What a colourwheel freakout has to do with your business progress

I’m sketching out this post on my iPhone with the WordPress app (which is pretty awesome by the way) as my machine has just gone into colorwheel ‘goodbye cruel world’ mode.

The freakout began innocently at first with a few slowly responding windows but gradually the whole thing failed to respond and ground to a halt.

As I was getting less and less of a response I tried to open Activity Monitor (Mac answer to ctrl alt delete) and some other recovery programs to remedy the problem but the situation got worse.   The more windows I had open the worse it became until the whole thing crashed completely.

This got me to thinking about your business (random segueway ftw) and how information overload like this, coupled the resultant lack of focus on one or two particular compound moves that really matter might be holding you back.

So here is a set of unsolicited computing analogies that’ll help you avoid stunting your own progress.

Know your RAM

A friend nerdier than I once referred to RAM as the “desk space” you have available to work on. In business its important to understand your capacity, understand the limits of what you can be working on at any one time.

Don’t mix operating systems

Find a method and stick to it, master one way of working and get really efficient at it. In a previous Q&A call Amy Hoy referred to this as just taking advice and running with it.

Understand personal bandwidth

Trying too many things at once will result in a slower rate of progress on each.  A core trait of successful people is being able to run projects simultaneously. This takes practice though, so understand that if you’re just starting out try to take decisive action to get one thing finished first before taking anything else on.

You only have so much hard drive space

Stored information gathered from other channels (blogs, ebooks, video training) is useless if its not acted upon.  Develop a bias for action, make your own way with trial and error and really look to make a dent in your business growth without going into information overload.

Read the manual

Build a vision and map out a strategy for achieving it so you know the key steps for your growth with milestones so you know when you’ve reached them.  This is your own personal user manual.

So something a little light hearted there but hopefully the points raised were still pertinent. Ah, wouldn’t you know it… the colorwheel issue seems to have resolved itself…. back to work then.

Learn anything? Please share

By Liam Veitch @freelancelift