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Join for freePosted: Thu 22nd Oct 2026
You know what you need to do. So why aren't you doing it?
In this practical Lunch and Learn, business coach Mark Elliott explores what might really be happening when an important decision, task or change keeps getting pushed down the list.
Learn how to recognise the patterns behind your procrastination, understand when a useful strength has started working against you, and find practical ways to move forward without waiting until you feel completely ready.
Why successful business owners procrastinate
How to recognise what’s really keeping you stuck
How to move from procrastination into action
Mark helps solo business owners overcome the challenges of starting a business.
With more than 15 years of experience, he uses tools such as the Lean Canvas, Customer Factory, and RAISE goals to turn learning into action that sticks.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Beth Galloway: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Beth, and I'll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for startups and small businesses.
I'm very pleased to introduce Mark Elliott, who is a business coach. In this session, Mark will explore what might really be happening when an important decision, task or change keeps getting pushed down the list. If you have any questions, please post them in the chat or the Q&A box, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session.
As always, this session is being recorded, so you'll receive the recording, along with a few follow-up resources, in an email later today. Over to you, Mark.
Mark Elliott: Thank you, Beth, and hello, everybody. I'm part of the vibrant community, so hopefully I can keep fairly steady during this Lunch and Learn. Why do you procrastinate? I don't know – why do you?
Before I get on to that, let me introduce myself. I'm a coach who works with business founders, and I've been doing this for 15 years or so. I run several programmes, including a national programme for the over-50s about starting their own business. For people who start a business in their fifties, procrastination is sometimes one of the key reasons they have left it so late.
I'd like you to think of one example from your own life of procrastinating or not getting on with a decision and action. Perhaps put it in the chat, but keep it in mind as we go through some of the reasons why you might be in this position, and some of the tools and tactics to get you out of it.
There is no judgement about procrastination here. For those of you who follow me on LinkedIn, I haven't been publicising this talk for some time because, yes, I procrastinated about writing the posts and recording the videos. So I do it too.
Before we hold ourselves to account, I wonder what you have been doing instead of the thing you're procrastinating about. Some of those things are actually quite important for your business. That doesn't let you off the hook, but it is an acknowledgement that what you do when you're busy may also matter, and that what you're holding off from may grow in urgency and importance.
You might well be doing something useful, and some of the strengths that have brought you to this point in life may be the very things holding you back from the next stage. That sounds grand, but some of your qualities as an individual may be playing into your inability to make the decision or take the action. High standards are an example: if quality is super important to you, you might tell yourself that it's not ready yet, or not perfect. That can stop you from taking action that would let you learn how to improve a new product or service.
Or you may hold yourself in high esteem because, like me, you've done lots of things and know lots of things. You set an expectation that you should already know this, but in life, knowing doesn't mean you can action it. You can end up caught in a loop of examining how well you know the background to a decision or activity you've never done before.
Then there is responsibility. If you take responsibility and have a history of doing everything in your own business, you may tell yourself you can do it better yourself. That keeps you busy and keeps you from delegating, letting other people do things, or explaining your standards.
The strength of being dependable, of doing what you say, may also hold you back. What you've promised may not be possible for you to do on your own in the time you've allowed. Does any of this sound familiar? Do any of your great strengths create the environment for not moving forward?
I can see a useful reframe in the chat: think about your business almost in the third person, and ask what your business needs from you right now. Perhaps it needs you to delegate more, or to move faster. Perhaps it needs you to experiment, or to make room for other things by letting some go.
I always like to use the word play, so perhaps experimentation and play is what you need, even if you're not an experimental or playful person like myself. So what does your business need from you at this moment, when you're looking at procrastination? And the other side of that conversation is what you need from your business.
If there's a particular decision you're finding difficult, perhaps it's part of how you see yourself. You might consider yourself a procrastinator, and see that as a difficulty. So what story are you telling yourself about why this is difficult? Do any of these strike a chord? I say "ring a bell" a lot because I'm deaf – that's my phrase.
