Category: Personal

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These Blogs are the Most Important Thing

It’s been something like six weeks since I last posted. And yet, I’ve already mentioned how I think these are the most important thing when it comes to both my business and, probably, my life. But I haven’t been doing them!

Sure, I could say that I’ve been busy, which is true. I’ve also had other things going on in my personal life that have caused me to be both busier and less productive while working.

But if something is truly “the most important thing,” shouldn’t it come before literally anything else?

The answer is clearly ‘yes’.

Maybe I should revisit why it’s the most important thing. Let’s make a list, shall we?

  1. It focuses my mind and efforts on productivity, growth, and improvement.
  2. It reminds me of past goals, thoughts, methods, and efforts which helps those things contribute more to improvement.
  3. It’s about the only time and place where I really work through difficult problems in a clear, productive, and concrete way, and then holds me accountable to my conclusions.
  4. It clears up what I need to be focusing my time and efforts on in order to achieve my goals.
  5. It makes me more productive, even in the short term (such as that day).

It seems to me that without this, I’m simply going day-to-day, performing routine tasks as they come up without any guidance or thought. Honestly, I suspect that’s how the vast majority of people live their lives.

But I don’t want to do that! I’m still young, and any investments I make in self-improvement now will pay off over the course of the majority of a lifetime. It’s more important that I do them now than ever.

It really is critical that I do this regularly. Even to the point where I can be neglecting other responsibilities and projects to do it. If it is the most important thing, then it needs to come first, or else everything else ultimately suffers.

And realistically, it’s not very hard or all that time-consuming, and it makes me feel better to do it. So there’s no reason not to!

 

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Second Most Important Thing?

Recently I posted in this blog about the “most important thing” being these blog posts, where I have some reflection and determine all of the things I need to improve. It’s still quite possibly the most important thing I do every day.

But in the past, I had always considered the “most important thing” to be self-improvement through education and learning. Mostly it has taken the form of reading books on a variety of topics.

Is that, then, the second most important thing? For now, I’m going to say yes! Things like, focusing on improving the business are important too, but none of them are as far-reaching and critical to my long-term success as improving myself through learning.

Reading has given me a huge list of improvements, both short-term and long-term. In the short-term, I feel empowered and capable. Learning something new makes me excited to try new things and general sense that I’m improving and my situation is going to constantly improve.

And long-term, it’s basically everything. I makes me more effective. It improves my decision making. It helps me focus on what’s important and ignore the rest. It literally makes me better at everything. Knowledge is power, as they say.

These are all things that will serve me well for my entire lifetime. The more knowledge I can acquire while I’m still young, the more valuable it will be over the course of my life. Just like making an investment early. Exactly like that, actually.

I need to redouble my efforts to constantly improve myself. Whether that means reading books, taking courses (online and off), trying and improving in new things, learning a language, or even just meeting new people and hearing their thoughts. It’s absolutely critical.

Without that learning, it’s easy for things to feel stagnant. Like nothing is going to improve, and that I’m not getting better at anything. I think one of the most important things in life, in terms of feeling fulfilled, is to always be improving. And I need to do that.

Lately I’ve maybe not been as focused on it as I should have been. I’ve gotten carried off in different directions with work, and I’ve been spending more time on other, unrelated activities in my spare time. I’ve even got a handful of books I’ve only partially finished! I need to finish those up.

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Time to Be More Disciplined

I’ve decided I need to be much more disciplined with my work.

Today, for example, I feel like I got almost nothing done despite having been home all day and working relatively long hours. I had important things to do but I kept putting them off.

Why do I do this? Probably just human nature I guess. A lot of it is rationalization. “If I go upstairs immediately after lunch, I can play a quick game before starting work again!”

And then throughout the day you find yourself browsing Google news for the 10th time, looking at pointless articles.

Part of the problem is that I see that I have a lot of things to get done during the day, and I just procrastinate on the difficult ones. In reality, I think if I condensed what I was doing down to just a small time frame, and just focused on it, I could get all of that done and more.

Maybe I need to just actually have a timeline, and say that I’ll only work for, say, 6 hours per day at most. And then just agree to work really hard and focus hard during that time.

But that’s not to say I haven’t improved in this area. One of the first website I built took months, and it was basically my only client. I would spend the whole day playing games or distracting myself in other ways.

I’ve made large strides over time to improve it, but I realize that nothing ever came all at once. It’s been slow progress. Every year is just a bit better. But the last couple weeks, at least, I feel like I have not been very disciplined. And I need to improve that.

If I want to work on the business and change a bunch of things in my business, I need to finish the other things first. And that won’t happen on its own.

(Note: this article was originally private and I’m not sure why. Upon reading it years later, I have made it public.)

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Time to Write Every Day

I’m thinking that I should start writing here, literally every day, for at least ten minutes.

