, you can significantly erode your problem, bit by bit.

4. You use avoid or escape methods for coping with anxiety.

People who are overloaded will have a strong impulse to avoid or escape anxiety. Avoidance could be putting off a discussion with your boss or avoiding telling a friend you can’t make it to her wedding. Escape could be rushing into an important decision, because you want to escape needing to think about it further. This can lead to a pattern of excessively delaying some decisions and making others impulsively. Avoidance and escape can also take other forms — an extra glass of wine (or three) after work, binge-watching TV, or mindlessly scrolling through Facebook. It might even be ticking less-important things off your to-do list to avoid the urgent task that’s making you anxious.

If you want to deal constructively with situations that trigger anxiety for you, you’ll need to engineer some flexibility and space into your life so that you can work through your emotions and thoughts when your anxiety is set off. With practice, you’ll start to notice when you’re just doing something to avoid doing something else.

If you can relate to the patterns described, you’re not alone. These issues aren’t personal flaws in your character or deficits in your self-control. They’re patterns that are very relatable to many people. You may be highly conscientious and self-disciplined by nature but still struggle with these habits. If you’re in this category you’re probably particularly frustrated by your patterns and self-critical. Be compassionate with yourself and aim to chip away at your patterns rather than expecting to give your habits a complete makeover or eradicate all self-sabotaging behaviors from your life.

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How To Prepare The Perfect Elevator Pitch

Tim Wesley

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 The ability to create an effective elevator pitch can make all the difference as a startup entrepreneur. What’s the formula for crafting a quick pitch that can take you to the next level?

Having heard dozens, if not thousands of pitches by entrepreneurs over the past few years, I can tell you that there a lot of cringeworthy ones, and a few that really blow away investors to the point they attract instant engagement.

As I mention in my book, The Art of Startup Fundraising, to fully appreciate the value of a good elevator pitch, you’ve got to look beyond just how it can set up an investor meeting or open your live presentation when out there fundraising for your startup.

An elevator pitch can be instrumental in earning the opportunity to pitch in the best places, start relationships with key co-founders, vendors and team members. It can keep you invisible, or win the help of powerful influencers. So, how do you craft a perfect pitch for propelling your venture?

Recognize You Need More Than One Elevator Pitch

Before you get frustrated trying to condense everything you want to say about your business into just a few words, know that you’ll be best off with several versions of your elevator pitch.

Stanford graduate and mentor at 500 Startups, Elliot Loh poses the following simple formula for crafting an elevator pitch.

We solve [problem] by providing [advantage], to help [target] accomplish [target’s goal].

Of course, startup life means you’ll be meeting and talking to many people in a wide variety of scenarios. It may be running the office mascot in a local park, huddling around the Keurig in your coworking space, networking at a big tech event or tradeshow, pitching from the sidelines during a pitch night or literally in the elevator.

Everyone you meet may play a different role in the ecosystem. Each has a different need, or way they can help. It’s your job to convey how you can solve their problem and be of service to them and everyone in their circle.

Be prepared with different pitches for potential investors, influencers who can help you get your product noticed or make introductions, and for others who may just become power users themselves.

Prepare Different Lengths of Your Pitches

How long is an elevator ride anyway? Are you riding to the new observation deck in the Empire State Building, or just two floors to a house party? Are you using this at a structured networking event where you have a couple of minutes dedicated to presenting yourself? Or do you just have five seconds to make sure a major angel or VC rep overhears you as they walk by?

Having several lengths of pitches can ensure you are always successful in getting your message across, without any embarrassing silences, or mumbling to race the words off of your tongue.

Keep it Simple

There may be situations in which you should be using industry tech terms. Tailoring your language and word use can definitely help with connecting. However, in the majority of cases you want your pitch to be incredibly simple. Cut the jargon and fad words. Make sure the average person with no knowledge of your industry gets it.

Numbers and analogies can also help transcend these differences. Via Techrepublic venture partner Rui Ma says “Experienced investors are looking for data they can use to benchmark you against other players in the industry," and "For less experienced investors, provide the numbers but also provide context.” For example, “We just add 300,000 new users last quarter, which was more than twice the pace of Facebook.”

The elevator pitch could also be a good way to ease your way into the content of your actual pitch deck. In some instances you may want to lead with your elevator pitch and then walk the prospective investors through your pitch deck guided by the questions the investor may ask you. If you need some help with your deck, I recently covered the pitch deck template that was created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) where the most critical slides are highlighted. Moreover, I also provided a commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here)

Know Your USP

Make sure to highlight what is unique and different about your product, service or company. You need to be different in order to deserve attention.

Have a Hook

It is insanely easy to gain opportunities to deliver your elevator pitch. Just ask someone what they do. They’ll almost always return the favor.

Just don’t leave it there, with a flat statement or declaration. Ending or following up with a question is a great way to keep the conversation going, get them engaged, and take things to the next step.

