How to reduce procrastination when creating social media content...

It is becoming increasingly difficult to pull away from that procrastination cycle…Why? Because there’s just so much going on! Life is always moving at superspeed, especially when running your own business. Social Media is one of those things as a business owner that is quite essential, but I also think it is one of the tasks that one can become easily distracted. This, paired with procrastination is a recipe for not much work to be done! But, in my time talking to people about social media and being part of the industry, I have found some top tips to reduce the levels of procrastination when you’re doing your social media.

1. Write down your goals – if you have goals written down, whether this be qualitative (consistency) or quantitative (number of followers) this will allow you to have something to work towards and therefore increase motivation for the task.

2. Know what you need to do – procrastination is really easy when there’s no clear direction and clarity on what you are doing, therefore before you even start doing the task, write down your plan for the time you are spending on your social media and tick the tasks off. So, once you have finished one thing, you know exactly what you’re moving on to next.

3. Set a timer – For those who are in a habit of procrastinating, this is a really good one and I call it ‘organised procrastinating!’. Set a timer for a specific amount of time (for instance 20 minutes), during this time you really focus and then have a 5 minute break and get back to the task or move on to the next one, this way, you have had that middle time to break things up (as soon as we get bored it is easy to procrastinate!) but still get things done.

4. Do it first – If social media is something you struggle with, something you don’t enjoy doing too much or you just find yourself procrastinating too much, do it first! This way, you have other things to do to run your business afterwards meaning you have to set and end point. Whereas, if you do it at the end of the day, the distinction between managing your social media and downtime become merged and you will find that it takes a lot longer.

5. Schedule and get prepared - Whether you are somebody who likes to do their social media on a monthly basis and scheduled things in all at once or you like to do it on a daily basis. It is a really good idea to have a Social Media planner that you have for the month defining the ‘types’ of posts you need to do and what essential things you will be promoting this month. Therefore, you know what you’re doing before you even come to it.

Having specific direction and cut off points for your social media time is the way to go, it has helped me to reduce my procrastination significantly (although it may need a little bit of improvement still!) as it keeps you on track. I could just tell you to turn your phone off and do everything on your laptop but we need to be realistic, there’s always going to be distractions but it’s having that focus and clarity on what you’re doing so that when the opportunity for procrastination comes along, you ignore it / recognise it and continue!

I hope this is of value and I would love to know how you get on!

Izzy x

Izzy | Founder of Gloucestershire Virtual Shopping Mall

What we do: www.linktr.ee/glosshoppingmall

E-mail: info@glosvirtualshoppingmall.com