Starting a Small Business

• How to Write a Great Business Plan
  Sure, you might be able to start a simple business without a business plan if you are not looking for funding, but writing out a business plan is an important step to help you clarify your offerings and goals with your business. I have seen many businesses fail from a lack of focus and direction.
• How to Choose the Right Colors for Your Brand
  From your website to your business cards, the colors you choose shape the opinions people will form about your business. Even if you are hiring someone else to create your branding, you should read this article to know what to watch out for.
• 10 Things to Do Before You Start Your Start-Up
  Planning is an essential part of starting a new business, so do your research before you start your business to save you from a lot of costly mistakes down the road.
• How to Write a Marketing Plan
  Even the most innovative products on the market can die a slow and painful death from a lack of sales. The difference? People who meet their sales goals have a clear marketing plan, which enables them to make the right move at the right time.

Your Home Office

• The Basics of Home Office Design
  Some people can just grab a laptop and go, but I find that I am more productive when I use a space that is designed for working. Mine happens to be in half my bedroom, which would kill some people but it is a good location for me. The goal is to design a space that works for you and meets the needs of your business.
• How to Set Up a Home Office
  This one goes into detail about tax deductions for home offices, which is an important consideration for those who work at home.
• Deducting Your Home Office Expenses
  Knowing what you can and can’t deduct off your taxes before you set up your home office will empower you to make more financially sound decisions for your business setup.

Running a Small Business

• How to Run a One-Person Business
  If you’re looking to run a one-man (or one-woman) show, you’re going to need a variety of skills to get the job done.
• 25 Ways to Jump-Start Your Business
  Has your business become stagnant? Get it going again — fast! — with these hints and techniques.

Sales and Marketing

• How to Improve Your Cold-Calling Skills
  I know that I generally do well on a sales call, but I only make warm calls (and I dread those anyway). The ability to turn a call into a sale without seeming like a pushy salesperson is a valuable business skill that everyone should have.
• How to Manage a One-Person Sales Force
  An efficient system is vitally important to a successful solopreneur business. This article will show you how to get there.
• How to Make Money on Etsy
  Are you a crafty person? You can make a great living on Etsy, selling your handmade goods, if you start with some sound business principles and some marketing know-how.
• How to Use Social Networking Sites to Drive Business
  The key to successfully using social media is to drive sales for your business is creating an efficient system so that you are not wasting all of your valuable time online.
• 7 Common Sales Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them
  By learning from others’ mistakes in sales, you can set your business up to be more successful from the start.

Your Web Site

• 7 Deadly Website Sins
  Before you spend money (or hours of your own time) on a web site for your business, read this article to educate yourself on the issues you should avoid.
• How to Design a Great “About Us” Page on Your Website
  This article is a great read for two reasons: 1) The About page is an important piece of your web site; and 2) The process of writing the About page will get you thinking about your marketing messaging, business goals, and how you will sell yourself both on- and offline.
• 10 Vital Items You Should Give Your Web Designer
  I’m not a big fan of the term "web designer" being used here, but gathering this type of information and handing it over to your designer/developer/marketing lead will save you from having to redo the site a day after you finished the first version.

Small Business Inspiration

• And the Money Comes Rolling InMarkus Frind started Plenty of Fish out of his home, in his spare time, and now his site serves up over 1 billion of pages a month and he pays himself $5mil USD a year.
• How Would You Like to Make $6 Million Sitting on Your Couch?
  Paul Mann runs Fetch! Pet Care, a service with thousands of employees all across the nation that brings in over $6mil in revenue yearly — and he does it all from his home.
• How to Make a Million in Your Pajamas
  If you think you can’t make "real money" working from home, think again — not only are entrepreneurs making sustainable income from their homes, they are increasing their profits by saving on overhead for their business.

I came across the article Guidelines for Going Self-Employed on workawesome this morning, and it feels like they are leaving something out. Sure there are disadvantages to being self-employed, but they are not as bad as the article makes it seem. Here’s the reality of self-employment from my own perspective:

Salary

A guaranteed paycheck is just not guaranteed anymore. I started out my working life in the days of the dot-bombs in Silicon Valley, and I was out of a job every 4 months or so. Today’s economic environment is equally volatile, but it is more widespread across all industries. The problem with working for someone else right now is that you are relying on their decisions at a time when only the fittest are surviving. Is it really "job security" if you are relying on someone above you to make the decisions that are best for you and your family?

