There’s a pattern I’ve noticed. In my own life, and in almost every conversation I have with people running small businesses.
You have a thing you know you should do. You think about doing it. You tell yourself you’ll get to it when things calm down. Things don’t calm down. The thing stays exactly where it is. Repeat for months. Sometimes years.
My website was a prime example of this. Over ten years in the making, as I mentioned last month. (Ten years. For a blog…)
But there are others. And I’ve been thinking about why some of them finally get done and why others just… sit there.
Not everything in the pending pile is equal, I’ve decided. Some things are in there because they’re genuinely low priority and they can wait. Others are in there because they feel big and shapeless, where starting feels like committing to something you can’t quite see the end of.
Websites fall firmly into that second category. So does properly building out a reporting dashboard, or writing down how your business actually works (as opposed to how you’d like it to work), or having a conversation you’ve been putting off because it’s a bit awkward and there’s never quite the right moment.
None of these have a clean finish line. They require a version of you that’s slightly more organised and patient than the version that’s currently two hours into someone else’s urgent problem.
What I’ve noticed about the things I finally get done is that a few things tend to be true. The scope got smaller, I stopped trying to build the perfect thing and started trying to build a thing that worked. (My website is a free WordPress theme. It has exactly what it needs. It is very much not the elaborate custom-built site I spent years planning in my head.) The tooling got better, the honest reason I finally launched is that it’s now easy enough that there’s genuinely no excuse. Same goes for a lot of things in my work. The combination of better platforms, a bit of scripting knowledge, and yes, AI, has made things that used to eat a whole afternoon quite manageable. And I stopped waiting for the right moment, because there isn’t one. It’s usually just a random Tuesday.
Running my solo consultancy, I see this play out with clients constantly. People who’ve been meaning to get properly set up on Amazon for years. Campaigns that haven’t changed structure since 2022 because nobody had the bandwidth to rebuild them. Reporting that technically exists but isn’t really being used to make any decisions.
It’s never laziness. It’s always the same gap between knowing something matters and having the headspace, clarity and tools to actually do it. A lot of what I do is help close that gap. Less about managing the day-to-day, more about making it easier for people to see what’s working and act on it without it taking over their week.
Probably worth a proper post on that at some point. For now: the pending pile is real, everyone suffers from it and the way out of it is almost always simpler than you’ve convinced yourself it is. As theys say, eat the frog!
On a completely different note, Milo has been insisting on longer walks now the evenings are getting lighter, which I have absolutely no complaints about. Early spring with a dog is quietly one of the better things in life.
Also been putting a lot of time into automating the repetitive bits of my work. Dashboards, scheduled reports, things that just run. One of those areas where an hour of setup pays for itself over and over. Deeply satisfying when it clicks into place.
More on that soon.
David Bradley 
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