Busy But Broke: When Productivity Becomes an Avoidance Tactic {3.11.26}

Many solopreneurs pride themselves on being responsible, productive, and hardworking. But what if the very behaviors that make you feel productive are actually keeping your business from growing?

In this episode, Jen Laffin breaks down a pattern she sees constantly with entrepreneurs: filling their days with work that feels responsible while quietly avoiding the work that actually generates revenue.

If your days are full but your results are slow, this conversation will help you recognize the difference between real business work and productive avoidance.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• The difference between forward-facing work and backward-facing work
• Why responsible entrepreneurs often struggle to focus on revenue-generating tasks
• The four most common productivity traps solopreneurs fall into
• How the brain uses “responsible work” to avoid discomfort and risk
• Why busyness can quietly stall business growth

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Join Jen on Wednesday, 4/1 for her free "Your Avoidance Protocol" Workshop  on Zoom where you'll discover the exact pattern you go through that's keeping you from taking action.

Sign up here: https://goal-getter-solutions.kit.com/apw

Thank you for listening!


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Transcript

0:44

Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Goal Getter Guide podcast. I am your host and guide, Jen Laine. Thank you for joining me again this week. Solopreneurs and small business owners tend to be very responsible people. We are the ones who are essentially responsible for the success of our business. However, that responsibility can sometimes get in the way of doing the real work of a business. And so today I wanted to talk to you about. Four responsible ways that I see a lot of solopreneurs and small business owners avoiding the real work of business. So what exactly is that real work? Real work is what I consider or call forward facing work. And so this is the kind of work that leads to revenue generation. They include tasks that have a direct line to revenue. They may increase your visibility so people can find you to take advantage of your offers. They may move an offer closer to market, or they could build that very important relationship with potential clients. These forward facing tasks may include publishing a post or sending an email to a prospective client or DMing someone who comments on a post or making an offer. It could also include finishing a product for launch or even following up with a lead. Now, these forward facing tasks. Are what I consider the real work of a business because they can be tied directly to generating revenue. They are usually client facing and for solopreneurs without a team, they are the work that can only be and must be done by the business owner. Now the problem happens when we take that responsibility and we let it consume every moment of our working day. And I have seen four ways in particular that solopreneurs and small business owners use. Responsibility as a way of avoiding doing that client facing or that forward facing work. And I wanted to go through these with you today to see if you recognize yourself in any of these. So the first one is research. Research is a form of avoidance that puts you in learning mode. Your goal is to learn something that you're telling yourself you must know before you can move forward with other things. It is a very popular avoidance tactic for those who struggle with imposter fear. And so some examples of using research as productivity include reading another book, listening to another podcast, taking another course, studying what other people are doing this research. It feels like it's a prerequisite for doing something else, especially if you've never done it before. It's also one of the ways to quiet down imposter fear that's telling you that you don't know what you are doing. However, the problem comes in when you spend so much time in research mode and no time in action mode at some point, all that research is going to become a sophisticated delay tactic that is going to keep you from making money. All right, number two, refining this form of avoidance has you constantly tweaking as you try to make something that's already good, better. This form of avoidance is a favorite amongst my perfectionists out there. So examples of using refining as productivity include tweaking your website before sending out your offer, rewriting the same sales page or blog post. Instead of pressing publish, writing a cash of newsletters before accepting signup. Changing fonts, colors, or branding on your graphics or adjusting slides just to make them prettier. This work is technically productive, right? But it keeps the entrepreneurs safely behind the scenes instead of in the market where there's money to be made. Number three is organizing, and this form of avoidance comes from the solopreneur telling themself that things would be so much easier if they could just get organized before they start. So they clean up their inbox, or they reorganize their Google Drive folders. They clean up their office space. They sort papers into files, and they sort out their project management board. Organizing gives your brain a quick hit of accomplishment. Something that is often not found when you are working on the harder and deeper forward facing work, but organizing the work is not the same as doing the work, and now you've just got less time to do it because you spent all day organizing. And finally we have planning. Planning is one of the most widely accepted forms of avoidance, and it's the one that I see most often when clients come to work with me. Planning feels responsible and productive, even though it often stalls the solopreneur because it tends to create more chaos than clarity. And let me explain what I mean by that. Planning as a form of avoidance could look like mapping out a quarterly sales strategy. That never gets implemented. Creating a detailed color coded content calendar that never gets used, designing a funnel that never gets started, or outlining the full curriculum of a program or book that never gets sold. So what they think they're doing is getting more clarity on what exactly it is they want to do. But what's really happening is they're just adding more to their mental bandwidth. And in my line of work, I see a lot of planning that produces work product that never gets put into action. Planning becomes a way to postpone taking action, but continuing to plan instead of taking action. It shortens your attention bandwidth, and it makes withdrawals from yourself, trusts, bank. So why is this forward facing real work so easy to avoid? Well, client facing work, the kind of work that generates revenue is easy to avoid because it is very uncomfortable. It's the hard, often never done before kind of work that tests our talents and our tenacity. There is a greater risk of failing or making a mistake. Yeah, and this keeps us from doing the work that needs to get done, and instead we focus on work that feels easier. Our mind is excellent at making up stories about what would happen if we put something out in the world that wasn't ready. Remember, your primal brain hates it when you're doing something that could lead to change or growth. It will want to always keep you in your comfort cave to stop you. This is where the backward facing task. Come in. They are easier, familiar and they keep you from really growing, but if you're not careful, they will also cause your business to fail. So why does all of this matter? Easy work that hides behind the cloak of productivity is the real trickster here. When our day is filled with busy tasks that take up our time, we are fooled into thinking that things are actually working out busyness. Is a badge of honor, especially for entrepreneurs who are still carrying around an employee mindset that values staying busy. We forget about the Pato principle that shows us that 80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts making staying busy, unnecessary. As a small business owner, you either have a very small team or no team at all. The success of the business rests on your shoulders. So if you never get to the real work that forward facing work of your business, you will not have a business for very long. You also often don't have someone watching out for you, pointing out when you're avoiding the hard work that will help your business be more successful. And without this, it's easy to stay buried in the details as revenue passes you by. Okay, now I'd like to help you go deeper on this topic, I invite you to join me for a free workshop on April 1st called your Avoidance Protocol, because the good news in all of this is that your avoidance follows a particular predictable pattern. And it's one that I call the avoidance protocol, and once you know what your protocol is, it's so much easier to get yourself out of avoidance and into that forward facing real work that matters. So please join me on Wednesday, April 1st. This free hands-on interactive workshop on Zoom where we are going to discover your avoidance protocol. You can register using the link in the notes and I would love to see you there.