Printable Work Excuse Form: Fill & Download for Free

Put it this way: Without discipline, your goals will be forever out of reach.And let’s be honest. Self-discipline is hard. Taking action on goals is hard. But coming up with excuses is much easier.We humans are great at making excuses for not taking action. It’s too early to go to the gym. It’s too late to start studying for the exam. It’s impossible to complete a project because the boss set an unrealistic deadline. It’s too hard to eat healthy because there’s no time to buy groceries or cook our meals.Is it possible to get out of this not-taking-action loop?Yes. You can train your brain to remove the excuses. You can work with what you have going in your favor, instead of wishing you had more skills, time, or money. You can choose to take ownership of your life, instead of passively reacting to what surrounds you. You can learn to rely on yourself and become self-sufficient, instead of relying on others to fix things for you. In other words, you can learn to independently work towards your goals.What does that entail?Get your brain to work with you, not against you.Before you start working on something new, get your brain on board with what you’re about to do. It helps you get motivated to take action and become fully absorbed in what’s in front of you.Think about a chore as a personal choice you are making. Tell yourself, “This is something I really want to learn more about.” What’s the benefit? It gives you a greater sense of control over what you’re doing.Remind yourself of the importance of your efforts with this question: “Why am I doing this?” Make the connection with the initial reasons for working on something. It can be to learn a new skill, study for an exam so you can graduate and start your career, explore a business opportunity that intrigues you, etc.Visualize what you’re about to do. This is a technique called building a mental model; you imagine in detail all the steps you will be doing. For example, if you are researching something new, visualize covering a certain amount of material, taking notes, writing down questions to follow up on later. By telling yourself a story, you train your brain to anticipate next steps and map out the entire learning process so it’s easier to understand.Replace the words “I can’t do this!” with “Why not try?”When something is hard to do, our natural reaction is to resist it. But it’s a much better idea to get to the bottom of the resistance.Think carefully what is hiding behind your resistance. Maybe it is fear of not being able to do something successfully, or not being better at it than someone else. In many cases pride and ego are getting in your way.Next time you avoid doing something hard, ask yourself where the resistance is coming from. Be honest with yourself. Get to the root of the matter. Find out what it is so you can do something about it.Consider the advantages of facing your resistance head-on. Whenever you say “Why not?” you overcome your feelings of fear. There is something powerful when we leave a little space open for possibilities, instead of shutting the door and never finding out what those possibilities can turn into.Focus on goals by asking this question each morning: “What is the one thing I am committed to completing today?”This is a simple, 5-minute technique that helps you train your brain to focus on goals that are important to you right now. It also forces you to prioritize the goal you believe to be the most relevant in this moment.Write the question down. Write it in big letters on a sheet of paper and hang it on your bedroom or bathroom wall.Read it out loud as you start your day. Come up with an answer on the spot.Follow up by taking action. Remind yourself throughout the day about the commitment you made.Prepare your workspace ahead of time.It’s easy to complain and make excuses for not doing whatever is on your agenda for the day. That’s why in order to boost focus while working on any task, it’s important to declutter your workspace.Gather all materials the night before so that you don’t waste time in the morning looking for them. This applies to your books and notebooks, reference materials, and your daily plan (a checklist of tasks) if you’re working or studying. Or, it can mean packing your gym bag the night before.Pack refreshments to go. Before heading out to work or school, bring with you or set aside a bottle of water, an energy snack such as a power bar, banana, peanut butter, or a fruit and nut mix. If you’ll be away from home for a while, prepare a sandwich and pack a side of veggies like carrots, cucumbers, and tomatoes.Maximize each part of the day.For one week, keep a log of all mental activities you perform in the morning, midday, afternoon and evening. You will notice a pattern in how your brain works. Adjust your schedule to accommodate the activities depending on what's right for your brain and when.Mornings can be great for doing deep work. Scientists call this the brain’s peak performance time, and it's roughly 2-4 hours after we wake up. If you wake up at 7, your peak times are between 9 and 11 a.m. when you can work on complex cognitive tasks (studying, writing, problem-solving).Early afternoons are great for collaborating. This covers the 12-4 p.m. time range, during your lunch break and the few hours after lunch, when you are more likely to socialize. It’s a good time of day to schedule meetings, brainstorm ideas with others, and work on group projects.Evenings are for strategic thinking and relaxing. Here’s when the brain is more creative so it’s good to brainstorm, daydream, make bigger plans. It’s also a good time to unwind after a long day: make a nice dinner, chat with friends, watch a movie, or go out for a walk.📖 A publishing update on this topic:I’ve been working on a growth mindset series of workbooks this year. Each workbook is a printable .pdf file and includes tips, question prompts, a workbook section, templates, and a list of recommended reading. Two of them are related to this topic: Develop a Self Disciplined Lifestyle and 5 Ideas for Setting Realistic Goals.

