We’re all sick of it. Despite this, I still tend to rant about productivity. It’s not just because I’ve wrestled with the beast.

I rant because entrepreneurs are ignoring productivity, at their peril. And I don’t mean they’re ignoring information about it, I mean that they’re ignoring looking at their own productivity levels.

Everyone is happy to read an article with the latest three steps to fix your procrastination problem. When was the last time you really looked at your own effectiveness though?

Entrepreneurs are in denial.

Sometimes procrastination is obvious. You can see and feel the direct effects of failing to follow-up with that hot prospect. You don’t get the sale and your bank balance suffers as a result.

But it’s not always that obvious. As a business owner, procrastination is most lethal when it’s invisible. How does one measure the impact of launching a new product six months later than anticipated? It’s so very easy to construct a mental fiction that justifies enormous delays to your best laid plans. That fiction helps you forget what might have been.

Procrastination doesn’t bankrupt your business overnight. It slows progress to a crawl, robbing you of a more precious asset than even cash… time.

Killing procrastination is more important than ever before. The world’s economies are dicey at best and there is uncertainty on almost every front. We need entrepreneurs to succeed. Short term, because entrepreneurs create jobs. Long term, those same entrepreneurs might just solve some big big problems.

Entrepreneurs could be heroes, helping us avert global catastrophes. If only they’d conquer the brutal complacency that allows procrastination to flourish.

Announcing “War on Procrastination Week”

In true entrepreneurial fashion, I’m not just working on my own productivity. I’m working on a scalable solution to help all business owners pull the trigger on procrastination.

And this week, I’m announcing the War on Procrastination. I’ll be publishing a procrastination crushing post to the blog, daily.

This is an announcement post and also a call to action: It’s time to start look at what you’re really getting done.

The first step, the one that all the productivity guides avoid mentioning, is to get really honest with yourself. The first step is to get out of denial.

I don’t mean denial in the sense that a part of you knows you’re being damn useless. That’s probably not the case. I mean denial to even consider the issue, to even know how much you really got done last week.

Do you really know how many hours you spent in your focus-zone last week? 

Do you know how many hours you spent mindlessly procrastinating, only to tell yourself you “worked so hard”? 

Are the answers to those questions uncomfortable? That’s the denial I’m talking about and ending it is as easy as admitting it. Once you get clear on what is really getting done (and what isn’t), we can start solving the problem.

Let’s begin the War on Procrastination by getting real about it. Until then, not one productivity tip will make a difference to your bottom-line.

Up ahead, we’ve got reviews of productivity software, daily mind-hacking rituals and an expose on the psychological building blocks of effectiveness. It’s all coming at you thick and fast this week!

Meanwhile, we’re cooking up enormous things over at Commit Action. This week marks the launch of a couple of (huge!) new features to the service and, as we move from Beta to Alpha, we’re launching new priced packages.

I’ll be announcing more on this later, but here’s a hint: Users who sign up for Commit Action before friday will be grandfathered in for life at the old “latte-per-day” price!

Will you join the War on Procrastination this week? Leave a comment detailing the three significant actions you’re going to commit to accomplishing in the next seven days.

Let’s get some momentum going!