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You can set your small business apart in several ways, from your brand to the quality of your products. Still, even if you’re the top small business in your city, your audience is limited. How can you grow beyond the borders of your town? 

Now you’re probably considering an ecommerce option for your company. As with starting a business, adding online shopping is a whole new endeavor. Sure, you have your brand and your products taken care of, but there are a million new tasks to complete and even more things to learn. Why should you take the plunge?

1) Larger Customer Base

We touched on the potential for a larger customer base, but it’s important to realize just how large that base might become. With excellent inbound techniques, including stellar SEO, and a robust CMS, a small business could grow into a global powerhouse.

Scaling for growth is important for small businesses that turn to ecommerce models, because the potential reach for online shops is unlimited. While there is never the promise your company will grow to Amazon-like greatness, the possibility is always there.

2) Customers Choose Ecommerce 

The number of online shoppers has increased sharply within the past few years. Just three years ago, 36% of American shoppers completed their holiday shopping online. Last Christmas, that number jumped to 61%. Keep in mind, that’s only holiday shoppers that did all or most of their shopping online. If we study the number of people who’ve made at least one online purchase, the percentage would skyrocket. Even 39% of shoppers who prefer stores will investigate prices and brands online before buying.

3) Online Shopping Offers More Options

A large percentage of shoppers, 93% to be exact, actually prefer local business who offer online shopping. These buyers want to find something unique that’s not available anywhere else, but they still want the convenience of online buying. Others like to buy online and pick up at their local retailer.

4) Lower Labor and Tax Costs

Expanding your business could mean opening more retail spaces, which brings its own set of challenges and costs. Staff, rental, and inventory equals a lot of overhead. An online presence can help expand beyond your one location without the addition of staff or retail space. In addition, tax regulations are different for each state, so sales taxes and income taxes, while tricky, could add up to less than physical stores might incur. 

5) Easier to Compete

Marketing and SEO play a huge part in growing an online presence. Think about it: you already provide better products and services than the big guys. Why wouldn’t a buyer choose you over the local chain mega-mart? Right now, they won’t choose you because they can’t find you. If they could find you… Well, you’d have those buyers locked down. 

If you’re still on the fence, investigate the possibilities. There really is no better way to grow your small business into a true force of retail than opening an e-tail branch to serve your buyers’ needs.  

“I’m sick of this.” “I hate this.” “Not again.” “Can’t stand it!” “I’m gonna quit.”

If you’ve ever thought — or said — those things about writing, you’re not alone. I’ve experienced those thoughts. As someone who writes a lot, I get it.

After a while, you get sick and tired of writing. You just want to quit. Is it that notorious condition known as writer’s block? It could be, but in many cases it’s a little bit different.

There are a few things going on:

• You’re bored with what you’re writing about. Boredom kills affection.
• You’ve exhausted your creative energy. Creativity, like a muscle, has its limits. Push it too hard, and it caves in.
• You need something more challenging. Lack of challenge — goals, vision, perspective — leads to disillusionment.
• You need some fresh experiences. Fresh experiences will give you a fresh perspective.

It’s time to figure out how to get your brain back on task. How do you get past the drudgery and enjoy writing again? Let’s talk through a few tips.

5 Ways to Fall Back in Love With Writing

1) Take a long break.

If you’re feeling a little burnt out, it’s probably a good idea to put some time and space between you and your writing. Depending on how much time you have, this might mean a 20-minute break or even a few days off.

When you take a break from writing it gives you time to recharge mentally. And if you’re truly meant to be writing, it’s not going to be long before you’re chomping at the bit again. You’ll feel it. The need to start writing again will surface.

If you’re really at rock bottom, I recommend taking a break longer than one week. Try two weeks … or even longer.

“But, Neil, I need content for my blog!”

Of course. But do you need low-quality content for your blog?

If you can’t write, you can’t write. Why force it? It’s better to take a break and come back with some good stuff, than to fry your brain and produce awful stuff.

If you decide to take a break, but still need to produce content, here are some tips:

• Recruit a colleague to write the content instead.
• Use Textbroker or Upwork to find a qualified content writer. (For tips on working with freelancers, read this.)
• Stop … and see what happens.

2) Write for five minutes about your thoughts and emotions surrounding your lack of writing affection.

Weird. I’m telling you to combat your lack of affection for writing by writing about how you feel about not feeling affectionate towards writing.

Uh, why?

Here’s the point of this exercise. It jogs the mind, and breaks you out of a funk.

Some evidence, please?

In a study published by the Academy of Management Journal, researchers rounded up a study group comprised of people who were discouraged over their job loss. They divided subjects into three groups:

1. They told one group of people to write about whatever came to mind — the “thoughts and emotions surrounding their job loss.”
2. Another group wrote about “non-traumatic topics.”
3. A control group did not write at all.