The best exercises to acquire self-discipline are those you can practice every day. Because if you just dabble in them from time to time, you won’t really make a change in your life. There’s one big reason why this is so important — self-discipline can become your lifestyle and part of your mindset. It will give you freedom to grow as a human being and give your life a greater sense of purpose.And the best part — it will put you in charge of where you are going.How can you make self-discipline part of your day?#1. Simplify your focus.Leading a self-discipline life starts early in the morning. That’s the time when you set the tone to the next 12–16 hours of your life. You can choose to be reactive — wake up, get your phone and start scrolling through emails or Instagram, watch the news on TV, or respond to text messages that your friends start sending you during breakfast. If you’d like to create a different beginning to your day, train your brain to be focused as soon as you wake up.How to do this?Start your day with this question: “What is the one thing I am committed to completing today?” It trains your brain to focus on which goals are important to you right now, and it forces you to prioritize the goal you believe to be the most relevant in this moment. Write the question in big letters on a sheet of paper and hang it on your bedroom or bathroom wall. Read it out loud as you start your day, for example as you’re brushing your teeth. Come up with an answer on the spot and answer it out loud. Then follow up by focusing your energy throughout the day on your one thing.#2. Do your hard work early.A self-disciplined life is not about being spontaneous in how you go about your day. There’s time for spontaneity, and then there’s time to do what you need to do. In other words, timing is everything. Being self-disciplined means you do your hard work first before you do anything for pleasure. It means you are aware of which times of day should be devoted to doing hard work, and which times can be allotted to entertainment and socializing.How to do this?Build a habit of doing your hard work early. Take full advantage of your circadian rhythm (your body’s biological clock), which is your natural rhythm that “knows” what are the optimal times for you to perform certain tasks. For most people, the early morning hours are optimal for doing deep work — work that requires a lot of concentration. Specifically, the brain’s peak performance is 2-4 hours after we wake up. So if you wake up at 6, then your peak times last until 10 a.m. Working early allows your brain to focus fully on the problem at hand and with fewer distractions.#3. Postpone what feels good.If doing hard work early helps you focus better, the natural side effect of self-discipline is that you start postponing things that are more pleasurable. What’s the point of doing something difficult first? You’d be surprised how far-reaching this practice can be. In a study called the Marshmallow experiment performed by Stanford University scientists, results showed that delayed gratification can increase your chance at succeeding in many areas of your life — your education, career, short and long term goals, even your personal life choices.How to do this?Start by observing things you’d like to indulge in whenever the opportunity presents itself — for example, buying a decadent dessert or box of candy at your grocery store. Then, resist the temptation to immediately choose to treat yourself by thinking of one reason why not to indulge: maybe you’re working on creating new fitness goals or building better eating habits. And follow up — take your attention away from the distractions and focus on your priorities for the day: finish your homework, go out for a run, or prepare dinner.#4. Stop making excuses to distract yourself.It may feel easier to give in to the temptation to indulge in pleasant activities, procrastinate on daily priorities, and allow yourself to get distracted all the time. These activities may seem harmless to begin with, but distractions can easily make you slip from your work. One minute you’re just catching up with a friend on WhatsApp, and the next thing you know it’s two hours later and you haven’t even begun studying for your exam. When you turn off what distracts you, you have a better chance to actually get stuff done.How to do this?Distractions come from different sources, not just your electronic devices. Your goal is to dial down all distractions so they’re not in your way. Set your phone to Airplane mode when you need to focus on your work — try it for a 2-hour period. Let people around you (family members, friends, or roommates) know you won't be available in the next few hours. Check email and social media apps at scheduled intervals 2–3 times a day. Don’t browse YouTube videos without a specific purpose; instead, close all tabs in your browser so it’s easier to focus.