I also think it is a myth that you need several years to turn a profit. If you are a smart entrepreneur, bootstrapping your own business, you can turn a profit right away. I made a profit my first month in business because my business model has very low overhead, and I kept my investments smart. There are ways of testing the water and earning income without having to dump large amounts of money into a business that you won’t get back for several years.

Benefits

Benefits for group plan insurance are no longer cheap, nor fully paid for in most companies, so a "regular job" is not a guarantee of benefits. Small businesses also have new offerings in insurance because insurance companies finally got smart and pooled smaller businesses together to look like one large group plan. To get around this problem entirely, just get married to someone with a regular 9 to 5. It has worked well for me for about 7 years now.

Vacation

The article makes it seem like taking a vacation is impossible, but I don’t think that is true at all. I manage to go on daytrips and longer vacations with my family throughout the year, and I’m the only employee in my business. In fact, I don’t know one self-employed person that doesn’t go on vacations. Being self-employed makes vacations easy because I don’t have to ask for time off in advance or get permission to take a trip from anyone. If you are self-employed and finding you can’t take a vacation, try some of these strategies:

• Find another you.
  I’ve made a lot of friends in the business over the years, so I have someone I can call if I need some help with a client while I am gone.
• Take mini-vacations.
  Instead of spending a month away from home, break it up into several trips throughout the year.
• Go wireless.
  Handheld devices are getting smaller and more powerful, and wifi networks are widely available. With tablet PCs, smartphones, iPads, laptops, and other wireless devices, there’s no reason why you can’t check in with work from the road or respond to an emergency if you need to.

Freedom of Schedule

I can’t really just take off half a day whenever I want, as the author made it seem, but I do have the option of picking my kid up from school, taking a park day, and doing most of my work from 9 am to 1 pm and 9 pm to 1 am. That flexibility is what made me decide to work for myself in the first place, so that I can have the family life I wanted and be there for my kids.

In Conclusion

While working for myself is not always a walk in the park, it is really not as scary as the author made it seem. I love it and have been doing it for over six years now. It really has been the best choice for me and my family. I wouldn’t want it any other way!

Flickr photo by ShashiBellamkonda.

So what do you do when this happens? I’ve basically come up with a plan to get myself out of this productivity funk. It’s worked before in the past, so I’m hoping it works again. (I’ll let you know in another month if it worked this time!)

The Bad Habit Breaking Process

Have you found yourself in a low-productivity time? Try these tips:

• Go through the motions.
  I may not be writing my best material at this moment, but the time I am spending just going through the motions on a daily basis will help to get my mind working in that manner again. This is true for any task: whether you have been neglecting your calendar, not replying to e-mails promptly, or letting your voicemails pile up, going through the motions will get you back into good habits.
• Start a new, energizing habit.
  As we’re having some toddler schedule issues over here, I stopped walking in the afternoons. I think this lack of exercise was contributing to me feeling drained. So I have started walking her to the sitter in the mornings, letting the fresh air wake me up and get me ready for my day. I can also listen to business-related podcasts on my iPod after I drop her off, so that helps me to be in the right mindset by the time I get home. You don’t need an hour walk to help you start a new habit—perhaps just take a brisk 10-minute walk in the morning to get the fog out of your head and get yourself ready to start the day. Or, if you are a gym person, try going to the gym in the morning vs. the evening to increase your daytime productivity.
• Reduce or eliminate procrastination and distractions.
  For more on this, check out my ongoing special Less, the Series.
• Take a mental minute.
  If you feel your mind starting to get clouded, try a one minute, eight minute, or three minute meditation to bring yourself back into clarity.
• Eat power foods.
  Sometimes bad habits include dietary changes as well. I know that when I get particularly busy, I start relying more on convenience foods instead of making myself nutritious meals when I am alone here during the day. By getting back to healthy summer fare, like fruit from the farmer’s market, vegetables from my garden, and whole grain products, I can increase both my energy level and my productivity. You don’t have to start your own garden to enjoy this benefit—perhaps try reaching for a salad or a smoothie instead of a greasy burger next time you stop somewhere for lunch.
• Switch gears if you need to.
  If you’re really stuck on one project, there’s just no sense staring at your screen for hours. Go on to the next thing on your to-do list (or, just some easier thing on the list) and come back to the harder task later. Sometimes the action of doing work will get you in the right mode to work on harder tasks, and sometimes that boost of happiness from checking off something on your to-do list gets you motivated to tackle the hard stuff. Either way, you’re getting things done.

