Do you ever find yourself putting off important tasks, like Procrastinating when Financial Planning ?  You're not alone. Procrastination can be a major obstacle to getting things done. But don't worry, there are ways to overcome it. In this blog post, we'll explore some tips for stopping procrastination when it comes to financial planning. So read on and get started!

Financial planning is an important aspect of any business, but it can be tough to get started when you're feeling overwhelmed or procrastinating. Here are a few tips to help you get started and stay on track.

If you're a business owner, it's important to have a financial plan in place. This will help you stay on track and make sure your business is doing well financially. There are a few things you need to include in your financial plan: your budget, your income and expenses, and your forecast. Having a financial plan will help you make informed decisions about your business' future. Check out our sister site Numbers Know How to get practical help and support . This will help you create a plan that works for your business. Don't wait - start planning for your business' financial future today!

Conclusion

So, there you have it. Procrastination in a nutshell. Now that we understand what it is and why it happens, let’s look at some ways to stop procrastinating and get moving on our financial story plan. Just remember, the key is making that connection between your goal and your financial story plan.  Once you do that, taking action becomes a lot easier. Are you ready to get started? Don't forget to subscribe to I Hate Numbers so you never miss another post and leave me a comment letting me know how you're planning on stopping procrastination in its tracks!

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What happens if you give a wonderful idea to a procrastinator? Absolutely nothing. Now, I love that phraseology. I think the idea of procrastination for most people is this idea of laziness, this idea of putting things off and the rest. Now in this broadcast, folks, I'm only going to be talking to you about procrastination, what it is and what it isn't, why it occurs, what we can do to stop it, and actually making that connection to your financial story plan and what we can do to actually try and move forward, to actually execute that plan and eliminate brackets reduced procrastination.

You're listening to the I Hate Numbers podcast with Mahmood Reza. The I Hate Numbers Podcast mission is to help your business survive and thrive by you better understanding and connecting with your numbers. Number love and care is what it's about. Tune in every week. Now, here's your host, Mahmood Reza.

My name is Mahmood. I'm an accountant, I'm an educator, I'm a mentor, author of the book I Hate Numbers - the book that will change according to others, your relationship with numbers, all for the better. So this broadcast today is about procrastination. More specifically, what it is, why it affects pretty much most human beings. And it's not just of recent times; it's affected human beings for centuries. What we can in business do about that. Anybody who says they aren't a procrastinator is, I would suggest, a bit of a fibber. It happens to all of us here.

What we're trying to do here is try and understand it. We can't actually solve anything. We can't actually come up with solutions if solutions are what we're looking for, until we understand what's going on underneath and why it's relevant and why it's something we should be addressing in our businesses. There's already a procrastination. It's about not just about putting things off here, but there's got to be a connection between an outcome that you want, an outcome that's going to be good for you, an outcome that gives you rewards, and taking action now to actually get you closer to achieving that reward.

Most of us as human beings, we tend to have competing pressures here between something that gives us that immediate gratification, something we want right now, we can see the results, and something that might be some many years into the future. So we think, for an example, if you are a business, one of the things that you need to do is to make provisions for that point in the future when you're going to be slowing down in your business, when perhaps you might be popping off the roundabout, pursuing a different ambition, you might want to be retiring. So it's therefore essential that you build up resources that you build up a pot financially in order to help cater for you when you step off that roundabout.

Whether it's a pension, whether it's putting money together in financial products like ISS, whatever it is, it's important to actually make sure you've got some provision to actually take care of you when you make that final decision. Now, the outcome of having that provision, that financial provision and that safety net to support you, most of us would agree it's a positive outcome. But actually what we have to do now is to save money. And far too many people don't actually make provisions for that venture time. When they get around to it, they might be more mature in their life. There's many years that have gone and therefore to actually make something happen to put that money aside becomes not impossible, but becomes more challenging.

