Bottlenecks. Man, we lose so much time to bottlenecks.
Over a year ago, the bottleneck in my coaching practice was my podcast. I started putting episodes out again in August. Now I’m working on improving the content I deliver and upping the frequency.
This time, I am holding onto the goal of 1% improvement over time, or, in the words of James Clear, harnessing “the power of tiny gains”.
Three weeks ago, the bottleneck in my coaching practice was my website, or lack thereof. I had a website, but in my effort to streamline my homepage I somehow managed to delete everything.
Some of you may wonder, “How is it possible to delete everything?” I’m very skilled, apparently, and managed to pull it off.
After spending days trying to recover my website, trying to reset it to where it was before I started tweaking, I threw up a ‘website is in maintenance’ page and left it.
For months.
I had clients. I had ways people could contact me. I could’ve paid someone much more skilled than me to solve my problem, but I didn’t.
And so it became a bottleneck.
Every time I wanted to write a blog post. Every time I thought about ideas for a newsletter. Every time I attended a networking event where people asked if I had a website.
Three weeks ago I asked myself the Gary Keller/Jay Papasan focusing question:
What’s the ONE thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
The answer was my website.
And now, after being a bottleneck for months, my revamped website is up and running.
I built my new website following the incredibly valuable YouTube tutorial by the theme’s developer. One of the steps involved adding a newsletter subscription box.
And suddenly, I was stuck again.
Did I want to offer a newsletter? What would it include? Would I have enough to sustain it weekly? How do people even create newsletters? What would it look like? I went through my inbox & pored through newsletters I’ve signed up for & realized there were more steps I hadn’t considered. For example, the title. The language to subscribe. The welcome email.
Bottleneck.
Until I realized that 95% of bottlenecks are caused by putting off decisions.
Looking back, that was the case for my podcast. That was the case for my website, which was now in danger of being further delayed by my thoughts around the newsletter.
So I decided to offer a newsletter and with that decision, I finished my website.
To not let my newsletter turn into a bottleneck, I used Google for each
step:
First: ‘How to write an email newsletter’.
Then: ‘How to create an email newsletter using Canva”.
Then: “How to use Mailchimp to send out my Canva newsletter”.
I’m proud to say my first newsletter went out to my list yesterday. (BTW, you should sign up. :P)
Bottlenecks are not a problem, a moral failing, or a sign that you should give up.
They’re signals that decisions need to be made, and the sooner you make them, the sooner things can flow again.
What’s a bottleneck in your life?
I invite you to use the focusing question that helped me to move forward (see above). It’s one I share with my clients regularly as a tool to diffuse overwhelm and paralysis by analysis:
What’s the ONE thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
Gary Keller/Jay Papasan
The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results
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