The Bottom Line

For your business to succeed, you need to make sure that temporary dips in productivity are just that—temporary! Good luck, and if you find any other tips that work for you, please leave a comment below to let everyone know!

I switched to Mail, the e-mail program that comes with Mac OS X. The program itself works fine, but that’s not the point of this post. While I was cleaning up my mailboxes and transferring them, I realized how much e-mail I had just sitting around, not being deleted, that were completely unnecessary. The problem, I decided, was my use of filters—I had nearly 50 filters to sort e-mail into various boxes. What this meant is that I could just push aside e-mails instead of actually dealing with them.

Nikole’s Inbox, Unfiltered

Before you start laughing about my inbox problem, you have to realize that I have domain ownership or webmaster control over many domains, including my own and those of my clients. This means I get a few hundred legitimate e-mails a day. So what I did to deal with these e-mails in a more efficient way was to create a set of rules for myself to deal with my e-mail:

• Turn off all filters
  In my case, I just didn’t import them. What this did was to make all e-mails go directly into my inbox, every time.
• Implement spam filtering.
  Before switching all of my e-mail accounts to Google Apps for Small Businesses, I used to have to sort through thousands of spam messages every day. Google now catches about 95% of the spam. The flip side of this is that it also catches maybe 2% of legitimate emails, so I go through my spam folder on the Google Apps website once a week to read headlines so that I can send through any non-spam e-mails.
• Answer e-mails as they come in.
  I invoked a bit of Charles Green’s rules for e-mail on this one: As each e-mail comes in, deal with it. This doesn’t mean I have to do the work immediately. It means that I respond with an answer, whether it’s an immediate answer or just a "I’ll do this at such and such time".
• Create actions.
  If I can answer an e-mail immediately and there is no reason to keep the e-mail, I delete it! I know this is a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many e-mails I found cluttering my box that I should have just deleted. If the e-mail contains important information for the project, I put it in a box for that project. (Alternatively, you can just put the information in your project management software or contact management software.) If the e-mail requires work to be done on my part, I add it to my task list.
• Archive e-mail.
  When a project finishes, I put the entire project inbox into an archive folder. This way, if I need it 6 months from now, I can find it—but it’s not cluttering my e-mail program on a daily basis.

So how is this going? I started out with an inbox of about 2,500 e-mails. I’ve now been able to maintain it under 100 for over a month, so I think I’m doing pretty well!

Reader Question

What do you do to keep your inbox under control? Do you delegate like Tim Ferriss? Respond to everything like Charles Green? (For a review on the difference, see here.) Or do you have your own set of rules for your e-mail?

In the end, it had nothing to do with the aesthetics or the influence, but with clarity. I simply felt the ads were distracting me from my true, internal reasons for having this site, and I couldn’t let that happen. The ads were removed, my purpose for this site has been reaffirmed, and all order has been restored.

Which brings me back to my continued goal of Less for 2008: Less Noise. By taking the time to reflect on my true goals and eliminate outside influences in my decision, I came up with the right decision for me—and that is what "less noise" is all about.

What is noise? Noise is the activities going on around you, the distractions hiding your message, the things keeping you from your focus, clarity, and true self.

Reducing Actual Noise

I don’t know how anyone works from a coffee shop. I suppose if I had some sort of writer’s block, I might head to one to energize myself to get going again—but for the most part, that amount of action and sound is completely distracting to someone trying to work. Instead, I work from home, where I can have the house as quiet as I want and not have to worry about my silence being invaded. If controlling your environment is not possible, try these ideas:

• Don’t listen to music.
  I know someone is going to come on here and tell me how their music makes them work better, but for the most part, it does not. (The one exception might be music without lyrics, played softly, but even that is not always effective.) What happens in reality is that your brain is going into overload trying to stay on task while also processing the words to the song and whatever else is going on. This kind of mutiltasking actually makes you slower and more prone to mistakes. So turn that music off and learn how to enjoy the silence.
• Wear earplugs.
  If you have no choice but to work in an office or a noisy location, bring some earplugs with you. Of course, don’t use them in any situation that might be dangerous, such as while riding a bike or driving a car, but feel free to use them when your yackity cube mate just won’t shut up.
• Soundproof your home office.
  Even if you don’t live near an airport or a busy freeway, reducing the noise in your environment can help you concentrate better and reduce your stress levels. There’s strong evidence to support the idea of noise inhibiting learning and causing stress, such as this study on children and noise done by my alma mater, Cornell University.

