It’s Time to Trim the Fat

No, I’m not talk­ing about los­ing weight (although that’s on my list), but about my busi­ness and the work I do. It’s time to trim some things that aren’t nec­es­sary. To make my busi­ness and my goals more focused, more streamlined.

As you may know, I believe that knowl­edge is power, but only if you put it to use. Learn­ing has always been a pas­sion of mine and that was one of the goals of this blog; to share the knowl­edge I find as well as my own. That is part of my business.

If you watch my Twit­ter or Face­book updates you’ll notice that most of them are links to other blogs posts. These are posts that I found to have good infor­ma­tion that I think would be help­ful to oth­ers. So I share them on my social sites.

This has been a lot of fun, and it’s helped some peo­ple as well. Which is what I was shoot­ing for. But there is a prob­lem. It’s tak­ing up a lot of time. Just like try­ing to keep up with social sites, espe­cially Twit­ter, takes a lot of time. And that is time cut­ting into my writ­ing business.

Mind your own business.

So it’s time to adjust a few things. It’s time to stop work­ing so hard, and start work­ing smarter. It’s time to let some blogs that I love so dearly go.

This doesn’t mean that I’m not going to share infor­ma­tion any­more, it’s just going to be done less. Or maybe a bit dif­fer­ently. This is so I can open up some more time to run my busi­ness and still run this blog.

This is what I mean by trim­ming the fat. It’s tak­ing the things you do for your busi­ness and reeval­u­at­ing them to see what is mov­ing your busi­ness for­ward, and what is just “busy” work.

Busy work is some­thing that feels like your doing some­thing but it’s not really help­ing you make money or run your busi­ness. Yes some of it is essen­tial. If you ignore all your email or never respond to any­one it’s going to come off the wrong way. But it’s good for your busi­ness to put a limit on the “busy” work.

Here are a few exam­ples of busy work:

• check­ing email
• respond­ing on twitter
• check­ing facebook
• read­ing blog posts
• shar­ing blog posts

As you can see these are all tasks that, to a degree, are essen­tial, but are tak­ing up a lot of time. This is busy work. You feel busy, but it’s not mov­ing your busi­ness for­ward that much.

Now some­thing that does move your busi­ness for­ward would be some things like this:

• get­ting your copy done for your sales page
• con­tact­ing peo­ple for team­work or JV
• pro­duc­ing products
• mar­ket­ing your business
• bring­ing traf­fic to your site

There are plenty more exam­ples of each, these are just to give you a gen­eral idea. To put it sim­ply, there is busy work that you can do that may per­tain to your busi­ness but doesn’t move it for­ward towards growth and mak­ing you money. Then there is work that directly effects your busi­ness and helps both it and you grow more.

So, while I’m not going to quit shar­ing infor­ma­tion, as that is part of my busi­ness, I’m going to be cut down to make time to work on my projects and mar­ket my business.

Instead of read­ing all those blogs and shar­ing them with oth­ers, I’m going to trim some of them. That will give me more time to work on my busi­ness more directly instead.

Your busi­ness needs a strong foun­da­tion and reg­u­lar growth to pros­per. Then, both you and your busi­ness will reach success.

~Chris

What other tasks can you think of that may be con­sid­ered “busy” work?

Sim­i­lar Posts:

• Why You Should Have Your Name Everywhere
• 4 Ways to Re-Evaluate Your Busi­ness (part 1)
• How to Find Well Done Head­lines and Why They Work

I’m glad to see you back at The OMV. I hope your enjoy­ing your time. Feel free to con­tact me for any­thing and if you haven’t already, don’t for­get to sub­scribe to The OMV Newslet­ter. Leave a com­ment too! I’d love to hear from you.