I fell asleep last night and woke up to this blog title.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been working hard at doing less these days and wanted to help you do the same.
You see, there are some things that you need to do to have a successful business. Things like marketing, networking, applying for jobs. But there are tons of other things that are unnecessary and if we were to keep doing them could detract us from our true goals and real intentions.
{photo by iko}
And when you’re your own boss, time is money. So let’s spend more time doing the necessities and less doing these 5:
- Follow me and I’ll follow you back. (Sing to the 80’s tune of Digital Underground’s Kiss You Back.) At the beginning of Twitter, everyone made the error of following every person who followed them. It was a show of courtesy as well as a way to increase your own Twitter followers. But these days, more and more Twitterers are wising up by being selective of who they follow. Instead of a large amount of followers who have nothing to do with your field, industry or even your hobby, it’s all the more important these days to be picky about who you choose to send streams of Twitter feeds these days. Recently, former publisher and editorial director of Writer’s Digest Jane Friedman posted about why she’s not doing it either. Smart cookie! Just think of it as one less thing you have to do.
- Sign up for every newsletter available. Sometimes you sign up because you know the person. Other times you sign up because you’re curious about what they have to say or what free e-book they have to offer. But the more things you sign up for, the more time you’ll spend searching through and deleting unsatisfying emails. Emails that take over your inbox and take much of your precious time to go through them.
- Plan your blogging schedule. A lot of you may disagree with this one. But I believe and have seen other successful bloggers write on impulse instead of posting every day and a certain time and still have millions of followers. Yes, you may want to plan ahead when you’re going on vacation. But for the other 300 or so days in the year, maybe it’s okay to take it easy and write and post when the fever hits. You’ll spend less time fretting when a busy work day prevents you from posting and you can’t stick to a regular schedule. No more staying up past midnight to get that post done!
- Take every online course just because it’s free. There are so many great webinars and online courses out there. And it’s so wonderful when they are free. With that being said, I learned the hard way that not all of them are worth your time. In fact, a few were time zappers, preventing me from doing the things I needed to do to get paid.
- Apply for a job or send in a query just to meet your quota. It’s admirable to apply for and send hundreds of query letters a month. And it’s true that the more you send out there, the higher your chances of getting that job or writing assignment you want. But most likely what will happen is that you will get burnt out. You’ll do a haphazard job of sending them in or apply for jobs you really don’t want or assignments you feel unqualified for. Maybe it’s more important to spend quality time working on things that you can do versus just sending shoddy work just to get your numbers out there.
What do you think?
Do you agree or disagree? Anything you would add to the list? Let’s all help each other do less unnecessary things in 2011, and more things important to us and our business.