Quieting the Noise in your Head

External noise isn’t the only thing distracting you. For many entrepreneurs, the constant swirl of ideas and passions makes concentration nearly impossible. To clear your head so that you can concentrate more, try these new habits:

• Use a notebook system.
  It doesn’t matter if it’s an actual notebook with a pen, 20 notebooks, bits of scrap paper, or a file on your computer: writing things down will get them out of your head and make room for you to process the things you are currently working on. Think of it as a mental filing system—by putting your thoughts on paper, you allow your mind to free itself of the burden of trying to remember them. Many people love the Getting Things Done system for this.
• Find a quiet place.
  Some people go for walks, meditate, or practice yoga; I do all my best thinking in the shower. The purpose of this is to find a space in which you are free of noise and distractions in order to internalize your thoughts and solve your current challenges. When I am under the greatest work stress, I have gotten a great deal of clarity out of hot shower or a extra-long run.
• Listen to yourself.
  Many times, a struggling business owner will seek out the answers to get through the next dip by hiring consultants, callings colleagues, or spending hours on Google. These activities often add to the noise and stress, not reduce it. Instead, try internalizing your search and reflecting on your current progress and goals. You may find that you have more of the answers than you think! This process also allows you to adapt your business to current challenges while avoiding any "me too" behaviors or opinions that will draw you away from the core of your business.

Taming the Electronic Noise

All of the electronic devices we depend on can add to the noise in our lives that is keeping us from greater productivity. To tame that beast, turn it off! You can live for an hour or 2 without checking e-mail, IM, Twitter, or your phone messages. There are very few times in life where picking up the phone on the first ring is actually important.

Eliminating Behavioral Noise

In my next post in this series, I will go more into the nuts and bolts of eliminating unnecessary activities and actions from your daily life. For now, focus on time management and wasting less time as a way of eliminating behavioral noise—by removing unnecessary actions from your daily life, you will help eliminate the noise from your business as well.

Filling the Noise Void

What happens when the noise is gone from your life? Your signal to noise ratio increases, making the message and path of action more clear for you. That is the goal—to help your brain eliminate or reduce the noise in your life in order for the true message to come through clearly. The entire process of eliminating noise from your life will help you to achieve clarity and confidence in your business strategy and execution.

A Note About This Series

In case you missed it, this series started with Less, Part 1: Time.

Photo by BarelyFitz.

Part 1: Wasting Less Time

When I think of time management, I don’t think of scheduling every minute of my day. Instead, I think of eliminating the things in your daily activities that don’t hold meaning and making room for the things that are important to you. Eliminating time wasters will make you a better and more productive entrepreneur. I’ve processed through my own life and the stories I’ve heard from colleagues, and identified some time wasters that I do during the day. Some of these may be funny to you, but I’m trying to be as honest as possible in order to help you identify and eliminate the time wasters in your own life.

Phone Calls

I once had this guy call me who went off for nearly 45 minutes—and I swear he did it without a single breath. As the conversation was really only good for the laugh I had retelling the story to a friend of mine, I found myself wishing I could have redone that hour of my life and let the voicemail pick up the second time around. Don’t get sucked into that trap. Your time is precious and you don’t have enough extra to be wasting with useless people or telemarker sales calls.

Action items: Keep important phone calls on task and schedule them to not interrupt your work flow. If you work alone, don’t pick up the phone for a number you don’t recognize; let it go to voicemail. Learn the art of ending a conversation better than I can, and get off the phone when you get stuck talking to a blowhard.

Personal Tasks

When you work from home, like many of my readers do, you can easily get caught up in personal tasks that suck up your work day. Don’t. Save your cleaning, shopping, decorating, laundry, childcare and other personal tasks for non-work hours. Those dishes will still be there in 2 hours when you call it quits for the day, so don’t use them as a reason to procrastinate on a project.