#5. Keep your eyes on the future you.As I mentioned earlier, self-discipline can become part of your mindset, so it’s important how you think about it. If you define self-discipline as an uncomfortable practice, it’s time to get another perspective so instead of deterring you, it can help you apply it to your daily life. For me, it’s never been about what I “should” do. It’s about what it can afford me. With daily practice, self-discipline trains my brain to prioritize the things I can control, allows me to let go of what I cannot, and frees me up to focus on goals regardless of how small or big they are.How to do this?Instead of living life day by day, start thinking about the big picture of your life. Even if practicing self-discipline may feel like you’re sacrificing some things right now (time chatting with friends or indulging in a delicious dessert), think about what leading a self-disciplined life will afford you. Write down a list of new habits you’d like to practice that can add up to bigger results a year from now. Create time in your calendar to devote to these new habits so you can make progress — even a 30-minute session is sufficient. When you understand the benefits of a self-disciplined life, you’ll invest in it more.📖✏️ While we’re on this topic, there’s something I wanted to share:I’ve been working on a growth mindset series of workbooks this year, and one of the workbooks is called Develop a Self Disciplined Lifestyle. It is a printable, 35-page book divided into 5 chapters with tips, question prompts, a workbook section, a list of recommended reading, and a weekly gratitude journal template. Check out this page for more information.

Stop drinking your own kool-aid. – If you are not brutally honest with yourself, you can’t make informed decisions that will truly improve your company. You will hide behind excuses and spin stories to yourself explaining away why you have to keep doing the rest of the things on the list. You can’t believe all the stories you tell. You need a healthy dose of skepticism (not the same as self-doubt or lack of self-belief) to make real forward progress.Stop being so busy all the time. – Does an early stage startup founder really need to spend time evaluating every HR alternative instead of focusing on customers and product? Some people think that being the CEO means being involved with everything. But what they are really doing is getting in the way and usually just slowing down progress. Surround yourself with smart people and delegate delegate delegate. There are only a few things you should not delegate in the early stages of a business like customer engagements, raising capital and finding product-market fit.Stop working yourself to death. – As the founder, you often feel like the world is on your shoulders and you have to be working 100 hour weeks to set an example for your employees. Startups are a marathon, not a race. The average successful exit takes 7-10 years. If you don’t take time for yourself and take care of yourself, nobody else will. Relax, take breaks, take walks, take days off, get massages, pamper yourself. You can’t take care of others if you do not take care of yourself first.Stop half-assing it. – On the other hand, I have tried countless times to build a startup idea as side projects, and it doesn’t work. I am not saying that it is impossible to start a startup on the side. I am saying that to make a real play at doing something investable, you are going to have to make the leap and do it full time sooner than you will feel comfortable doing so. It always works this way. Nobody will invest in you if this is not what you do all the time, no matter how good the idea is.Stop hiding behind fake traction. – Founders often highlight what looks good and hide what looks bad. This is fake traction. Like: “All of my users love my product!” Sounds great, but if you only have 12 users, your sample size is two orders of magnitude too small. If you find 1000 people who can’t stop talking about your product, you are on to something big. Or another is “I have 300 people on my waiting list to buy my product!” Awesome, how many of them are willing to pay you for it up front? None? Haven’t even asked yet?Stop counting your eggs before they hatch. – An investor who expressed interest in investing but hasn’t called back in a few weeks isn’t money in the bank. Close close close. Convertible notes aren’t perfect, but at least you can do a rolling close cheaply. A potential customer who says he may pay if your product did such-and-such is not money in the bank. Close close close. What will he pay for today?Stop trying to get around paying lawyers. – You are running a complicated legal entity that may take funding from