How to Find Focus in Your Business

Sometimes my brain feels a little bit like this piece of palette paper.

As someone who has many many interests, focus has been my greatest struggle as an entrepreneur. When you don’t have a boss looking over your shoulder, there can be too many pots on the stove, and no one to hold you accountable.

On any given day, I probably have at least five business ideas swirling around in my brain. My natural tendency is to start a lot of projects and not finish them. This isn’t always a bad thing, because it’s important to test ideas (without fear of failure) to figure out what you enjoy.

The important part is knowing when to ditch an idea, and move on to something else. And that is the dark side of this trait. You can be so busy chasing new ideas, that you never really focus on anything. You can spin your wheels for years and get nowhere. It’s hard enough to get one business idea off the ground, let alone several! And every time an idea crashes and burns, that’s time wasted. It can be hard not to get frustrated and beat yourself up when this happens.

The best way I’ve learned to manage my lack of focus is to take frequent pauses and assess how I’m spending my time. I know I’m going to get off track because this trait is not going away. Therefore, it’s important that I’m frequently steering my focus back to the main road - the road I’m meant to travel. Over the years, I’ve learned what questions to ask myself to make sure I don’t get too off track.

Any time I have a new idea, I ask - why do I want to pursue this idea? What are my true motivations, if I’m being totally honest with myself? The answer cannot be because I think I will make a boatload of money. And it can’t be because it will make me look important.

The only reason that’s acceptable is that I think it will bring me joy. It has to add energy to my life, instead of draining my resources. You never know how an idea is going to do financially, or what kind of impact it will have, so it has to be for the love of the game. It may be years before you see any profit, so that joy is the fuel that’s going to keep you going. The one thing all entrepreneurs seem to agree on is that everything takes a lot longer than you think. You need to be in it for the long haul.

I’ve been working on my Etsy shop for five years, and I’ve just recently seen a lot of growth this year. That was four years of blood, sweat, and tears, and the only thing that kept me going was that I loved every minute of it. If I hadn’t held on for this long, I would have considered the shop a failure and moved on years ago. My joy kept me going. Now that the shop is successful, I know that I will always enjoy the work. That kind of success is SO much sweeter than finding success with something I never really liked in the first place.

If I do decide I want to try a new idea for the right reason (fun), I test it out on the smallest scale possible. This way, I can see if I actually do enjoy the work. I won’t get other people involved in my little test. Those are people you’ll need to break up with if you ditch the idea. And I won’t invest hours in branding. I’ll spend as little money as I can to do a trial run. That way, I don’t put pressure on myself to make the idea work. I can abandon ship at any time, without feeling an ounce of guilt over it. This saves me a lot of self-loathing too.

So now, let’s talk about how to decide if you should continue to spend time on something? When is it time to ditch the idea? As you may have guessed, it’s a lot about fun, and just a little about money. Since we are talking about business, the money part must come into play. It’s mainly in reference to your financial situation as a whole. So, ask yourself - are you still finding the project fun, or do you dread doing the work? AND are you seeing a little profit? Is the growth promising? How much are you being paid for your time? Can you afford to invest the same amount of time you’ve been investing in order to give the business time to flourish?

Going back to my Etsy shop - my number one reason for doing it was love. However, the financial growth was always promising. Every year, I did a little better, and I suppose that kept me hanging on too. Also, I was investing a very small amount of time for the profit I was seeing. I like how my hourly rate was looking in reference to running my shop.

I do these little check-ins with myself every few weeks. I like to take time to set goals and assess how my business is going. To recap, the scales I use are fun and compensation for my time (with more emphasis on fun). It’s really quite simple. If either of these scales are low, I have no problem watching an idea crash and burn. In fact, it feels pretty liberating - similar to the feeling of purging your closet.

To make sure I stay on task daily, I write down three personal and three professional things to do every day. This habit is from Jim Kwik, and it has changed my life.

The one thing that has improved over time is how well I know myself, and what I enjoy. By now, I know I love design, illustration, teaching, and writing, so my new ideas should mostly fall into those categories. If they don’t, it’s easier for me to shoot down the idea quickly, knowing that I won’t enjoy the work. In the beginning, I had no idea what kind of work I enjoyed and didn’t, so I used to chase ideas much longer before ditching them. I think that’s all you can hope for, if you struggle with focusing too.