If they do, it's likely that the core of your particular style of procrastination is fear, or a near-equivalent emotion of almost equal intensity. A really common cause is fear of what's on the other side of what we're holding back from. You might fear losing control, because we often think the other side of being in control is total loss of control, rather than a variation in the control we're used to or hope for.
It must be said that procrastination isn't always purely emotional. Sometimes there is a practical obstacle, either in the way we support ourselves through life or in our capacity at this moment in the growth of our business. For those of us who are neurospicy, as I am, there may be purely physical elements of movement, or issues with time management. So what actually makes this decision or action difficult for us?
Here is a tool I use with clients quite often. If you find yourself procrastinating, there are three simple steps. First, notice that you're putting something off and, if you can, notice what happened immediately before. Like a horse approaching a fence, there is often something particular about the way you come up to something you're procrastinating about.
Second, put your feet on the floor if you can, or place your hands on a support. Be grounded and breathe, bringing your focus back to yourself and away from the fear and emotion that is stopping you from moving forward. Third, choose what you do next: what would be useful to do now? Often that's the first step of what you're procrastinating about, and sometimes it might be a cup of tea.
The point of "notice, pause, choose" is that you deliberately decide either to continue procrastinating or to take the first next action. I'm not saying you will burn through the fear every time, or that it will be perfect or comfortable. But it is an opportunity to act differently from how you otherwise would, and that action can take you past your procrastination.
Let me give you a couple of examples from clients. Lisa was procrastinating about choosing and implementing a CRM, and every time she came up to it she had a different reason why she couldn't. When we talked about what was causing it, we uncovered that she was actually afraid of not having a customer pipeline, or a sales process she was comfortable with.
Recognising what her fear was really about freed up her thinking. She was an events person, so she began having fun with potential clients and creating beautiful mini corporate events. Her pipeline was small, and all she needed at first was a spreadsheet rather than a formal CRM. Designing a sales process she was happy with allowed her to choose a CRM and find more people to sell to.
Another client, Adrian, was holding back on recruiting, despite being super busy. His company had lots of revenue coming in, but a great deal of work, which brought an incredible amount of stress. Despite plenty of experience of hiring, he had niggling doubts about finding the right person. That's really common in small businesses, because any hire is a significant percentage of your business, and first hires are always different.
Because the decision wasn't taken immediately, it became more and more important. It became the focal point for the growth of revenue, the growth of profitability and all the variability small businesses live with in the early years. The fear on the other side grew greater because everything was focused on it.
Recognising that the next hire wouldn't solve every problem broke the back of it. Having made the decision and drawn up a plan for the hire, supported by my friend Claude, he was able to take the first steps and see how the team could pull together to make it a good hire. Recognising the fear, then breaking it down into a simple next step that takes you over the fear barrier, liberated his thinking and his anxiety.
So what would help you move forward? If your procrastination is about quality and standards, and it's not ready yet, ask what "ready" actually means. If you need to stay in control, agree on your red lines and boundaries, and when you will review items rather than being constantly vigilant.
If your fear is to do with communication, practise it a few times first. Write the email and send it to friendly contacts, or practise the introduction, or the talk, as I did for this one. If you think you need to be certain, examine what "certain" really means, and identify what risk you can actually absorb within your business.
Think of one small reaction, different from usual, when you come up to the pause with your procrastination. That will help you find the one next step that breaks the pattern. So what I'd like you to do now is remember what you chose as your procrastination piece. What are you actually putting off? Write it in the chat or in your notebook.
Then ask what makes it difficult: perhaps the fear of failure, the effect on revenue or the fear for your reputation. Next, decide on your next useful action. Perhaps that is defining what quality means for you, or what "good enough" is. Finally, decide by when you will take that first action.