individuals and VCs, and could eventually IPO or be acquired. This is not a mom-and-pop business, LegalZoom and RocketLawyer are not good enough. Do it right. Don’t even try to out-smart yourself here. Expensive in the short term? Yes. Worth it in the long term? ALWAYS. Your future self will hate you if you try to save too much money here.Stop trying to serve two kinds of customers. – You can’t do two things great. You don’t have the time, money, or resources to figure out the product-market fit for more than one product doing one thing. It is always so enticing to try to follow new opportunities that come up, but don’t fool yourself. You can’t be great executing two go-to-market strategies at once. The split focus will mean you will be at best mediocre, but probably terrible at both. If you really think the new opportunity is better, pivot the company and go all in.Stop believing that your product is your company. – Your company is the value your provide to your customers, not your product. Often your customers couldn’t care less if what happens behind the scenes was done by the best Scala code in the universe or a thousands monkeys… as long as it works reliably and timely. Your customer value and your team is your company, not your product. Focus on making your team happy and your customers happy and all else will follow.Stop avoiding your customers. – How long has it been since you last talked with a customer? On the phone or in person? Not to sell them stuff. Not to offer support. To listen. To build your relationship with them. To ask questions. Please don’t tell me it has been more than a week or two. A founder, and especially a CEO, has no excuse not to be in continuous communication with customers. Don’t have customers yet? Call your prospects.Stop avoiding your team. – There are often times you want to curl up and cry, but a leader can not hide behind his desk no matter how much he might want to. A leader must be visible in good times and in bad. Especially in bad times. When a child is scared and hurt he needs his parents the most. Your team is your company, keeping them happy is one of your top priorities.Stop pretending to be superman. – A leader doesn’t need to be perfect. Don’t pretend that everything is always fine and that you never make mistakes. You might think it makes you look strong and brave, or makes people look up to you. In reality, it comes off fake and inauthentic. You don’t have to flaunt your failures, but hiding them is unnecessary too. Just talk about them honestly and ask people how they think you could improve.Stop being so secretive about your idea. – You may be scared someone will steal your idea. Don’t. Just don’t. Such a beginner mistake, not even an amateur mistake, it is just a total rookie mistake. You will never find product-market fit by keeping your idea secret until it is perfect. You need to talk about your idea. A lot. To a lot of people. Because honestly, your idea probably sucks just as much as you are secretly afraid it might. One of the reasons many founders are so secretive about their ideas is because they don’t want to be told it is a stupid idea. This is just denial. Don’t be in denial. Anyhow, the people you are so afraid will steal your idea are too busy working on their own big ideas to steal yours.Stop falling in love with your idea before product-market fit. – “The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.” —Steven Pressfield. The more confident an early stage startup founder is, the more concerned I am for them. Of course they can’t just go around telling people they are scared to death all the time. But when you are an early stage founder and really in love with what you built, you will never seek the changes necessary to really make your product great. Read the Instagram Story to get a great example of a team who wouldn’t stop until they really found product-market fit. If their love of Burbn (predecessor to Instagram) had held them back, they would probably be out of business by now.Stop ignoring marketing. – Even before you launch your product, you should be marketing. By marketing, I don’t mean press releases and media attention. The best marketing is word-of-mouth. Getting people to talk about you. You only get word-of-mouth by creating real fans. You create fans by adding real value to people’s lives. You can add value to people’s lives in many ways besides your product or service. You can write tutorials and provide useful blogging content that isn’t directly related to your startup at all, but related to your industry. Some excellent examples of this include Signal v. Noise from 37signals, DigitalOcean Tutorials and The Buffer Blog. Create fans, not just users. Most startups don’t even try.Stop comparing yourself to other startups. – Startup envy isn’t a good enough motivator to