The results? Read the abstract for yourself:

Those assigned to write about the thoughts and emotions surrounding their job loss were reemployed more quickly than those who wrote about non-traumatic topics or who did not write at all. Expressive writing appeared to influence individuals’ attitudes about their old jobs and about finding new employment rather than their motivation to seek employment.”

When you ignore the feelings of dissatisfaction with writing, you’re just compounding the problem. The solution isn’t to ignore it and keep on truckin’. The solution is to stop, reflect, and face the feelings.

Sure, getting sick of writing isn’t the same as losing your job. But if expressive writing helped people cope with a job loss, it’s likely that it will help you engage with writing again.

3) Change your writing environment.

Your writing environment — the thoughts, habits, preparation, and place in which you work — has a profound impact on how you write. If you make changes to your environment, it could spark changes in how you perceive and respond to the task of writing.

Nate Krueter, writing for Inside Higher Ed, explained it like this:

There is no ideal writing environment. The ideal is the set of circumstances that allows you to be productive. If you’re happy with your own productivity, both in terms of quantity and quality of writing, then perhaps your routines and environment ought not be monkeyed with. But if you’re dissatisfied with your writing patterns, perhaps a set of experiments is in order. Try working in a new environment, different in nature from where you typically work.”

He’s suggesting the same thing that I am: ”Try working in a new environment.”

When I run into a brick wall with my writing, I typically do something totally different with my writing environment — go outside with my laptop, go to a different room, write at a different time of day, whatever. Changes in environment can spark changes in your approach and attitude toward writing.

4) Read more interesting stuff.

What and how we read influences what and how we write. If you are sick and tired of writing, then what about reading? Again, the power of difference can be the catalyst.

If you’re used to reading material that only discusses your industry, try reading something from a different industry. Better yet, take a novel from off the shelf — something that you’ve been wanting to read for a while — and take some time to enjoy it.

You might be surprised by what happens:

• Your creativity skyrockets.
• You banish boring content.
• You’re fired up about writing.
• You begin to write with a passion.

5) Take intentional time out of your schedule to do nothing.

When you hate writing, your brain is stuck. It’s stuck on the negativity of writing. How do you break the logjam of negativity? By doing nothing. On purpose.

How does this work?

Neurologist Marcus Raichle conducted a study in which he analyzed MRI images of subjects completing various tasks. The study was innocuous enough in its hypotheses, but what Raichle discovered from the study was something he hadn’t expected: During times of activity, the brain’s salience network and central-executive network were hard at work — processing input, and exerting problem-solving skills.

That’s not a bad thing, but because the activity was so intense, it crowded out what Raichle called the default mode network.

Image Credit: Jeremey Duvall

The default work mode is a discrete brain system that is responsible for self-reflection and self-thought. The crazy thing is, the brain can only operate this way when you’re doing nothing. In Raichle’s study, the subjects were in “quiet repose either with eyes closed or with simple visual fixation.”

In other words, only by mental relaxation could the subjects prompt their brains to involuntarily process the thoughts, feelings, emotions, self-understanding, and presence that help to unlock creativity and greater insight.

What’s the takeaway? Give your brain a break. Chill. Walk. Sit. Do nothing. Visualize. Meditate. Take a nap. Whatever you do, give your brain a chance to return to its “default mode network,” and you’ll discover a refreshing state of creativity that you didn’t realize you had.

Feeling the love?

You don’t have to love writing in order to be good at it … but it sure does help.

When you enjoy your writing, you tend to do it so much better. Readers can tell if the author enjoys her topic. Your writing is clearer, livelier, and way more interesting.

But falling in love with writing is a tricky thing. You can’t force love — especially love for something as inanimate and conceptual as writing. However, you can change a few things in your mindset, your habits, your environment, and your activities to spark a change.

Who knows, you might come back with a passion for writing that makes your content even better than before.

Have you ever experienced a total loss of interest in writing? What did you do about it?

In small doses, stress can actually be an important part of our lives. It can motivate us and make us more productive. And, once it’s over, we might come out of that stressful situation all the better for it.

Too much stress, though, can be detrimental to your health, happiness, productivity, and relationships.

So what’s that healthy balance between being too stressed, and being not stressed enough? Is your current stress level manageable and healthy?

To help you figure out where you are on the stress scale (and what you can do about it), the folks over at Pound Place created the flowchart below. Start with the question at the top, and then follow the arrows to work your way to the bottom, where you’ll find out whether your stress is at a manageable level. 

So … how stressed are you? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.

“Learn by doing.” It’s a theory of productivity we’re taught at a very young age, from the moment our parents make us sit down and practice the piano. Because practice makes perfect, right?