We know that when it comes to a business, well, I certainly know that one of the critical things that all business owners should be doing is to create and write their own financial story, their own financial plan. The benefits for that are many. They include reducing the anxiety, giving you much more clarity to your decision making, taking away those unanswerable questions that you might have in the current, say I might need to take on staff. Can I afford it? Can I afford to take time off in my business? Can I afford to recruit more freelancers, more staff to actually help me take my business dial forward? Can I invest in new equipment? Is it affordable? All those impugnable questions about making more money, getting to your Northern Star become very difficult, if not impossible to answer unless you've got some idea of a financial route map in front of you.

For all those thousands of clients I've held over the years in terms of putting together a financial story, I know the immense benefits as they get engaged in the process. They know the immense benefits of it as well. Now, there could be other things as well. You can have a challenge that you know that your pricing is not quite there, that you know, you may be undercharging certain clients, you may not be making as much profit as you would like to for the efforts that you're putting in there. Now, in terms of those intrinsic rewards that we're getting, there might be somewhere in the future. The biggest problem with procrastination is getting our brains, getting our thought processes to connect to that, taking that on board and the actions that we have to do now.

So let me just explain a few things about what I mean by that. Now, procrastination is not just doing delay. What is really critical for a business owner to do is first of all to accept, articulate, visualise that the end point they're going for is worthwhile. If we imagine our personal lives, if we're happy, content from our own perspective about our own health, our own size, our own diet and we're comfortable with that. We're very relaxed with that. End of story. There's no need to then pursue a direction where we might have to modify our diet, we might have to change our food groups, we might have to exercise more.

If you are content and happy, then basically you do what you like. It doesn't really matter about, say, I must go on a diet, I must change my food groups, because you're not going to accept that. All that happens is you impose a restricted regime on yourself for an outcome that you don't actually desire, you don't actually want, and you can't visualise and you can't see that it has a positive consequence. So it's really key to begin with that there's got to be a connection, there's going to be an acceptance between the things that you're doing in the here and now, how that's going to achieve something that's positive for you at the end of the day? And if we have that relationship strengthened, we have that cause and effect strengthened, then it's more likely that we're going to be more motivated, more effectively followed up to actually pursue that path that we need to.

Other things in terms of what effectively procrastination manifests itself. Now, I procrastinator, I'll put my hands up to it, I'll share the symptoms of that or how it manifested, so, for me. So typically, if you're the sort of person who might say, we're extremely busy, we can't do this right now, we know it's really important, but we're not doing it. There's probably something else that's going on underneath the surface here. So a bit of self evaluation, a bit of awareness, what's going on to actually say what the real intrinsic problem is. It could be you don't accept the path that you've trodden, you're not actually thinking that you're very comfortable, that your business direction may not be bringing you joy, you don't actually understand fully and appreciate the why, why you're doing it.

You may be working with client groups that you're not particularly fond of. And effectively what is happening is if it's becoming a chore and therefore for you to do the steps to take you forward, you're not going to take them on board. If we have a situation where we've got too much in our in-tray, we know busy people do get things done here. Again, there may be an overwhelm, there may be an overburdening of your in-tray and you're lacking a bit of focus here. And if you haven't got that focus about clearly the direction you want to take your business in, all you're going to be doing is taking lots of different tasks, lots of different things, and you're not going to achieve any of them because you work too much. And entrepreneurs, business owners, myself included here, we like to think that we can do lots of different things. Lots of different things excite us.

We don't necessarily stay in our lane, we don't necessarily have a narrow focus here. So we've done all of our efforts as well. For example, all of that shiny bauble syndrome is called. So you get excited by a particular project and you don't actually finish a particular task because something else distracts you there as well. And again, that sort of overwhelm, that take your too much. That shiny bauble syndrome is an example, again of procrastination. The best example I can give you of that connecting the outcome to the steps is taken is in the example of high performers. Athletes will be two great examples that we can all relate to.

