Being a solopreneur is exhausting.
You wake up in the morning, check your emails and find dozens of new strategies waiting for you.
Double your subscribers with this new pop-up!
Use this little-known copywriting trick to get 32% more signups!
How this simple tool helped me get 201,456 visitors from Pinterest!
You then read a few of the emails, consider implementing a few tactics and feel terrible when you realize you really don’t have time for all this.
The 2 strategies you are about to discover will help you better deal with information overload and make real progress without feeling guilty about all the strategies left behind.
The one-focus strategy
Back when I started my blog Parlons Allemand (not online anymore) 10 years ago, I would constantly try new strategies.
I would spend Monday trying to get more Facebook fans, Tuesday creating a lead magnet, Wednesday creating a product, Thursday learning about affiliate marketing and Wednesday writing a guest post.
The next week, I would explore ways to earn money with sponsored posts and try to uncover all the secrets of SEO.
Some would say I was hustling but I now realize most of what I was doing was a waste of time.
What I have found over the years is that trying lots of different strategies and focusing and lots of aspects of growing a business at the same time doesn’t lead to more growth but to more overwhelm.
If you truly want to grow your online business, you need to say no.
No to new strategies that may or may not work.
No to fancy tools you don’t need.
No to long unproductive hours that just make you feel busy.
And embrace the power of focus.
You need to choose one main focus and say no to information overload.
My focus right now with Grow With Less is to get more readers and every single action I take serves this focus.
It may seem like I’m missing out but this ruthless focus reduces stress and helps me avoid information overload.
I know from experience that trying to earn money with affiliate marketing, creating a product or even trying to get more Twitter followers would just distract me, overwhelm me and ultimately slow me down.
So I just add all these tasks to my “to do later” so they can become my one-focus once I’m done trying to get more readers.
To implement the one-focus strategy, simply decide what your main focus for the month (or week) should be, look at your to-do list and ask yourself: will this task help me with my one-focus? If not, file it in the “to do later” list and move on.
This may not be as exciting as constantly trying new strategies but you will feel great once you realize how much this helps you accomplish.
Just-in-time learning
Deciding to focus on one thing at a time is awesome but it’s easier said than done in a world where we are bombarded with information.
Sure, you decided to focus exclusively on getting more email subscribers but you just opened Twitter and stumbled upon a strategy that could potentially double your email list in a matter of days.
What do you do? You can’t just ignore it, right?
You use just-in-time learning, a strategy I discovered when Pat Flynn mentioned it on his blog a few years ago.
Here is how he describes it:
“Only allow yourself to consume information about the task and project you’re working on right now. That’s it!” Pat Flynn
This concept paired with the one-focus strategy changed my blogging life and helped me go from hobby blogger to business owner by allowing me to focus on improving my business, one step at a time.
Instead of reading about meta-descriptions for a bit, then switching to copywriting and then social media marketing and letting information consume all my energy and time, I decided to apply just-in-time learning and only consume content that was immediately applicable to my one focus.
If my one focus was writing a new sale page, I would only read about sale page copywriting. If I was trying to get more readers to my blog, I would only read about SEO strategies that could help me with my goal.
At first, it felt like I was missing out but I quickly realized that just-in-time learning helped me make real progress and avoid information overload.
What I found after using just-in-time learning and the one-focus strategy was that most things in my to-do list could wait and that trying to do everything at once only results in inaction and stress.
Or like Denzel Washington said: Never confuse movement with progress. Because you can run in place and not get anywhere.
The 2 strategies you discovered are powerful because they let you take control of your business.
Instead of letting the information you receive consume you, you get to consume the information you truly need and focus on what matters without worrying about strategies and fancy tools you won’t have time to implement anyway.
Have you ever tried these 2 strategies to fight information overload? What strategies do you use to feel less overwhelmed?