Do you worry about every little detail about your course, do you avoid hitting the publish button because you want to just tweak that last little edit to your videos or that 32 page workbook download you just created needs just a little different colour accent in the header?
This sounds a lot like you’re in procrastination mode, it happens to all of us at one time or another and it’s one of the biggest things that holds us back from succeeding with our courses. Procrastination also equals missed opportunities to share your knowledge and transform your learners.
So how do you overcome procrastination?
The only way I’ve found to overcome procrastination is what I call – progress over perfection.
Progress over perfection is all about taking action, and I’m not talking about throwing yourself into 1000 tasks at once and overloading yourself, that’s a sure way to end up in overwhelm, which in turn takes you straight back to procrastination, I’m talking about writing down all the things you need to do to reach your goal, then dialling right back to the first task, and just doing that.
If your goal is to get your first course online, create a workbook for your learners, or just create new content for your course, write down all the tasks you need to do, and these can just be bullet points for now, this is how I write blog posts and create videos, I just brain dump a list of bullet points on the topic, then I go away and take a break, then come back and flesh out a few subjects for each bullet point, I take another break, and then return to formulate a quick script for a video or write out the blog post, and then I record or publish it. I might give it a quick proof read – just the once- but that’s it – then I hit the publish button. Progress over perfection. That’s how I take action to get content created.
Breaking down the things you need to do and focusing on a single task at a time is a real procrastination buster, and when you do this, for example let’s say your creating 12 course videos, in no time you have the whole course created. You look back and you think to yourself, ‘How did I get all this stuff done?’.
The other thing that helps beat procrastination is thinking about your greater why. When I talk about the why, I’m talking about the reason that your learners come to you for your knowledge. If you’re procrastinating on your content, your courses, sharing what you know, then your students can’t get access to all that valuable knowledge that has a block on it because you’re procrastinating. Your learners can benefit so much from what you are teaching, you’ve got to get it out to them. When you switch the focus to your learner and getting them what they need, you have an urgency to get stuff done so you can deliver, and the focus switches away from yourself and what you need to do, and onto your students and how can I get this valuable content to them. Serving your student is a massive procrastination buster.
One of the things I hear all the time is ‘I’m just doing a quality check on my course’ – no – that’s procrastinating, the longer you take to quality check your course, the less people are buying your course and learning from it. Get your course created with whatever you have now, your knowledge, however you present it is the most important thing. Progress over perfection. You can always ask for feedback once your content is out there, and re-iterate, most likely, you’ll have so many people asking for more, you’ll likely be creating new content from your student’s input, and going on to create even more value.
You are not perfect, I am not perfect, life is not perfect, and learners don’t expect perfection – they want to get to their goal. Get them what they need as soon as possible. Progress over perfection.