Action item: Set regular work hours, and use those hours only for work-related activities.

E-mail

Tim Ferriss (author of The 4-Hour Workweek) says that you can triple your productivity by eliminating your e-mail overload. If elimination isn’t possible, perhaps you can take advice from Scoble on how to process all of it better. The connection between these two is that e-mail is a horrible time waster, and the only way to gain back that time is to tame the e-mail beast without hurting your business.

Action items: Become an e-mail ninja. Don’t send e-mail first thing in the morning. Schedule times to check email throughout the day, but not every 5 seconds when you are trying to procrastinate. If you need to write a long explanation, maybe it’s faster to pick up the phone and do it verbally.

Craigslist

Now, there are many reasons to use Craigslist: I have used this site to find new homes for my daughter’s outgrown toys, hire an artist, and look for freelance writing jobs. But if you can spend an hour laughing at the "Best Of" or half a day in one of the forums, then you’ve really lost sight of the big picture.

Action item: If you must use Craigslist, just find what you are looking for, and get out.

Bargain Hunting

I always laugh when I see someone go to purchase a new piece of office equipment, such as a scanner, and they go to 10 different stores to try to find the lowest price. In the amount of time you spent trying to save $5, you could have been spending 4 more hours working. I love a good deal just as much as the next guy, but not if it’s going to suck up my entire day.

Action item: Use tools such as Google Product Search, PriceWatch, or PriceGrabber to know what prices are before you buy, even if you are just going into the store. Many brick and mortar retails also have online versions with in-store pickup so you can compare pricing before you get into your car.

Daydreaming

I’ll confess: I actually spent an hour today looking at housing for a place we may not be living in for another 6-12 months. While daydreaming is nice, it’s not very productive.

Action item: Table that daydreaming until the day when you are actually able to put your plan into action. If you must do it anyway, use a timer to keep it short or you may spend all day playing on the internet.

Learning

I have heard from many entrepreneurs in the initial start-up phase that the learning curve is very steep. The real question is, are you really learning anything? I’m sure you can easily spend a few hours on a tangent surfing the web for affiliate marketing on the internet, but will that help you or your business in any sort of way? If not, don’t do it.

Action item: Delegate tasks when you can: Hire a bookkeeper instead of teaching yourself accounting, for example. If you need to educate yourself in a topic, find one or two sources that can be a regular source of information in that particular subject matter and use that to get answers instead of spending hours searching Google.

Blogs

Robert Scoble reads hundreds of blog feeds every day, and I think he’s nuts. I’m with Rob May when he says that you just don’t need all of that information—it isn’t really making your life any better anyway.

Action item: Look at your list of RSS feeds. Which ones have really helped you in your business, and which ones just produce a lot of fluff pieces? Use your RSS program to sort the ones that are regular must-reads or just eliminate the non-useful feeds out of your program.

The All-Encompassing Question

There are some valuable time wasters, such as when I take a shower to clear my head when I find myself mentally stuck. The trick is knowing whether or not that activity is hurting you or helping you. If you find yourself wasting time at any point in the day, just ask yourself: Is this activity going to add value or meaning to my life? If the answer is no, don’t do it.

Photo by FABIOLA MEDEIROS.

What I am doing, in reality, is hurting my business.

Why Goals are Important

Business goals are important for many reasons, including:

• Focus.
  Without an end goal in mind, how do you know where to focus your efforts and actions? (On the flip side, having too many goals can spread you too thin this year, so focus on one at a time.)

• Productivity.
  Having goals in mind helps keep you on task by allowing you to operate at a great efficiency. It also helps you to break down your goals into action tasks for your to-do list.
• Accountability.
  With no goals for your business, you can feel free to slack off, work part time, not look for new clients, etc. If that’s what you want, that’s fine—but if your life plan includes running a successful business, then you should be accountable to that business.
• Progress.
  Setting milestones for your business helps you to see your progress and gives you the encouragement to keep going, much like the weekly weigh-ins at Weight Watchers.
• Success.
  How will you ever know you were a success if you don’t know what the end goal was? Think of it as running a race with no finish line—would you be able to keep running forever if you never knew you could win?

