What can you stop doing in 2016 such that it would allow you to focus on higher payoff activities? Continuing on the #quest2016… Today’s prompt is from John Jantsch, from Duct Tape Marketing.
I’ll admit that “payoff” is not generally top of my mind as I apportion my time. I once wrote an blog post about saving $2 an hour by hanging out the laundry, and how it didn’t make economic sense, but I enjoyed it so much that I was going to keep doing it. I don’t want to stop doing things I like (like podcasting and blogging) just because they are time consuming hobbies rather than the businesses they were supposed to become. (I also just published a workshop on time mastery in which I argued in favour of binge-watching Netflix if it’s part of what keeps you functional, so I may have unconventional views on all of this.)
Housework. Can I stop doing housework? (Other than hanging out the laundry, since I get pleasure from that.)
Yet I realize that it is a more directed question than that.
At our startup, we have largely stopped maintaining our twitter feed, since it was not attracting any audience… pretty much at all. We had one nice conversation with a random follower on May 25 while live-tweeting a video game. Same for the articles we were writing at the beginning of the year: crickets. (We’ve unpublished all of those and stopped writing about geeky things in general terms.) We’re trying to redirect those energies into something that has more obvious benefits to the bottom line. And make no mistake, this time I’m talking about straight up revenue.
This is the ongoing struggle: the sense that we need to do something to make an impact, yet finding that our efforts are not rewarded. All this jumping up and down and flapping of hands is so much… noise. I don’t want to keep contributing to the noise. When we build something, I still want to know how to use those channels to good effect. We’ve redirected a good portion of my time to products and marketing, but the “social media for its own sake” thing… not worth it for the nonce. We’ve given it up.
Hey! That’s a precise and non-theoretical answer! Look what I can do!