Guest post by by Cass Mullane, Accountability Coach, Right-Brain Business Plan® Licensed Facilitator, Prosper Creatively, LLC

BZZZZZ! BZZZZZ! BZZZZZ! BZZZZZ!

How many of you wake up in the morning to an alarm buzzing in your ear? Do of you automatically hit the snooze button to sleep just a couple minutes more? Do you hit it more than once?

There’s nothing wrong with a little extra sleep, but the reality is that hitting snooze does not really gain anything because you’re not getting restful, restorative sleep, you’re just crashing and then being jarred over and over. Plus, you’re wasting 10, 20, 30 minutes each day that you could be using to finish the things that are keeping you from getting your beauty rest.

So ask yourself these three questions:
1. What’s keeping you from getting enough sleep?
2. What will happen if you just get up?
3. What changes will you make to stop hitting snooze?

The same holds true for your business. When you delay a task or delay making a decision, you may get a few minutes of not worrying about it, but the fact is your tasks just keep piling up and your decisions keep being left unmade and you’ve suddenly got a mountain staring you down.

So here’s an example of a task people hit snooze on a lot: updating your website. (Just to be transparent, updating my website has been on my To Do list for quite a long time and I’ve hit snooze on it more than once.) You know that the longer you wait, the more work you have to do because more changes occur that need to be reflected on your site.

Since there’s no question that having an up to date site is critical to your business success, ask yourself these three questions:

1. What’s keeping you from getting your update done?
2. What will you gain by updating your website?
3. What changes will you make to stop hitting snooze?

The list of reasons you haven’t gotten your site updated is probably pretty long. You know what your excuses are so it’s easy to say why it isn’t getting done. But let’s look at the other side and see what you may gain by making time to get it done.

Obviously, one of the tangible things you’ll gain from updating your website is you’ll have a reliable place for your clients and customers (and future clients and customers) to go for current information.Your products and services will be clearly laid out and many questions will be answered effectively on the site. You’ll have your offers and you have a place to make purchases as well as contact info for more info. And that translates into increased sales opportunities.

A less tangible and quite significant gain is you’ll find your stress is reduced simply because you know your site is up to date. Another gain is focus. You’ll be able to focus your energies on other revenue generating activities because you’ve minimized the distraction of updating the website.

So what changes are you going to make to stop hitting snooze? Whatever it is, you have to make getting it done a top priority or you’ll just stay in the spin cycle and your site just gather dust and become useless. Maybe you’ll finally decide to hire someone to help you get the work done. Maybe you’ll ask for help from someone who knows what they’re doing.Maybe you’ll just take a weekend and knock it out yourself. You decide, just make sure that you make a wise choice.

Since I have a business to run just like you, and I like to walk my talk, I’m giving myself a challenge to update my website within the next 30 days. This means you are all invited to be my accountability partners and you are allowed to ping me if I do not get an update completed.

All I ask is that you do something right along with me:

1. Pick a task that you’ve been hitting snooze on and make a commitment to get it done within 30 days
2. Post that commitment here in the comments so you’ll have accountability
3. Report your progress

Let’s get to work on this together and stop hitting snooze!

Cass Mullane is an artist with an MBA. Cass’ calm, comfortable approach consistently yields positive results for clients. Her business and personal coaching practice, www.ProsperCreatively.com, specializes in delivering solid left brain business skills to right brainers and creatives in a fun, visual way. She’s a best selling author, textile and mixed media artist and creator of the Cool Stuff Jar™ coaching program. You can also visit Cass on Facebook!