get you through the tough times. Thinking that such-and-such startup was just acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars and you are so much smarter than them is not a productive thought. I have written about how to cope with startup envy before but it is better if you just prevent yourself from getting envious in the first place. In fact, it is probably a fantastic idea to stop reading Hacker News and Techcrunch altogether until after you don’t work for your startup any more.Stop ignoring history. – Trying to raise venture capital for the first time? You are not the first person to do this, read as much as you can and surround yourself with people who have raised money recently (not 10+ years ago, within the last 2-3 years). Trying to build a payment company but never built a payment company before? Don’t try to rediscover everything that worked and didn’t work for others, surround yourself with advisors who have done it before. Get introduced to Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. Read their biographies before you meet them. Pick their brains. Offer them stock in your new venture. Hustle smarter, not harder.Stop procrastinating the launch of your company. – Procrastination is just giving into your inner demons. You don’t want to know if it will succeed or fail, but all you are doing is shooting your own feet and cutting of your legs and arms. Go read The War of Art, now. I’m serious. Steven Pressfield calls procrastination a form of your own personal ”Resistance”. The closer to launching your startup, the stronger the Resistance feels. You will make up excuses, you will do anything to put it off another week, another month. You can’t find product-market fit unless you have a product to try to fit with.Stop launching too early. – Launching a “Minimal Viable Product” or MVP does not mean building the crappiest proof of concept and launch it as quickly as you can. Though “Lean” startups are a hot trend right now, many founders misunderstand what a MVP is. Build a product worth using, not a proof-of-concept. If an MVP was a proof-of-concept, it would be called POC instead. Build something that someone would pay for. This means making the product look professional and polished. This means finishing enough details that it doesn’t look like a fly-by-night endeavor.Stop avoiding thinking about revenue. – Stop comparing yourself to Twitter and Facebook that didn’t worry about revenue until many years after being founded. Stop saying you are the next Instagram. I’ll believe you about as much as I would believe you told me you are holding a winning mega-lottery ticket. Growth is great, and great growth can be wonderful to experience, but cash-flow is king for almost all startups. Don’t tell yourself that you are an exception, you are risking too much if you are wrong.Stop using your lack of funding as an excuse. – With today’s technology, you do not need to spend millions of dollars to validate most startup ideas. You can usually validate that people want to your product in some form or another, or even pay for it, with just a few thousand dollars. Haven’t built your product yet because you think you need funding first? Build another product that won’t cost so much. Haven’t started selling your product because you think you need funding first? Richard Branson built a billion dollar business without venture capital. You are making up excuses, go find solutions.Stop just following your passion. – Passion is an energy that can power and motivate you, but easily blind you too. Passion can blind you to truth; it can deceive you. I have seen many founders blind with passion. Passion can blind you to know when you need to pivot or change your product. If the Burbn founders had been overly passionate about their first app, they would have never created Instragram. The trick is to get passionate about product-market fit, not about the product as it is today. Keep tweaking until you find the fit. You will know when you found it, there won’t be any doubt. ”When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion.” –Scott AdamsStop asking people to sign NDAs before discussing your startup. – Early stage startup ideas are not worth protecting because they almost all suck. Yes, your baby is ugly. Sorry, but it is the truth. After you raise a few million in venture capital and you are setting up a meeting with a large public company, then you can ask to put an NDA in place. However even then, you will have to sign their NDA (they don’t do special NDAs for every startup they talk to) and thus you won’t likely get much protection.Stop lying to yourself when things are not right. – How long have you been telling yourself that the employee (you know which one I mean) is not pulling his weight and is causing more harm than good? How many times have