My initial thought was, “how valuable is thinking about my own business towards its future success?” And I think the answer is, perhaps clearly, ‘extremely valuable’.

And yet, how often do I actually do it? I have lots of little thoughts here or there, but it’s almost never organized, and often no action comes from it anyway.

I think it would benefit me hugely to just organize my thoughts on a regular basis here. I’d like to outline just some of the ways that I think it will help.

1. Focus

It will help me focus on what’s important, and also to keep any pressing tasks or goals top-of-mind. By thinking about these things every single day, and in an organized manner, they will be more likely to actually stick and have an impact on my actions.

2. Time Analysis

I’ll be able to analyze what I’ve been spending time on and what has actually contributed to my success. If none of the things I did contribute much to my actual goals, I’ll have to ask myself why I’m doing them.

3. Organization and Clarity of Thoughts

By writing things out, I am clarifying my thinking and organization my plans and analysis. Once it’s on paper it will help me think about it more. Since there are a million things I could be doing at any given point, it’s nice to narrow that down.

4. Improved Writing and Communication

Simply by writing every day, I’ll get better at it. Better writing is useful virtually everywhere, so this can only help. It is likely to even improve in-person communication I think.

5. Last-Minute Blog Posts

It’s likely that there will be value in some of these musings to others beyond myself. In a pinch, I can always revise one and make it a blog post!

6. Goal and Progress Tracking

I’ll be able to go back and read previous entries and see where I was at. This could help me see where I’m stuck, and also to track how I’ve come along on priorities and goals.

7. Posterity

This could be a great collection of writings at some point. Maybe I’ll want to look back at it for myself, maybe I’ll want to make some kind of compilation. Who knows!

8. Conscious Effort Towards Business Thinking

This is a concrete step I can take to spending more time thinking about my business and how I can improve. It could start a chain reaction of improved business planning.

 

Thought of the Day – Not Spending Time on Most Important Activities

We’ve all heard the Pareto Principal, also known as the 80/20 rule. But what if you’ve identified your 20 but don’t actually focus on them anyway?

Right now, I have work extending out for months on my waiting list. I need to find additional help to handle that. It’s like we’re ready to grow, I just need more help.

In one of my recent posts, I talk about how I need to change what activities I’m involved with in the business, and pursuing that will certainly give me more time to find that help. So I would say that concentrating on delegating and removing responsibilities from myself is certainly part of the 20, and an overall process to simplify my business and establish processes is critical for scaling as well.

But not everything I’m doing right now has anything to do with that. For instance, I’m spending a fair amount of time preparing for an event I’m hosting along with Kari Switala and others.

From a business perspective, what is the purpose of this event? Almost exclusively marketing. Getting new clients.

And is that a priority right now? No. Not at all. In fact we have too many!

I obviously can’t back out now since I made the commitment. Plus it’s coming up soon, so I would never do that anyway. But I think it’s important to recognize that it isn’t furthering my goals a whole lot.

The real issue is that it’s a short term marketing effort, which is specifically what I don’t need right now. Long term efforts such as BNI and blogging/SEO for my own website are still important, because I need to keep growing well into the future.

But the short term ones, I should be saying no to until I actually need them. There are way better ways to spend my time.

How Should I Spend My Time?

I thought I would sketch out a rough outline of how I think I actually should be spending my time, because I should be putting conscious effort in to that. Note that I attempted to include emails relating to these things in their respective categories

Long Term Time Spend Goal (6 Months)

20% Working on business, developing processes
20% Working with employees, hiring initiatives, training
15% Sales, Proposals, etc
15% BNI
10% Project Management
5% Admin Work (Billing, Invoices, Deposits, Accounting, Etc)
5% Writing Blog Posts / SEO for myself
9% Other
<1% Actually doing work on client sites

Short Term Time Spend Goal (6 Months)

15% Working on business, developing processes
10% Working with employees, hiring initiatives, training
10% Sales, Proposals, etc
15% BNI
15% Project Management
5% Admin Work (Billing, Invoices, Deposits, Accounting, Etc)
5% Writing Blog Posts / SEO for myself
10% Other
15% Actually doing work on client sites

Where I Think I Am Now

1% Working on business, developing processes
1% Working with employees, hiring initiatives, training
15% Sales, Proposals, etc
18% BNI
18% Project Management
10% Admin Work (Billing, Invoices, Deposits, Accounting, Etc)
2% Writing Blog Posts / SEO for myself
15% Other (Things like this upcoming event)
20% Actually doing work on client sites

There’s a lot to think about when looking at those numbers! The two most important long-term tasks (most likely), are ones I spend a combined 2% of my time on now. That’s terrible! I definitely need to work on that.

I think it might also be time to read “The One Thing” again, as it really goes over all of this, and is fantastic.