Posted by Most days the problem is not a shortage of hours. It is a list of jobs so long that none of them gets a proper run at it.
A few emails. A website that needs refreshing. A newsletter promotion half planned. An idea sitting untouched since last month. Everything pulling in a different direction, and by the end of the day, nothing properly finished.
Getting your business focus right matters more than adding more hours to the day. I learned that the hard way, and I am still relearning it now.
For the last couple of years my own business went quiet. Not because I stopped caring about it, but because my wife’s health and my own meant the time went elsewhere. We are settled now, and I have the hours back.
The temptation is to throw all of them at everything at once. That is exactly the wrong move, and it took me most of a working life to understand why.
Business Focus Means Three Things, Not Twelve
I have three websites that need rebuilding, a newsletter that needs restarting, and solo ads I want to set up again. Written down like that, it looks like a dozen separate jobs. It is not.
Every one of those jobs falls into one of three buckets: getting a good offer in front of people, growing the list who see it, and bringing enough visitors to make either of those worth doing. That is business focus in practice. Nothing gets added to my day unless it fits one of those three.
If a task does not grow the list, improve an offer, or bring more visitors, it is not why my business is stuck. It is why my day feels full while the business stays still.
That is not a clever system. It is the same discipline I had for years running shops and later a cleaning business. You knew within a day if the shelves were empty or a shift was missed.
Online, nothing tells you that directly. You have to decide it yourself, every morning, before the day fills up on its own.
Three Short Blocks Beat One Long Day
I do not try to work twelve hours straight anymore. I give each of the three things a clear block of time, usually around forty-five minutes, and move on once the block ends.
Forty-five minutes on the list. Forty-five minutes on an offer. Forty-five minutes on bringing visitors in.
Whatever is left of the day goes on the smaller jobs still sitting there.
Three focused hours, spent on the right three things, will outrun twelve scattered hours every time. It is not about finding more time in the day. It is about pointing the time you already have at fewer things.
A Lesson I Learned Twice
As a boy I played most of the sports going: soccer, tennis, hockey, gymnastics, athletics, fencing, judo and golf. There was never enough time to do all of them properly, so eventually I settled on soccer, and on golf. I am still playing golf at 78.
I had to learn the same lesson again, decades later, in this business. Nick James would release something new, I would go to a meeting where it sounded exciting, and I would switch to it.
That left whatever I had been building before to fall behind. Sometimes the new thing never got properly going either.
It is the same choice I made as a boy standing between eight sports and a limited number of evenings. You cannot do all of them well. You can do two or three, properly, for years.
You can do two or three, properly, for years.
Now that I am picking this business back up, the plan I set myself works the same way. I chose three things to focus on, and I do not start anything new, including several of Nick’s newer products, until the current plan is carried out.
Setting a plan and sticking to it before chasing the next exciting thing matters just as much running an online business today. It mattered just as much choosing between soccer and seven other sports as a boy.
Finish Before You Start The Next Thing
None of this matters if the work never gets finished. A half rebuilt website earns nothing. A newsletter promotion that is three-quarters written earns nothing either.
In the shops I managed, a job was either done or it was not. Half-stocked shelves do not make half the sales. The same is true here, even though nobody tells you so directly.
Pick the smallest unfinished job sitting closest to being done, and give it today’s attention before anything new gets started. One finished website page outsells a dozen half-rebuilt ones every time.
I have written more about rebuilding steadily rather than all at once in other articles I have shared recently. If you want to see how the same idea keeps showing up, take a look.
Protecting The Few Things That Matter
Doing less on purpose means saying no to almost everything else that turns up asking for your attention today.
Reschedule anything you are only maybe going to do. Drop whatever adds no real value once you take a plain look at it.
Hand off anything someone else can do as well as you. Lean on what you have already built rather than starting fresh every time.
Obviously none of that happens by accident. It happens because you decided, that morning, which three things mattered and refused to add a fourth.
Where This Leaves Your List
Of my three things, the list is the one I am rebuilding first, because without it, an offer and a visitor do not connect to anything lasting.
If building a reliable list feels like the piece you are missing, Lazy Way To Email Riches is Nick James’s own course on exactly that. It may be worth a look if you want to go further than this article can take you.
I cannot tell you it will work for your business, only that it covers ground this article has only touched on.
Whatever your three things turn out to be, business focus is what separates the business that grows from the one that doesn’t. It is the one doing the fewest things properly, and finishing them before starting the next.
I am still rebuilding my own three things as I write this, one finished page at a time. If yours went quiet for reasons that had nothing to do with giving up, the same applies to you.
Pick your three.
Finish what you start.
Jim