Years later, the lesson doesn’t change. We’re taught time and time again that productivity equals practice, output, and action.

That’s why, in our working lives, we’re often focused on activity. What can we do right now that’ll cross something off the list? It can be easier for us to feel like we’re making progress and being productive when we have completed actions to show for it, no matter how menial those actions are. Checking the boxes just feels so good.

That, my friends, is called “completion bias” — and it may be preventing you from tackling your most important tasks and projects.

What is Completion Bias?

You know that feeling of pleasure you get when you cross something off your to-do list? For many of us, that’s a feeling we seek out multiple times a day. I’d been lying if I said I didn’t add tasks to my to-do list after I’d already completed them just so I could check them off.

Unfortunately, that pleasure can get us into trouble when it comes to productivity.

Enter completion bias: our natural tendency to focus too much on tasks that are easy to complete because completing things is psychologically rewarding. Why is this so bad? Because often, we focus on those easier tasks at the expense of the tasks that are more important.

“Completing simple tasks, such as answering emails or posting updates on your Twitter account, takes little time and allows you to check off items on your to-do list,” wrote Francisco Gino, a Harvard Business School professor who’s been studying completion bias and its affects on productivity at work with Bradley Staats of the UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.

The reason we lean toward those easier tasks is (at least in part) thanks to our natural bias for action. Completing a task is an easy way to show progress, whether it’s to your boss, to your coworkers, or to yourself.

But in many circumstances, that can really backfire.

When Completion Bias Fails Us

In Gino and Staats’ unpublished research, they looked at the completion bias of physicians in the emergency department (ED) of a busy hospital, where patients arrive without appointments.

“Using data from about 43,000 distinct patient encounters, we found that physicians exhibit a bias toward completing easy tasks when confronted with an increased workload due to an increase in the number of arriving patients,” wrote Gino. In an ED setting, “easy tasks” refer to treating patients who are less sick.

At first, this might seem like a pretty solid strategy. By focusing on these less-sick patients, a doctor is “more productive” because these patients don’t stay in the ED as long. But, according to Gino and Staats, there are at least two problems with this approach:

1. Patients with more severe conditions wait longer.
2. With each “less sick” patient a doctor treats, that doctor slows down — so there’s a chance she’ll get tired and less effective on the job before she begins seeing those patients with more severe conditions.

How does this relate to an office setting? Think about the last time you were faced with a to-do list and decided to chip away at the smaller tasks first. For example, maybe you chose to spend the first two hours of your morning responding to mundane emails and ended up waiting until late morning to start on your most important to-do list item of the day.

By the time you start working on that important item, you’ve already expended precious energy and willpower, which some studies show is a limited resource that depletes throughout the day. In other words, you shouldn’t always let the size of a task inform your prioritization strategy. Instead, try focusing on pertinence first. 

A study by Dr. John Bargh, an award-winning psychology researcher, showed that this is more likely to happen before we start working on a big project. In an attempt to simulate real, productive work, our brains tend to focus on small, mindless tasks.

So if you’ve ever thought the night before a big presentation was the best time to clean your room, respond to your friend’s son’s girlfriend’s career question email, and tackle the pilot of 24, well … that’s why.

In theory, it should be easy to fight the urge to tackle those smaller tasks. Just recognize which tasks are the most important, and prioritize them, already! But we all know that’s easier said than done.

How to Plan & Triage

Planning and triaging is one effective way to tackle our natural tendency for instant gratification. The key is creating a to-do list, and then spending some time thinking about that to-do list. Go through each item on your list and rank them based on impact and effort. Then, rewrite your to-do list in order of importance.

The last part of this exercise is the most important one: Select one, single item as the absolute most important thing you need to get done that day. That’s going to be the item you want to start working on as soon as possible in the day.

If you feel your natural completion bias surfacing — or if you feel like you’re just plain procrastinating — catch yourself. The more self-aware you are, the more important items you’ll get done. If time-sensitive tasks surface that need to take priority over that one single item you selected, do your best to get them done as quickly as possible. Then, refocus your attention back to the task at hand. 

If your “most important item” is so complex that it’ll take more than that day to complete, try splitting that item into manageable chunks. 

HubSpot Co-Founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah said he likes to “‘deconstruct’ the large problem at hand into smaller, bite-sized chunks. Each of the individual, smaller things seem surmountable on their own, and it calms [him] to know that if [he] conquered all of those small things, [he’s] essentially conquered the big thing.”

Then, it’s time to take a deep breath, hunker down, and just get started. Sometimes, the biggest hurdle to being productive is simply doing it.

What other tips do you have for overcoming completion bias? Share with us in the comments.