Let's be honest, you have bad days when you don't want to work. For entrepreneurs, you feel as though you are cheating yourself, yet you may not feel like doing anything substantive. There is a middle ground I have found - queue up some "mindless" tasks or things to do and be successful at, whether you are grumpy, sick, hungover, or some combination of all of those! Here are some I have on my list currently and others I have done in the past.

• Building your contacts in LinkedIn – You can go through your email address book for people who are not in your circle and invite them. Another way is to look at the connections for colleagues you have worked with in the past for people who are in their circle you are connected to – if you worked with them, you can request to be connected without knowing their email address.
• Scanning documents and business cards – Perhaps the paperless office in general is more myth than reality, but I am working to rid my own from as much paper as possible. With my Fujitsu ScanSnap I scan papers, documents and other items I would like to keep to PDFs.
• Clean out your email inbox – I am a true believer in managing your inbox to zero, where you read then file or delete all your email, only keeping in your inbox those messages to reply to at a later date. But sometimes our inboxes grow, and it takes a little time away from everything else to tend to it.
• Clean out your desk drawers – Being in a less than pleasant mood is perfect for cleaning out your desk, as it’s much harder to come up with a rational reason to keep half of the junk you have accumulated.
• Inventory your safe deposit box – Wondering where that contract or passport is? It may be in your safe deposit box. At least you made the first step to get a box, but it’s also handy to know what is in there.
• Write blog posts in advance – There’s nothing worse like your blog going dead for a few days or weeks, and by writing ahead of time non-date sensitive posts is a good way to clear your mind of things you’d like to share with others, and keep your blog publishing on a regular basis. What you are reading is one such example.

Hopefully these ideas will help. Are there things you do when you’re not feeling so great?

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