Fashion Business Owners Musings: What’s Your Minimum?

Feeling overwhelmed is no joke. It often causes shutdown mode, ultimately resulting in nothing getting done.  Forming certain habits is a necessary component of combating this issue.

I know though that even forming habits can feel overwhelming! But it doesn’t have to. In order to make progress, you just need to set your minimum.

What does that mean? Well, it means that you need to figure out the minimum amount of time that you can commit each and every day to a specific component of your business.  In order to form habits, you need to start somewhere. You need to have a minimum.

So, let’s do a little exercise.

What is one thing you have been overwhelmed by or made no progress on in your business?

Be specific. Don’t say “marketing.” Say “growing my email list.”

Now ask yourself,  “What’s my minimum?”

What’s your minimum amount of time for each day that you can absolutely commit to working on this?

Is it 1 hour? Is it 15 minutes?

Now, this is important: don’t lie to yourself. Pick a minimum that you know you can do. If 1 hour a day spent on this specific roadblock is too much, then go lower.

The goal here is to create a baseline. A minimum amount of time that you will commit to, no matter what. And you won’t think about increasing that minimum until you no longer dread or struggle to achieve the minimum.

That means, even though you have a day job, a family, personal commitments, it’s raining, your computer broke, you’re tired, you have to go to the grocery store, or you locked your keys in the car and need to sit and wait for AAA, you will commit to this time every single day.

When you do this, you are establishing a habit and commitment that eventually will come without much thought at all.

Think about it- you have commitments like this in your personal life like brushing your teeth, things you just do no matter how you’re feeling.  Like, I will not, no matter what, go to sleep with makeup on my face for no other reason than it was a habit I started in my teens to avoid blemishes and it just stuck.

You can get to the point where you are committed to time spent every single day working on improving your email marketing or posting on Instagram. By creating minimum baselines of the time you must spend on these things daily, you start to make that happen.

When you give yourself no excuses, change happens.

Then, once you make this a complete and total non-negotiable (and not before!), you can increase the time minimum. It doesn’t have to be by much. But maybe after six months of spending 15 minutes every day working on your email marketing, you increase it to 30 minutes. Or maybe not. Maybe it will always be 15 minutes, but that’s OK because you are, in fact, making progress. Which is what really matters.

Creating your minimum for the most important aspects of your business (tasks and projects in sales and marketing being top contenders) will have a major impact on your progress. And honestly, the whole process feels so much less intimidating and overwhelming than trying to sit down and tackle it all.

Try it!

Lots of love and encouragement,