How To Complete Important Work When There’s No Deadline Leave a comment

If you work well under pressure but struggle to take action when there’s no deadline, this episode is for you.

Most of the tasks that actually grow your business don’t come with external pressure. So they get pushed back. Again and again.

In this episode, I break down why that happens and what actually needs to change if you want to consistently follow through without relying on last-minute urgency.

This isn’t about becoming more disciplined. It’s about understanding the perfectionist pattern that keeps you stuck – and shifting the way you approach your work so you can take action even when no one is watching.

If you’re a perfectionist building a business, you want to listen to this episode today.

READY FOR MORE?

If you want to learn how to plan properly as a perfectionist so you always know what to work on each week, join the waitlist for The Power Planning Course at samlaurabrown.com/planning.

If you’re ready for coaching and support to take consistent action and grow your business, join the waitlist for Perfectionists Getting Shit Done at samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.

Listen To The Episode

Listen to the episode on the player above, click here to download the episode and take it with you or listen anywhere you normally listen to podcasts – just find Episode 591 of The Perfectionism Project Podcast!

Subscribe To The Perfectionism Project Podcast

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Introduction
This is the Perfectionism Project, the only podcast created specifically for perfectionists who are building businesses. I’m your host, Sam Laura Brown, perfectionism expert and entrepreneur. I teach perfectionists how to plan properly, consistently follow through and rest without guilt so they can build profitable and fulfilling businesses without burning out.

I’ve helped over a thousand perfectionist entrepreneurs do exactly that inside my program, Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. If you’re tired of procrastinating, overthinking and half finishing your ideas, you’re in the right place. Now, let’s dive in.

Sam Laura Brown
This is the Perfectionism Project, the only podcast created specifically for perfectionists who are building businesses. I’m your host, Sam Laura Brown, perfectionism expert and entrepreneur. I teach perfectionists how to plan properly, consistently follow through and rest without guilt so they can build profitable and fulfilling businesses without burning out.

I’ve helped over a thousand perfectionist entrepreneurs do exactly that inside my program, Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. If you’re tired of procrastinating, overthinking and half finishing your ideas, you’re in the right place. Now let’s dive in.

Today, I’m going to be sharing how to overcome procrastination on tasks that don’t have a deadline. This is an incredibly important topic for you for building your business because the majority of the tasks that are your needle movers that build your business will not have a deadline where you have someone else, whether it’s a client or anyone else in your life, telling you to get it done by a certain date and providing that external pressure to complete it. I’m going to be talking in this episode about the things that you need to do specifically so that you can work with your perfectionist brain instead of against it so you can actually complete tasks that don’t have a deadline, because I’m going to assume you have tried setting yourself your own deadline and meeting it, and you haven’t been able to do that, or maybe sometimes, but definitely not consistently.

Have you been able to do that? What’s going on and what do you actually need to do to be able to get things done when you want to do them? That’s what I’m going to be sharing with you in this episode. Let’s start with how this problem can look. What I have done is I have gathered quite a few different ways that I have seen this come up in perfectionists who are building businesses.

In PGSD, Perfectionist Getting Shit Done, I’ve coached over a thousand perfectionist entrepreneurs in that program, and so I have seen this time and time and time and time again. Also, when I was first building my business, I really struggled, like deeply, deeply struggled. I’ll share a story of mine in this episode to demonstrate how deep that struggle was, but this was such a big one for me that I wasn’t able to consistently take action when there wasn’t a deadline, and that made it really challenging to build my business in the beginning.

I had to learn as a perfectionist how to complete tasks when there is no deadline so that I could build my business to where it is today. Here’s how it can look. Number one is you get things done under pressure with a deadline when other people rely on you, but you struggle to get things done for yourself as you’re really particular about all the tiny details.

You get caught up on all of the little details. They feel so important, and you want to make sure you get them just right. Another way it can come up is that if you don’t have a strict deadline for a task or a project, it just gets pushed to the bottom of your to-do list, and then it’s overdue, and you have so much anxiety about another day passing where it didn’t get done.

Another way this can look is that you have one specific task this is coming up for. Say, for example, you have a long list of potential referral partners to reach out to, and it just sits on your desktop, and you never reach out to them because there’s no deadline. There’s no immediate reason to get it done, and even though it’s a game changer, it would be such a game changer for your business to be able to get it done.

