We believe that as an entrepreneur, or an aspiring one, a deeper and frequent look into how to improve your daily efficiency strategies is an important step towards boosting your business in a way that will also save you time for freedom!
This week’s focus will be on the importance of recognizing which activities to prioritize in your work day and how to use a key efficiency strategy that leads to your most rewarding results yet.
Productivity Boost: Recognizing Motion vs. Action Activities
Restructuring your list of responsibilities in a way that demands action is a great way to becoming an extraordinary person with a great life and a growing business. However, some of these lists may feel like they are miles long and frankly, quite daunting. So, recognizing that not all things on a to-do list hold equal importance, how do you still move forward an efficient way?
In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear explains the importance and relationship between the motion and action activities that make up our to-do lists. In essence,
Motion activities are those that involve learning, planning, and strategizing. These are all good, but they won’t produce a result.
In contrast, action activities include those that do deliver a result.
Everyday examples for this would be brainstorming vs actually writing on chapters for your book, learning how to create an offer versus picking up the phone and calling potential leads.
Today’s struggle of efficiency and productivity is based on the fact that people spend most of their time in motion activities, as it produces the feeling of being busy, and it can most definitely keep people there (being busy vs. being productive!). Even though these are important in supporting the action activities, beware that you may get stuck in “learning mode” and forget the actual implementation. Information overload is a real thing and can keep the business from growing.
Understandably, people like motion activities as they are easier than action. In them people don’t have to worry about failing and that is a comfortable place to be, whereas in action activities the potential to fail is real (picking up and phoning 20 potential leads when you are new in business might be as scary as going bungee jumping for the first time!).
A great entrepreneurial example in advancing from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur is wanting to read, and read more books until they feel 100% ready to take the next step in starting their business vs. deciding to talk to potential clients instead. Often, wantrepreneurs get stuck right here because it is easy to always find another thing that they feel like they need to understand before actually going all in with their business idea.
The Key To An Efficient Day’s Action Plan
Before jumping to it, remember that successful results come from a successful goal setting practice - this should be the foundation of every good plan. Not having a direction would feel like steering a ship without a steering wheel. Why even try when the desired result is not known yet?
Now, the key to fill your to-do list with action activities is to primarily go through it and define what the motion and action activities are. Then, focus on the action activities first. Recognize that you can support these with the motion activities, but beware to not get stuck in “learning mode”.
Action activities deliver results and, as read in last week’s blog post, focus will always equal growth. Therefore, it only makes sense that this efficiency strategy will get you first-row seats as results start coming through and your business grows.
Seek to set your focus right…
Gone are the days where you a) don’t know what task to start with, and b) at the end of the day you feel like you’ve worked 12 hours without actually accomplishing something.
Consider Jenny Watzka and her story on how she hit 10,000 USD the very first month of starting her own consulting business. For the first few months her one priority was making money. She knew from the beginning that she needed to be laser focused, take appropriate action. All of her time was focused on delivering value, starting conversations, talking to potential clients. She did not focus much on motion activities such as creating a website, a logo, or business cards… Even though these activities were important, they certainly weren’t necessary for her to be able to hit her goal that month {all of those things she only got much later in her business and nobody ever asked for them!}.
Take your goal. Look at your activities. Which of those things will propel you forward more than anything else? Start with them! Finally, take a minute and consider, what do those action activities look like for you and your business?
We believe that you deserve to run better businesses - the best you can create. Thank you for reading this week’s blog and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram for our insights on how to turn your business into a seamlessly running one!
If you aren’t running a multiple six figure business working less than 5 hours a day yet… we created the perfect training for you: The Business Productivity Bootcamp. Walk away knowing EXACTLY how to organize your business to get things done and make time for what matters most to you. I’ll promise you - these are the best $79 spend in a loooooong time (or you get your money back!)
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