Why Goals Should be Flexible

I work in a business that involves the use of a lot of technology. From my point of view, if I don’t remain flexible and able to adapt to trends quickly, I can get passed by really fast. For this reason, your goals should not be set in stone, and you should be able to revisit your short-term goals frequently to see if they still make sense for you. I feel like this concept is true for any profession or industry, as we are all susceptible to changes in the economy, technology, or consumer behavior.

How to Set Goals

If you haven’t made a life plan (or at least have one in mind), I would start out with that.

If you haven’t reviewed your business plan lately, I’d revisit that as well.

Goals should be more about the process, not the end result, and for that reason I start out by making a master list of dreams. Once I have a list of everything down on paper, no matter how crazy it is, I can go back and prioritize and quantify everything. For example, you might mark up your list in the following way:

Assign years.
For each of your goals, decide how many years you will give yourself to attain that goal. For example, is it a goal for this year, the next 3 years, the next 5 years, or just sometime in your life?
• Give priority.
  Can you assign each of your goals some kind of priority level or number? For example, you might decide that creating a new product is more important than increasing sales on an existing one, so prioritize each of these items accordingly. This will help you when it comes time to set your tasks lists or decide which goals to table for another time.
• Break down goals into milestones.
  If your goal is to create a new product, how can you set mini goals for yourself to accomplish the larger goal? The mini goals might include researching the subject, taking some continuing education classes for yourself, or hiring a new employee to assist you in this aspect of your business.
• Create measurement units.
  How will you decide if your goal of “start podcasting” is a success? You should consider adding some form of measurement to each goal, such as "creating a new podcast every month for 12 months" or "writing an e-book and selling 1,000 copies of it". Having a way to quantify your objectives makes it easier to determine if the criteria for success has been met. Some goals aren’t easily measured, however, and for those you will have to get creative.

What areas should you cover when setting your business goals? Really that is up to you, because I can’t tell you what areas you need to make improvements in or what product lines are most important to you based on current consumer trends. The idea, however, is that the more areas you cover, the more well-rounded your goals (and your business) will be.)

My Goals for 2008

It’s only the first week in January, so I haven’t come up with much yet. Here’s the partial list I am working on:

• Move our of state in the summer.
• Launch one content-based site that is separate from the services my company provides.
• Make a regular habit of writing, even on "off days" when I don’t have any blog posts going live.
• Read more and use my Google Reader share feature regularly.

What goals have you made for yourself in 2008?

Additional Resources

• Goal Setting That Works I like this one for the way in which it internalizes goal setting and encourages you to listen to your inner voice.
• 101 Goal Setting Breakthroughs: A 31 Day Blog Series That Will Make 2008 Your Best Year Ever!
• The Ten Commandments of Goal Setting
• SMART Goal Setting

• Do something else on your to-do list.
  Sometimes the act of doing something else can get your mental juices flowing, or sometimes just the accomplishment that comes with completing a task can give you a boost of energy to get back to your original task.
• Do something completely different.
  You can do the dishes, take a shower (I do some of my best thinking in there!), go for a walk and get some fresh air, read a news article or an entry from your favorite blog, grab a bite to eat, or even take a nap. The idea is to give your mind a rest for a bit so it can process your difficult task in the background, or just ease your frustration for a few minutes so that you can gain enough energy to get back to work. One note: the best activities seem to be solitary and quiet, so if you head to the gym you might want to stick to a machine instead of a group class, or if you sit in a coffee shop you should read the paper in a corner instead of chatting with a friend.
• Delegate.
  If you are really stuck, maybe this task isn’t for you. Find an employee or subcontractor that can do it in less time than it’s taking you, and you’ll free yourself up for other work.
• Do anything.
  When I get stuck trying to think of a marketing piece or something to write for a blog entry, I will do a 10-minute free write. A free write is basically spending a timed period writing everything that comes to your head without respect to grammar, spelling or the grouping of ideas. Sometimes you will get ideas out of the free write and sometimes not—the real point is just to get your cogs turning so you can move on to other things.
• Change your scenery.
  I run my company out of my home, but there’s still a lot of places I can go. Sometimes just standing vs. sitting, moving into another room, or going outside with my laptop can help me reframe my work and get moving.

The key in all this is to not turn a reframing period in to a procrastination period. Put a limit on how much time to spend freeing your mind, such as 10-20 minutes, and stick with it. Otherwise, you may find that you are wasting your entire workday just procrastinating on your original task through reframing!

How do you unstick yourself?