You just keep pushing it off. Also, with this, oftentimes, you want to really present and produce high-quality work, so you hold on to things until the very last minute, tweaking them because you are afraid to release something that isn’t perfect out into the world. It’s not just fear.

It’s just, I just don’t even believe in doing that is how it comes up. This creates a lot of stumbling blocks for managing your life and also building your business. It has just made it really hard because everything is so heavy, and you can’t trust yourself when this is going on.

You can’t actually trust yourself to do what’s important, so it’ll be very hard to mentally switch off because you feel like you have to always be on top of yourself to be able to get anything done. What we do in PGSD is teach you how to complete tasks before the deadline. It is so important, and here are three reasons why.

Number one, most needle movers don’t have a deadline, and the story I’m going to share in this episode is such a good example of that. Most of the really important things are not going to have a deadline. If your strategy for taking action is there being a deadline and you’re so scared of disappointing the other person or letting someone else down that you’re able to do it, if that is the only strategy you have for being able to take action and get something done, then you’re not going to be able to build your business.

So this isn’t like, oh, it’d be nice to be able to do this. This is you will not be able to build your business. Number two is burnout.

If you only get things done in a last minute rush, then you will be burned out. If you procrastinate and rush and then procrastinate and rush and procrastinate and rush, it is incredibly exhausting to live that way. And my guess is if you’re doing it in your business, you are doing that in your life as well.

So in your job or with your life admin that needs to get done, that you are waiting until the last minute to get everything done. And that means that you spend a lot of time procrastinating and feeling bad that things aren’t getting done. They’re still in your mental load.

You’re not mentally switched off. So your brain isn’t able to rest and recharge as it needs to. And then you’re rushing.

And often when you’re rushing to get something done, you have to drop everything else and everyone else in your personal life to be able to get that thing done for your business. That is just not sustainable. And growing a business is a long-term endeavor.

You need to have stamina. You need to have endurance. You need to have sustainability to be able to get your business up and running and successful and staying that way.

So number three is that it will cap your business growth because if you are doing everything at the last minute in a rush, then you will associate unconsciously that having a bigger business means having a more unsustainable business. So you will unconsciously, you will have outwardly big goals, but unconsciously you will keep your business small because it will feel like you won’t be able to manage a bigger business because that would be unsustainable. So I want to share with you the three reasons, three of the core reasons perfectionists struggle with this.

Because it isn’t because we’re lazy. It’s not because we’re not motivated. And you might also be neurodivergent and have ADHD, for example.

But I want to share with you that even if that is the case, there are perfectionist reasons for this pattern. There are perfectionist reasons that this happens and these are what they are so that you can be fully aware of them and know what is going on. So the first one is the perfectionist thought pattern that we are in when we have a lot of time to do something versus when we don’t have a lot of time to do something.

One of the biggest, if not the biggest perfectionist fear is trying your hardest and your best not being good enough. So this procrastination on things until the last minute and we’re going to talk about in this episode how to do things when there is no last minute. But the reason that that happens is that at the last minute you get to have an excuse.

You get to have a reason to point to and this isn’t from this bad place. It’s just from a self-protective place. If you identify as someone who’s smart and highly capable and has potential, it feels very vulnerable to get something done ahead of time and put it down and say, this is finished and then have it be graded by the client or by people out there in the world.

Have it be judged and judged as not good enough. So that’s why we leave it to the last minute because at the last minute you can say, well, I would have done better if it wasn’t the last minute. It just gives you an excuse.

It lets you off the hook in a way that if you did it ahead of time and you just calmly got it done and said it was complete and set it down, if it wasn’t good enough, then you have nothing to blame. So we use it to build in this excuse that allows us to protect our potential. And so when that last minute isn’t there in an external sense, then we just stay in that thought pattern of if I have time to do it perfectly, I should, which creates a lot of pressure and makes it very hard to get anything done.

Number two, the fear of doing it badly and not as imagined. This is something that has perfectionist, has us procrastinate on tasks that don’t have a deadline. If you are someone who can really imagine, I’m going to assume you are, if you’re an entrepreneur, you have a business, you are, no matter what stage that is in, you are someone who has a vision and you are imagining whatever it is.

