While fuckarounditis has been a well-known disease in the fitness industry for a long time, there is no doubt it bleeds into every other creative or entrepreneurial endeavor as well.

For years (and still on and off to this day), I break out with fuckarounditis.

Fuckarounditis is a behavioral disorder characterized by a mediocre physique and complete lack of progress, despite significant amounts of time spent in the gym.

Sound familiar?

For years, I thought I was making progress because my to-do list was 927490274 things long and I was checking them off one at a time.

Look at me, ma! I’m so stressed! This must be the #hustle.

Spoilers: this is not the hustle.

(Also - ulcers are the worst. You can’t drink - well shouldn’t drink - coffee when one is healing. 0/10 would recommend.)

I’d guess 90% of the tasks I did for years had no bearing on moving the needle. For years.

A large source of the problem comes from:

1. Not having any idea what to do next (“I need to just keep reading blogs. I’ll figure it out.” - If you say “figure it out” to yourself, you have a case of fuckarounditis.)

2. Not taking a systematic approach to figuring out if we’re doing the right things (Instead we just keep doing the same things over and over, even with no results)

3. Doing the big thing is scary and hard

4. Most of us are all such neurotic stressed-out messes that we want even an ounce of fun, so we fuck around instead of putting our head down and getting to work because we’re simply tired.

Half of the time, we’re all focusing on the wrong damn thing. People e-mail me often with questions like, “What do I do once I have 20 clients at once?” “Well, how many do you have now?” “None.”

WHY are you stressing yourself out over something that isn’t a problem for you yet? (I’d also like to print out that question, go back in time to 24-year-old me, and slap her hard with it, too.)

For most of us in the freelance world, what we need to be doing is getting clients.

Making a twitter profile is not getting a client.
Making a website is not getting a client.
Worrying about paying taxes as a freelancer on money you’re not even making is not getting a client.
Scrolling through social media is not getting clients. (Yes, you can get clients from social media but there are about a thousand better ways to get clients. I worked in social media for years and can confirm it’s excellent for branding but not the best for client generation.)

Or maybe you’re staying with a client who treats you horribly when there are a million other great clients out there… Whatever it is, it’s not too late and you can fix this.

There are only two things that matter the most:

1. Working on your craft.

2. Getting paid to do your craft.

Anything that falls outside of that bubble is leaning you toward fuckarounditis.

The only cure?

DO THE WORK YOU’RE AVOIDING. Even for two minutes.

Take a list at your to-do list today. How many of those tasks are actually going to move the needle forward on what you want? How many of them will get you closer to your goal one step tomorrow?

One glaring way to know if you’re impacted by fuckarounditis is to look at the past year of your life. If you accomplished the big things you set out to get done, congrats! You are managing it well and don’t need to seek help.

However, if last year you finally organized your garage but you didn’t write the book you have been dying to write: you have a heavy case of fuckarounditis.

“Oh what? I’m supposed to just never clean again and only work on my dreams? Yeah okay, that’s not realistic I have 10 kids.”

At no point am I saying ignore responsibility. We all have things we have to do that keep our lives going.

What I AM saying is that when you have those even 5 minutes to work on what matters, do the hard thing first. Stop messing around when it’s time to work.

During last year, I’ve wanted to pick up woodburning as a hobby. The amount of time I spent Googling how to do it and cool designs instead of just PICKING ONE AND DOING IT is, honestly, embarrassing. That is fuckarounditis in its true form. If there’s something you want but you’re not doing the concrete steps to get the thing, you need to reevaluate how you spend your time.

Do the hard thing. Do the thing makes you sweat a bit. The things that you’ll probably be horrible at the first few times but need to keep pushing through.

Because those things?

That’s where you’ll finally make it happen.