Be Prepared to Answer Questions

Be sure you’ve also thought of the questions you are most likely to get after delivering your pitch. If you are successful in gaining their attention, then you have to back up your big claim. How are you achieving this? How do you know you can keep it up? How are you really better than ‘XYZ’ competitor?

Practice Your Delivery

The elevator pitch is a multi-million dollar sentence or two. Maybe even multi-billion dollar string of words. It’s worth practicing. You can bet each of your favorite music artists invests in a voice coach. You favorite athletes spend hours rehearsing their most notable feats. Even the minimum wage phone sales person who keeps trying to cold call you has probably going through a lot of intensive training. Even Tony Robbins spends hours exercising his voice to speak to a crowd that has already spent thousands to hear him.

Don’t let this trick you into stalling on delivering your pitch or approaching investors. Do put in some thought, practice and even get feedback and hone it. You may even want to record yourself, listen and hone it.

The more you practice, the more naturally confident you will be. Then you can really inject your personality and passion into, versus just reciting some stale words from a flash card. Investment manager, Sanna Westmanat VC Fund Creandum reminds us that "As a seed investor we not only invest in the idea but also in the people," meaning "I want to know that they're super excited about this and they'll put in the work that is needed for it."

Conclusion

Most entrepreneurs aren’t letting themselves down with their elevator pitch because they don’t know their value proposition or who it is for. They just rush out a couple of lines to introduce themselves, and forget the importance of tailoring it in length and substance for the current context. Others just fail to keep it simple enough, aren’t prepared for it to actually work and turn into an opportunity, or simply haven’t practiced it enough. Crush these factors and the world is your oyster.

Critical factors of a powerful elevator pitch are the following:

• An elevator pitch is simply a quick introduction to your business
• Around 30 seconds long
• Sparks interest and response
• It’s clear
• It’s authoritative
• It is about them, not you
• Highlights your value, and what problem you are solving
• Introduces your uniqueness
• It’s relatable

Below are a few tips to make an impact with your pitch.

1. Role play your pitch with team members, friends and family
2. Record yourself, and tweak it
3. Go listen to other pitches and note what works, or not
4. Check out elevator pitch competitions (some offer up to $10k prizes)
5. Document it in your mobile phone, so you won’t be at a loss for words
6. Practice, practice, practice until it becomes natural

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STARTUP TIPS FOR BUYING USED ITEMS

If you are like most startups, you have a bit of a problem saving money. Now, this isn’t your fault, as the revenue and income levels simply haven’t kept up with the your costs. As a result, many startups have to try and save money or spend less wherever they can.

One great way to save some money is to buy used items instead of new in order to stretch your dollars each month. While everyone knows to consider a used car, there are many other things you can buy used that you might not have thought about. And for a startup, you need to conserve cash.

Used doesn’t always mean bad, but it can. As a result, it is a good idea for you know a little about buying used before you end up wasting your money. This article is going to take a closer look at a few different tips for buying used items of all different kinds.

Know What to Buy Used and What Not To

While buying used can definitely save you some money, you shouldn’t be buying everything used. There are definitely some things you should try and buy new. While many will say to only buy “hard” items used (such as tables, coffee tables, vehicles, bookcases etc…) and buy “soft” items new (furniture and pillows), this isn’t always the case. For example, if furniture is cared for well and cleaned before you move it into your office, it can be a good way to save hundreds of dollars.

For a home item, it is a good rule of thumb for a lot of things as you probably don’t want to sleep in someone else’s old bed to simply save a little money. It is all about value and how much you weigh spending less money vs. the quality and experience you will get out of the item, costs versus benefits.

Do Your Research

This is arguably the most important thing to remember when buying used. If you buy used software or a gaming console, but it is only a tiny bit less money than buying new, you are probably better off buying new, as at least you know it is brand new. Without researching retail prices of goods, you could be spending more on used items than you should. Determining the costs of similar items will help.

Not only should you do your research to make sure you’re getting a good price compared to new or retail, but also to see if anyone else is selling something similar for less. Selling used goods is becoming a big business and thousands of people are using different websites to sell their items. As a result, there is a good chance someone else in your city is selling the same thing, so be sure to compare the prices before overspending when you don’t need to.

If You Have an Uneasy Feeling, Skip It

We have all had that “uneasy” feeling when buying a used item at one time or another. Whether you feel uneasy about the product you are buying, or the seller you are buying it from, it can be a stressful feeling. Instead of rolling the dice and still buying the item, more often than not, it makes sense to walk away.

Even if it is a really good deal, it might not be if the product isn’t as advertised or you get scammed. There will be other awesome deals, so don’t get too upset if you have to give up something that sounds too good to be true. Because if it sounds like that, it generally is.

In conclusion, buying used can be a very good way to save your startup money without sacrificing a lot of quality. If you follow the tips outline in this blog post, you should be well equipped to buy used without getting taken advantage of.

This weeks article by guest contributor.  

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