So one of my clients, she wanted to, as a lead magnet for her business, she’s a dietitian. She wanted to create a quiz and she had procrastinated on that before coming into PGSD for a year and a half. It had been on her to-do list and just kept getting pushed down and pushed down and pushed down because part of it was this fear of not having it be what you imagined and believing that it’s going to be so good when I finally do it, which creates pressure to do it perfectly, which I talked about before, and this fear of just seeing yourself do bad work and have it not be as imagined and that frustration, but also just how it feels from an identity perspective when you believe that you are someone who is, again, capable, intelligent, you have a lot of potential, to witness yourself doing mediocre or bad work feels so uncomfortable.

So we procrastinate and we delay so we don’t have to be in that discomfort of witnessing ourselves do average or below average work or be in the frustration of having the vision for how you want it to be and then you sit down to create it and it’s just not how you wanted it to be and dealing with the frustration of that. That is why we procrastinate and put things off. And number three is overwhelm.

You’re not sure where to start so you feel like you need a really big chunk of uninterrupted time to get it done. So this is, I call it like the cabin in the woods mentality when we perfectionists are like I just wish I could be in a cabin in the woods for a week and put my whole entire life on pause to be able to get this done and until then I can’t get it done. I can’t just do this if I have a one hour block of time.

I need a full day to be able to actually get that done and I don’t know what I’m going to be able to have a full day to do it. So we do that from this place of feeling overwhelmed by the pressure and feeling incapable because of the pressure. As I mentioned, the pressure is coming from the perfectionist thought.

If I have time to do it perfectly, I should. That makes everything feel like a really big deal and then we feel like we need a lot of time to be able to get it done if we don’t have external pressure. If we have external pressure, if there’s a client deadline for example or someone relying on you to get it done, then you can do it.

But if there’s no external pressure, then to be able to overcome your internal pressure, that is challenging. That’s what we’re going to talk about how to do in this episode. So then we just think okay well I just don’t have enough time to get it done and you’re just in this I don’t have enough time loop and that stops you from being able to get it completed.

So I want to share an example of being in this pattern and then I’m going to share what is required to shift from procrastinating on deadline-free tasks to actually getting them done and if you can relate to this episode you definitely want to stay tuned for that. So one example I have as I mentioned this used to be really how I operated first as a university student well I’m sure as a high school student as well 100% when I cast my mind back to high school and exams and assignments and how I operated it was definitely at the last minute.

Then when it went to university I did a law degree and a finance degree and a diploma of French and I procrastinated on pretty much every assignment every exam I would do the last minute cramming and get it all done in a rush because when I did the last minute I could say oh well imagine how I would have done if I try my best and I often did and this is the thing and for our PGSDers I did really well at the last minute when it came to grades so this pattern was really positively reinforced even though I burned out so much.

It was positively reinforced by the validation of I do it at the last minute I cram all night like I used to drive in the university that I went to is about an hour drive away from where I lived at the time including parking and everything I’d drive in and I’d go to one of the libraries it was 24-7 access and I would sit at the computer I’d get the assignment done and I would have I’d put a textbook underneath my chin like standing upright so that I could hold my head up so that I could just continue working all through the night I’d leave at 7am when everyone was getting into university for the day.

And I would get one of the best marks and so that just reinforced that I work really well under pressure I work really well at the last minute and then I came into entrepreneurship and having my own business and I really wanted to launch my own coaching services so now I’m a coach as I mentioned I have coached over a thousand as perfectionist entrepreneurs inside perfectionist getting shit done I’ve also had a one-on-one fully booked practice of coaching as well but it has not always been that way.

So when I was starting out I really wanted to be a coach once I learned about what that was which is a couple of years into my business before I realized what a coach is and that’s a thing I really really really wanted to be a coach I just felt like that is the most me job that could ever be and I hired a coach as well because I had this issue with taking action and I knew what to do but I just wasn’t able to get myself to do it and I remember telling her that I wanted to be a coach and it was so amazing to have her believe for me and to say I think you could be a coach too because that was just I was I really was so scared and I’ll talk about that in a second the perfectionist fears that I had.

