When you notice yourself progressing toward your goals too rapidly, use these helpful tips to successfully throw off your entire day.

Distraction Tip #1: Work some more on your website. Cause that’s for sure why you haven’t gotten enough sales lately.

I love this one. Whenever I’m about to do a favor for someone who has my ideal audience’s attention, I immediately go work on my logo or some weird page of my site that I never seem to finish. Nothing’s worse than getting myself or my business in front of a huge targeted audience and winning the attention game!

Distraction Tip #2: Check Facebook to see if there are any new pics of friends’ latest dining experience.

You could be networking, sure. Or you could check for the 5th time today to see if there are any new pics of goats wearing pajamas.

Bonus Tip 2.1: Watch a video about working from home. (Note – I don’t think they’re literally talking about working from home.)

Distraction Tip #3:  Read about doing things instead of actually doing things.

There simply has to be something you missed in that last course on how to get a lot of traffic from Pinterest. Go back and check again. They’ll tell you to take action on what you learn, but don’t let that distract you. Who has time for action when you can just read about getting traffic instead?

Distraction Tip #4: Make a new plan.

Nothing’s worse than a plan for success that’s more than a week old. The best way to distract yourself from accomplishing your biggest goal for your business is to rehash that tired old plan from last week! Bonus points for doing nothing more than re-ordering your to-do list from yesterday.

Distraction Tip #5: Start another project.

Tell yourself it’s really related to your current project. This works for me 100% of the time. Whenever I’m about to do something that really moves the ball down the field in my business, I like to switch gears and ramp up something else from scratch. Really gets the juices (not) flowing.

Distraction Tip #6: Pick up that book you never finished.

It might actually help your business to take a break, get some herbal tea brewing, and get away from it all with that novel that’s been nagging you. If you tell yourself “it might help my business” before you do anything completely unrelated to accomplishing something, it’s much easier to do it without feeling the least bit guilty.

Distraction Tip #7: Find something to edit that doesn’t need editing.

You know that nearly perfect blog post you’ve been working on? The one you simply will not publish until it’s Pulitzer-ready? It’s your favorite distraction friend. Like a pair of old, warm slippers, you can always count on your eternal Blog Opus to suck away some daylight and avoid getting anything else done.

Bonus Tip 7.1: Create a mind map of a process in your business that has absolutely no use for a mind map.

This is especially useful for processes and visualizations of things with few or no moving parts.

Distraction Tip #8: Check Facebook again. I think Earl’s dog should have had her puppies by now.

Because it’s been 5 minutes and the world is just passing you by!

Distraction Tip #9: Call that person who never returns your calls, again.

Nothing makes you feel better about networking and getting some leverage done than calling that person who has made it their personal mission in life to avoid you. Knowing they aren’t going to answer this time either gets you out of actually talking to someone while giving you the feeling that you’ve tried to do some networking today.

Distraction Tip #10: Create a list of 10 reasons it would be better to start tomorrow.

Seriously, this actually might help you out. Write down 10 things that you think justify waiting to do anything meaningful to grow your business today. The act itself will highlight the absurd game we play with ourselves to avoid getting what we know we should be doing, done.

If you love these tips and want to learn more about how to stall for time, hiccup at the finish line, or just need an excuse to read some tips, let me know in the comments below!