So athletes, for example, high performance athletes or whatever level that you're performing at, will think about those performance objectives. They'll think about the outcome, they even visualise what it's going to be like participating in a race. They get themselves into what they call the zone. Therefore, everything they do, everything they do in terms of preparing up to that, exercising, doing their work, their work in the gym, their work on the track. If you're a track athlete when the weather is bad, when the weather is good, religiously doing it day in, day out, they're doing that because they can visualise and connect to the outcome. The outcome that gives them joy.

There's going to be many months or years into the future they're putting in the groundwork now and they're reframing that and thinking what they're doing now, the training, the exercise, the change of diet, the sacrifice… they probably won't even use the term sacrifice or something. The things they're doing to help them get closer to those outcomes is for them how they would make that connection. Use of language is going to be very powerful as well. When we see things and we use those terms like restricting sacrifice, it's effectively you're giving up something.

It's a very negative sort of behaviour here and you've got to try and reframe that. You're investing your time, you're investing your energy to get you closer to your end target. Now, if we take that what I would always recommend people do, whatever your end objective is, whatever your Northern Star is, is really critical to break it down as what I call smaller milestones. You've really got to break down that twelve month perspective, that twelve month journey into much smaller increments. A lot of this in business, when we think about where we want our businesses to be, whether it's making more profits, which is always good, more money in the bank, having more time off, having more staff or team, growing our business past our geographical remit, perhaps being more national, more international,

introducing new services, having a bigger reach, whatever it is for you, we focus too much on the outcome, which could be a year, two years, three years, several years in the future. And a lot of business owners are very impatient. The expectation that it's going to happen overnight is not realistic. Overnight success is normally several years in the making. And while we're doing that, we've got to think about things that will actually reinforce that we’ve trod on the right path, give us that degree of achievement, degree of positivity, well, that's going to involve it is set in much smaller milestones, much smaller markers that says when we've got that, we've achieved, it gives us that bit of joy, gives us that bit of excitement and nothing wrong with that. And it makes us stronger to carry on down that path.

If you measure your progress in say, three monthly cycles for certain things, then you know it's going to be a long time, you're waiting, to know have I achieved it? Am I going on the right path? Is the investment I'm making in time and energy actually getting me somewhere, getting me much closer? So in a financial planning, for example, when you put that together, there are various stages involved and this broadcast is less about the mechanics of a financial plan. But it's saying that financial plan when you do it, when you write it, when you deliver it, when you monitor it, when you use it, it has so much that's going for it in terms of positivity.

This is not just a document that you just plug the numbers in. It's a real powerful way for you to connect as an individual your story to what the financial outcome is. You may set some of those measures and you look at that on a weekly or a monthly basis. So whether it's increasing the level of money coming into your business from steps that you're taking, look at that on a weekly basis, look at that on a fortnightly basis. There may be certain things that you've got to do in terms of your onboarding process that you're increasing your productivity and your efficiency. Or again, look at those as little steps. So step one is, for example, mapping out the process.

If step one is actually doing a form, an online form to do something, then so be it. But think of a task, measure it in smaller increments about that time scale. And therefore as you go literally each week, each fortnight, each month as you go by, there's a tip, there's a reinforcement and your month one step closer. What else we need to do is to actually think about documentation. If you relay everything just in your brain, you're not going to write something down, whether it's virtual or on hard copy.

If you're not going to actually do that effort and actually map things out and have a bit of a structure, then you're going to find it very difficult to monitor and see what's going on here. Coming back to this idea of want-should here. So why we disconnect, why people procrastinate a large amount we've said it's about not accepting or not visualising or not understanding, not feeling that endpoint, just going through the motions. And if you're not accepting that outcome for yourself, if you're not accepting the way you want to get to, if you can't visualise it, if you can't see the joy that it brings you the emotion that's positive that it brings you. And you can't take that and born and have that at the forefront of your consciousness. It becomes very difficult to actually relate what you're doing now to actually get into that end point.