But I told my coach that I wanted to launch my coaching services but first I needed to launch my online course that I had and then do repeated launches of that so that I could then have that have money coming in more passively like have it be open evergreen and then I would be ready to do it and I procrastinate on it for two years and it was so hard during that time to know that I really wanted to be coaching but I also had lots of good reasons as for why I couldn’t so I have so many examples my own life of stories like that where it is I was procrastinating on something that really didn’t have a deadline it was just something completely new like a a new project or a new endeavor.

And so for a lot of PGSDers when they come in it could be they want to start a youtube channel or a podcast or they have a part of their business that they want to venture into that they haven’t before or maybe it’s just them starting their business at all that they are at the point where they have just had that design and had that dream but not been able to do it and also what I’m going to be talking about in a second relates to when it’s just a specific smaller task like reaching out to referral partners for example that you are procrastinating on whether it’s posting on social media.

So what I’m going to share now is how to actually get those things done so there’s really two steps number one is to have the perfectionist fear identified and then shifted so to continue with the coaching example the perfectionist fear for me was that I would try my best at coaching and it wouldn’t be good enough I would get refund requests I would get haters I would also see myself coaching in such an inadequate way that it would just be so painful for me as someone who deeply believed that I was going to be or was inherently skilled at coaching to actually be bad at coaching I just didn’t want to be bad at it so I’d rather not do it at all than be bad at it.

Even though I wanted to do it so much but I just didn’t want to do it badly and so I just kept procrastinating on it again and again and again and I always had a really good reason as to why that I could point to and so what happened to be able to shift that and this is there’s a fear shifting process that we guide you through inside pgsd is that for me to be able to launch my coaching services, I had to move past that perfectionist fear.

That it wasn’t just a matter of okay well you know set a deadline and do this and do that I had a deep fear that needed to be shifted for me to be able to actually take action on that that I had to change the way that I was thinking about myself and then the second part is having a approach to taking action that works with your perfectionist brain instead of against it you need to have flexible structure you need to have clarity on exactly what needs to get done what your needle movers are you need to have a way to actually get insight into where your blocks are and where you are having those perfectionist fears come up and stopping you from taking action.

So that you can have those fears shifted if you’re working from a long to-do list and squeezing work in on your business to anywhere you can then it’s so challenging to see those perfectionist fears and when they are coming up to be able to actually go through the process of shifting them so you need to have first of all is a growth goal which is a 12-month revenue goal so in a way that works for your perfectionist brain and then you use power planning which is a planning method I developed to be able to get your perfectionist mindset on your side so that you aren’t all or nothing with your plans and you do classic time blocking in a calendar and then you stop looking at it one day later because it was just so overwhelming and so much pressure like just the way we do that. If we overschedule ourselves like crazy and we assume that we’re going to be perfectly motivated and have perfect discipline and that we don’t need to eat lunch and it is just not possible to follow through on that so when you’re power planning you have a plan that you can actually follow through on that will get you to your growth goal that you have.

So that is then fueled by clean rest if you’re having a hard time taking action and especially doing any tasks that are new to or require courage or are a bit tedious then you haven’t got enough rest for your brain and your brain needs to rest so that you can show up fully in the business time you have what matters more is that you have that rest to fuel you that matters so much more than how much business time you have because when you are having rest as the fuel even if you have a full time job and kids and so many life circumstances as our perfectionists do.

I’m a mom of four under five like i’ve got stuff going on besides my business but when i have a rested brain i’m just able to operate in a way and make decisions and flow through in a way that i can’t when my brain is exhausted so you have clean rest, you have power planning, and you have your growth goal those are the tools that allow you to once that perfectionist fear is shifted to be able to take action and those tools allow you to notice perfectionist fears as they come up while you are taking action.

So that you can shift out of them as well so if you can relate with what i’ve shared about in this episode and taught on there is nothing wrong with you it’s so important to know there is nothing wrong with you you just aren’t working in a way that works for your perfectionist brain. So i want to invite you into PGSD when we open for our next enrolment so you can go to samlaurabrown.com/pgsd to get the dates and add your name to the waitlist so you’re the first to know when doors are opening i hope you’re having a beautiful day and i will talk to you in the next episode.