How to Stop Procrastinating During Your Fundraise

This week's tip: how to stop procrastinating on the work needed for your fundraise.

As a founder, it can be challenging to stay productive and motivated when raising funds. Procrastination on your preparation work is a major obstacle to successful fundraising, and it's the primary reason why founders fail to secure funding. However, with the right mindset and strategies, you can overcome this obstacle.

By following these tips, you can transform your workdays from frustrating and unproductive to fulfilling and productive. And not to mention making sure you do the necessary work needed to succeed.

Here’s 6 practical tips to beat your procrastination:

1. Set SMART Goals

The best way to begin attacking procrastination is by setting SMART goals. If you’re not familiar with SMART goals, here’s what they are:

• Specific: What, specifically, do I want to accomplish?
• Measurable: Quantify what success looks like.
• Achievable: Is this reasonable?
• Relevant: Why am I setting this goal?
• Time-bound: What's my time horizon to finish?

You should be setting SMART goals for every single part of your fundraise. From adding 100+ investors to your CRM, mapping your network, prioritising investors, creating your narrative to confirming your fundraising process.

2. Create A Schedule

One of the biggest things I see founders fail on when procrastinating is you deciding you will just do the work you need to successfully fundraising whenver you can.

Unfortunately it never works like that as a start-up founder. You will be pulled in so many ways that if you don't schedule your work in advance, you will always push your fundraising prep to the back. Then suddenly you'll need money ASAP without having done the necessary prep before hand like building an investor network.

So once you have broken down your goals, create a schedule to start executing the necessary tasks to achieve those goals.

If you are committed to fundraising, schedule your tasks during your most productive times. Create a recurring invitation and include links to the tools you will use during that block. Aim for 2-3 hours of "deep work" and use time management techniques from tip #5 below.

It's also important to discuss with your colleagues how to run the business during your fundraise. As you approach the launch of your fundraise, make sure your colleagues are aware that you will need to devote more time to potential investors.

By creating schedules in advance, you can ensure that you have these conversations and that everyone knows what they need to do at all times.

3. Break Down Goals Into Small Tasks

Let's be honest: big goals can be overwhelming, but breaking them down into smaller tasks makes them much easier to handle.

For example, trying to establish over 100 warm connections with investors might seem daunting to some. That's a lot of people to research and confirm, and I've seen founders avoid this important step simply because they get scared by the end goal.

However, if you can find 20 connections to investors per week, you'll reach your goal in just over a month. That's only three connections per day. By giving yourself enough time to prepare and breaking down your goals into smaller tasks, the task seems a lot less daunting.

Breaking down your goals into smaller tasks also allows you to be more tactical. Using the same example, rather than trying to reach out to 100+ investors where you barely have warm connections, focus on reaching out to three investors per day for a month. This allows you to spend more time making sure that every investor you add to your CRM makes sense.

4. Eliminate Distractions

When it's time for deep work, it's important to stay uninterrupted. Here's what has helped me:

• Put your phone and computer on Do Not Disturb mode.
• Get rid of all push notifications.
• Close all social media tabs.
• Shut the door to your office, put on headphones, and listen to lo-fi beats or white noise.

This is your time to focus - the life or death of your company is defined by if you are distracted or not. So you can’t have distractions.

5. Use Time-Management Techniques

Eliminating procrastination requires setting goals and creating the right environment. However, eventually, you must do the work.

Personally, I love using the Pomodoro technique. While it may not allow for deep work, it can be an effective way to manage time. I use it every time I write this newsletter.

To use the technique, set your Pomodoro timer for 25 minutes of task completion, followed by a 5-minute break. Complete 6 rounds of this cycle to accumulate almost 3 hours of work.

I find this the easiest way for me to do the necessary work without it feeling daunting.

6. Get Organised

While this may not be relevant for everyone, having a clean and tidy workspace can make it easier to get work done. To achieve this, keep your desk clean and minimal, without unnecessary piles of junk, snacks, or messy papers.

Try to have only the necessary tools and your computer at your workspace.

I personally find that my mind is cluttered when my desk is also cluttered.

One Last Takeaway

As you complete your tasks, you move closer to your goals.

As you reach your goals, you become even more rigid in how you spend your time.

When you become rigid about how you spend your time, you stop procrastinating.

Congrats.

You've done it.