Do you get distracted from priority activities that will have a positive impact on your business? Are things getting left undone? Would you like to have a strategy to get important activities done?

These 5 tips will help you get on track and achieve all the things you need to do to achieve success.

5 top tips to stop your procrastination!

Procrastination is one of the biggest enemies you have when it comes to sales and marketing. Thinking about doing something and planning to do it is fine. The real challenge is taking the first step towards achieving your objective!

Developing the skill of procrastinating over an activity that doesn’t have much impact on your business is not an issue. The problems start when you procrastinate over important and critical activities that have an impact on your productivity and increase your stress levels.

Here are five top tips to help you overcome procrastination.

1. Daily planning the night before.

People don't plan to fail; they do sometimes fail to plan. Without a plan of action in place before you arrive for work it’s too easy to get caught up in ‘stuff’. The phone rings, you get engrossed in your emails, someone pops into the office and you spend your time responding to the loudest voices rather than to the most important priorities. A plan of action, prepared the night before is like a roadmap for the next day. It focuses your brain on the important aspects of the day and creates a path of the steps you need to take to get you into productive action and away from procrastination.

2. Work with a clean desk.

Out of sight, out of mind. The reverse of that is also true. When it's in sight, it's in mind and most of us can’t help getting distracted. You’ll then create the danger of your time being directed to less important and easier tasks, causing you to put off more important activities. Working with a clean desk or clean work environment allows you to focus all your attention on the most important tasks…without other visual distractions.

3. Reduce large projects to bite-sized pieces.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!

Tomorrow you plan to work on a three-hour project. Unless you are very lucky, you won’t have three hours to work on any one activity. You have to deal with interruptions, meetings and anything else that crops up. That’s in addition to the challenge of a three-hour attention span! It’s easy to end up procrastinating on big tasks because you’ve not enough time to get it done. So, instead of scheduling the entire three-hour project for tomorrow, schedule a small bite: a step or two that might take 20 or 30 minutes. Then put the next step on the next day's ‘Action Plan’ list and the next step after that on the next day's plan. It may take you several days, but you will get that elephant eaten up, one bite at a time.

4. Plan around interruptions.

Interruptions tend to occur in identifiable patterns. You may get most of your interruptions early in the day rather than later in the day. You may get most of your interruptions early in the week rather than later in the week. So, if you plan a big project make sure it works with your normal schedule of activity. Don’t create stress for yourself before you begin. As soon as your interruptions arrive they will re-focus your attention, causing you to procrastinate what you really want to do. It’s so much easier swimming downstream with the current rather than against the tide. Therefore, plan those larger projects for quieter times of your day and week when you tend to get fewer interruptions.

5. Assign deadlines.

Have you ever failed to achieve a New Year's resolution? If so, that probably happened because you didn’t set a deadline. Deadlines will move you to action. Without a deadline, activities will end up in your ‘soon as possible’ pile, a never never land where items might get attended to some day, when you get the time. Create a deadline and you’ll be moved to action.

Now go do those sales and marketing activities you know will generate business for you!