Some of the language that we're using to describe this, we got to sometimes reframe what we're doing, look at the words that we're using because our bodies, our brains are there to protect us and to help us. And sometimes when we use negative words, sometimes when we use wishy-washy language to articulate what we're trying to do, then that becomes a wishy-washy thing and it becomes very difficult to achieve. We're going to be careful not to overload ourselves having too much. And there is a school of thought that says actually focusing limiting attention on fewer things that have value, fewer things to give you more focus, is more likely to achieve some outcome.

Then there are other things as well. Procrastination, generally speaking, is couched in negative terms. So procrastinators is technically it's seen as a naughty thing, it's bad for your business. And I would say if you set your goals, if you set your objectives, if you set your Northern Star and you figured out and you've got an idea that route map you've got to do to get there, then what you have to do to get to that end point, and you don't do that. And you're delaying those things that you said you must do. That is procrastination.

If you've got an objective that is ill-defined, you don't quite know where you want your business to go, you don't quite know the path you want to tread, then the delay is really, to a large extent, they're not procrastination because it's not actually leading you to anywhere. Delaying, getting distracted by things like social media, getting distracted by things that don't add any value to your business. Effectively, to me, that's not procrastination, that's just trying to figure out what you actually want to do. So there's definitely got to be the path that you tread as the path that you identify, can articulate and feel that's getting you to where you want to.

So if we talk about procrastination, about how we can minimise it, smaller milestones, your brain, your brain, you've got to look after it. You've got to look after yourself. And therefore, sometimes when we don't do things, when we don't have the energy we feel, we can't be bothered, when we feel overtired, our brains are saying, come on, take a rest, take a break from your business here. It's not about how many hours you're spending in your business, but it's about the quality of the time. So focus here. Just go for a walk, get some fresh air, reconnect with the outside world. And I know it sounds a little bit on a woo woo side, but reconnect with nature, reconnect with the fresh air.

Now again, I'm very rubbish at taking my own advice. I'm getting much better. I have managed to move out of my back bedroom business to a business that's employing staff, having freelancers. So I'm doing OK as far as that’s concerned. I know I could do much better that will come and I like to do lots of different diffuse things here. But in terms of that, procrastination is something I succumb to, something everybody succumbs to, but it's negative if you're doing things that aren't advancing you to an end goal.

Other things you've got to bear in mind folks, you mustn't be too hard on yourself when you start to beat yourself up over these things about things you aren't doing. You can get into a spiral, a cycle of thinking actually I'm not achieving this. There's an element of failure, element of weakness. Put that thinking out of your mind completely. Now you've got to try and think of these things. You might have your good days, you might have your bad days, but it doesn't matter. There are only momentary here. And if you've got a certainty in your own mind about which way you want to go to then you will achieve that.

Do it in small steps. It takes time, it takes a degree of patience as well. Now, just to reinforce, just to come to a conclusion on this here, for me and for the hundreds and thousands of clients that have helped over the years, they can see once it's explained, once they get into it. They can see the emotional impact, the business impact, the monetary impact of writing a financial story, creating it, articulating their business journey, challenging themselves about how they are going to get to their own personal Northern Star.

They can take that on board and see that great, that big cathartic effect of why that's such a positive thing. The energies that are put in then subsequently they can connect to. They know that the efforts, the energies they're putting in now are going towards achieving that end goal. The milestones they set themselves, those small little mini milestones again, measured either on a weekly or a fortnightly or a monthly basis are markers they can look at - their accountability buddies, notice the reframe of the language here.

Progress is such they don't achieve what they set out to achieve. It's not a failure necessary, it's the okay, why not? What's happening? What's going on? Let me understand and I can see where the problems are, I can see where the successes are. So you're going to think of this in terms of a positive progression as opposed to it's all restrictive itself. So folks, I hope you got some use out of this broadcast. If you have, I'd love to hear your comments and your feedback.

Do you agree? Do you disagree? What tips would you share in terms of reducing procrastination about helping people get towards their Northern Stars, helping them in their financial planning? Do you think procrastination exists? Are you one of those procrastinators? So many questions, so many answers. Folks, until next week, have a wonderful week and I'll see you on the other side. A week today.

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