It’s all about minimum input and maximum output.

When I was first starting out on the Internet and as a business owner, I would sit in front of my computer for hours hitting the refresh button after every promotion, website tweak, or SEO hack I implemented. One day it finally hit me. I was spending so much time on activities that only garnished me a small output that I realized my efforts were taking me a long time. Hours and hours, and sometimes days, yet the output that I got from these activities were minimal at best.

I want you to try this exercise.  Take out a piece of paper and draw two lines on that paper dividing one page into three columns. On the left side put the title on the top of the page and call it  “input”.  In the middle column, on the top of the page, label that “category”. On the right side, on the top of the page, put the heading of “output”. Now, on the right side, start listing some of your activities that you do on a daily basis to build your business.  Use this as a brainstorming session. Just write down whatever you do starting tomorrow morning when you get in the office or when you start working from home. You could break your tasks up into a number of categories such as strategy, tactical, operational. For the sake of argument and keeping this article concise and to the point, we’ll label each one of your tasks on the left side with the three categories that we just described. So, for example, if you put down in the left column “modify my meta tags on my blog”, give this a category of tactical in the middle column. If you put down “split test my landing page offer”, this would fall under the category of strategy.  If another one of your tasks is “prepare media Kit”, this would fall under an operational task. Then on the right column, write down what you got out of doing this task. Was it motivational, a desired result, a sale or maybe that activity resulting in no output at all. Whatever it was, just write it down.

By the end of the day, you should have at least 5-10 tasks that you believe are related to building your business that fall under the strategy, tactical, or operational category.

After you do this for just one day from the time you start work until you finish your work, you’re going to be very surprised at the number of activities that you spend time on that do not yield you a high output.

Usually these are tasks that fall under the tactical and operational category. These are certainly important tasks and need to get done, but more than likely, they are not contributing to increasing your profits, or meeting your income goals.

The point of this exercise is to make you aware of what activity you are spending your time on. This will allow you to determine if your current input (your activity) is equating to a high output (your results). I’m not saying do not do these tasks, since they are clearly important to you and your business. What I am saying is to be aware of the time that you’re spending on tasks that should be delegated to a coworker, employee, or virtual assistant so your time can be freed up to work on the strategies that will produce the most tangible outcome in the shortest amount of time.