Good Afternoon,
Businesses fail a lot. There are a variety of reasons for that but there is one that eclipses them all…
…being distracted by things that don’t drive the business.
If you are constantly distracted you will lose hours of peak productivity a day, this will lead to less time spent on things that matter, lower quality during the time that is spent, and more time doing low level tasks that don’t matter. It doesn’t happen all at once, it happens more like weight gain does… an ounce at a time.
Tell me, and be honest, if this describes your day.
- Check your email and other messages
- Read the news
- Check Facebook/social media
- Talk with your staff/team/co-workers/boss
- Reply to the email replies you got up there in bullet #1
- Check your phone
- Check your numbers
- Do a little bit of work for 1-2 hours
- Lunch
- Check your email and other messages
- Check your phone
- Check Facebook/social media
- Check the news
- Talk with your staff/team/co-workers/boss etc… again
- Do a little more work
- Goof off for another hour before calling it a day
All of this peppered with various phone calls, emails, messages, and other conversations? I bet a lot of you have been shaking your head reading this realizing it means you. You know how I know? Because lately it has been me. I’ve gone through this before… I will cut out everything that distracts me and deters my productivity and CRUSH it for a while. Then I will gradually let one thing come in. Then another, then another until I am right back where I started only getting 3-4 hours of high quality work done.
In the past I have talked about getting 10% better that is definitely a big part of how you recover from these phases.
But it overlooks a crucial step… removing distractions. So much of what we do is habitual to the point we don’t even realize we are doing it… so the only way to put a stop to it, and begin to break the habit is to make it difficult or impossible to access these distractions, or at the very least minimize them.
This will be different for everyone, but some of the steps I have taken to improve productivity and minimize the things that were distracting me include:
- Installing this browser extension to block sites that were wasting my time. I even went as far as password protecting it, and not looking at the password I used so it becomes very difficult to undo.
- Removed the shortcut to MS Outlook from my taskbar and keeping outlook closed so it becomes much harder to check my email regularly
- Hired someone to work my personal Facebook so I only see messages at a specific time of day
- Removed all but a couple of apps from my phone (I have done this before. This time it will stick)
- Set specific times to talk with staff about (non-emergency) matters
- Set a specific time to check social media, and use it for work only 99% of the time
- Forward all calls to a voicemail service that I check once a day at a specific time
- Schedule a time to check my numbers
These steps alone will probably add another 3-4 hours of productivity a day for me, and make those extra hours higher quality.
This is the difference between moderate success and extreme success in most cases… the ability to GET MORE STUFF DONE (Nailed it!)
This is especially true in the industry than many of you are in… digital marketing/SEO. We’d like to think we are special snowflakes, and while there are differences in skill level, ultimately much of what we do is interchangeable with what others in the industry do… so what’s the difference between levels of success? Its who can get the most stuff done in the same 24 hours we all have a day.
So take inventory of how you spend your time. Figure out what you don’t need to be doing… and then stop doing it! I would like to hear from everyone on this… what is one thing you could cut out that would save you at least an hour a day?
Let me know in the Profiit Academy Daily Facebook Group or reply to this email if you don’t want to share publicly.
Let’s all stop screwing around, and get out there and make some Profiit.
CMW