I've been recognising some of the comments coming through on the chat. Updating your website – oh my goodness. I waited 10 years to update my own, and I've written an article about that journey on my website, so have a look. The key is understanding what the task is and the stages involved.
Similarly, there's a comment about creating a course because it will be final. That's the fear of finality, so it might help to ask what's on the other side of this fear. So there are four things: what you've been putting off, what makes it difficult, your next useful action, and when you will take it. Choose an action that will genuinely take you forward.
It sounds glib, and I recognise it's not that simple. But if you'd like to talk through what you're going through, or write it down, follow the QR code here and we can start a conversation about breaking through your particular procrastination. Anyway, Beth.
Beth: Brilliant, thanks, Mark. That's absolutely right, isn't it? It's about thinking about what the actual cause is, and it's rarely that simple. So how can we recognise when procrastination is holding us back, rather than us simply being busy or prioritising other things on our to-do list?
Mark: If you're busy and getting things done, then you're not procrastinating. Not everybody procrastinates – some of us are just busy. However, if there are important or urgent things on your list that you recognise at the end of the day, which have been there all day, and it's not the first time that has happened, there is probably some procrastination about that item.
If you're super busy and there are things you carry from day to day and week to week, those are probably the items you're procrastinating about. I use Post-its for my to-do list, and if I haven't crossed one off by the end of the day, it may be that I haven't found or prioritised the time to deal with it. Carrying things forward is a symptom of procrastination.
Beth: We've had a question in the Q&A about how you break down your to-do list into next steps. Do you have any tips for that?
Mark: Yes. One key tool is the Eisenhower matrix. Classify the things on your list by whether they are urgent and whether they are important, and prioritise those that are both. Then do the urgent things, then the important ones, leaving the non-urgent, non-important things until the end.
Once you've prioritised, understand whether each item will take a day or many weeks, and break it into smaller elements. Mind map it, or plan it however you plan projects, and schedule the pieces into your diary where you have control over your workflow. Build an active work unit of perhaps two hours. Many of my clients use days with three two-hour slots for clear, focused work, and put some of their urgent and important work in those slots. Don't expect to finish everything every time.
Beth: Sorry, Mark, I know we're out of time, but the same person then asked: how would you not feel overwhelmed by it?
Mark: One element of tackling overwhelm is to acknowledge that you have a lot to do. It's true, and accepting it can be useful. A technique I use to bring myself back from overwhelm is to mind map: write down everything on your mind in bullet form on a sheet of A4 to get it out of your head, then create some order. That might help you prioritise and cluster similar pieces of work.
I see there's a comment about finances, and many of my clients used to start by putting all their invoices into a shoebox, until it became a tea chest full of undone tasks. That can feel overwhelming, so the first step may be building a process for handling invoices more effectively. Or it might be being gentle with yourself, saying you're not going to complete this task this week, forgiving yourself already and lowering your expectations.
Some overwhelm also comes from setting yourself too many important things in any one day. For everybody, it is more motivating to complete everything on your to-do list than to have a list that is never finished. If it is never finished, you punish yourself for what's undone and never reward yourself for what you've finished.
One of the tricks with procrastination is to limit your expectation that you can solve the problem all in one day, or one session. Forgive yourself for not having been able to.
Beth: That's great, and so true. With a never-ending to-do list, you never take the time to reward yourself for what you have done, and there are always those outlying tasks. Thank you, Mark – it was a really great session, and I hope everyone has a productive rest of the week.
Please do feel free to reach out to Mark, whose Enterprise Nation profile and LinkedIn are in the chat. As I mentioned, we'll send the recording later today. Everyone is saying thank you, Mark, in the chat.
Mark: One more thing: I'm a solo entrepreneur too, and I would love your feedback on how you received this information. Please go to the feedback form, which is also where you can start a conversation about how to break the back of your procrastination. Thank you very much, Beth, and thank you, everybody, for being here. Bye, everyone.
Beth: See you.
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