you turned the other way hoping it will go away? STOP IT. DEAL WITH IT. TODAY. NOW. REALLY. You can’t afford to put problems off to the side at a startup. There is no time. Deal with your problems today, stop putting them off. Stop hoping they will resolve themselves. This is business, do your job. Deal with your mess.Stop trying to get away without knowing your unit cost. – Unit cost is how much your service costs you to run per customer. “But I’m a SaaS, Lucas!” Stop it, you are a business, right? You have customers? You have service bills? Take out the fixed costs, then divide the rest of your service bills by the number of customers you have. Find out how much it costs you to support one more customer on average. Make sure you are charging your customer a lot more than their unit cost, otherwise you are a charity, not an investible business. You can’t start calculating unit cost too early. It is key to understanding cash-flow and profitability.Stop believing that hiring sales people will cure your revenue problems. – Reality check: sales people don’t figure out how to sell your product. You do. The only reason you should hire a sales person should be because you don’t scale and you have been doing more sales meetings than you can handle lately. A founder/CEO doing sales calls? YES. Never done a sales call before? Doesn’t matter. Start now. It is your job to figure out how to sell your product. You need to perfect your sales pitch. You need to create a great deck that works. Once you know it works, you let a sales person shadow you until they can say the same things you do.Stop postponing the calculation of your cost of user acquisition. – Cost to Acquire a Customer (aka CAC) is one of the most important metrics an online business has. If you watch Shark Tank, you know they always ask entrepreneurs for the number up front. It has been extremely well studied by top tier investors like Bessemer who have published great resources on learning about CAC. To calculate CAC, you will need to know your business numbers inside and out, which you should already know. If you don’t, then figuring out how to calculate CAC will get you asking the right questions. Hire an accountant to help you double check your work and assumptions. Like lawyers, don’t try to skimp here, you future self will thank you. Like unit cost, you can’t start calculating CAC too early.Stop hiring contractors instead of employing great engineers. – It is so so so tempting to just say: “fuck it, I’ll just hire a part-time contractor to build out my prototype.” Don’t do it. don’t give in to the temptation. Hiring full time employees takes longer and is harder and can cost more, but the long-term benefits will always outweigh the short-term gains. A startup is not about the product, it is about the team. A great team will always out-do a great product. Hiring full time employees is about building a team. Hiring contractors is a band-aid full of dirt and bacteria. Startups are a marathon, not a sprint. It is more important to slowly build an excellent team, a motivated team, the right team… than it is to get your product out of the door faster.Stop ignoring your Ideal Customer. – “All novels are really letters aimed at one person.” –Stephen King, On Writing. That person is called the Ideal Reader. Novels are subjective, not everyone will like any given novel, so you don’t even try to please everyone. You try to please your Ideal Reader. Stephen King’s Ideal Reader is his wife. Whenever he gets stuck, he thinks of his wife and asks himself: what would make her laugh/cry/pee her pants? When you get stuck, always ask yourself: Who is your Ideal Customer? Who are you trying to make pee their pants?Stop picking such small problems to solve. – Will someone pay for your app that increases Twitter followers? Yes. Can you grow that into a $100M/year business? No. It is a small idea. It is a small market. There is nothing wrong if your goal is to create a small business that augments your income or might even support your whole lifestyle. But that kind of business will never get venture capital, nor should it, so don’t even try. You are wasting investors time and your time. A real startup’s goal should be to change the world for the better. If increasing Twitter followers is a temporary revenue-generating bootstrapping step to a next-gen marketing platform that improves the connection between brands and customers… that is a big problem to solve. That is an investible idea.You can download a free printable version of this list that you can put over your desk here: Free Printable Version of “30 Things to Stop Doing as a Startup Founder” PDF…These Quora posts are just the tip of the iceberg. If you liked this post, subscribe to the Craftsman Founder newsletter to get instant access to much more free content.