Productivity Doesn’t Matter Until Entrepreneurs Learn This
How to decide what to focus on
Comparing the 3 most-common strategies for deciding what to do next:
1. Tasks that produce the highest leverage
One approach is to identify what produces the highest leverage and do more of that.
People will say, why send one email to 100 people individually, when you can send that one email to all 100 people at the same time? This is the foundation of leverage. It’s the minimal amount of effort for the maximum amount of result.
This process works in tasks that require width, but fails in tasks that require depth.
e.g. Why meet with your friend face to face when you can send them an email?
See how that’s drastically different? Meeting face to face has a much deeper connection and much more value than an email exchange.
So if leverage isn’t the best way, maybe it’s by following the value?
2. Tasks that produce the most value
This is often referred to as the Pareto principle.
What 20% of tasks produce 80% of the results?
Using the email example above, you could make an argument that having 20 1-to1 (and face-to-face) conversations will yield better results than emailing 100 people. In this case, the 1-to-1 conversations would be of higher value and therefore be what you should focus on.
Both of these are principles helpful, but they both assume you have taken action and have baseline results that are predictable and repeatable.
e.g. you know that if you email 100 people, you’ll get 5 responses. And you know that having 20 1-to-1 conversations, you’ll get 10 responses. Therefore you know which is the better option for you.
This means there’s one step you have to take before considering Leverage or Value.
3. The bottleneck approach
Focus on the first thing that starts the chain reaction for everything else.
If you want to sell ten units of your product this week, what needs to happen before you do that?
- Step 1: You need to have potential buyers in mind
- Step 2: You need a way to contact them
- Step 3: You need to contact them
You can’t contact them, until you have a WAY to contact them. And you can’t find a way to contact them, if you don’t know WHO they are.
Each step hinges on the previous step.
So, this is where the bottleneck will be.
If you want to make 10 sales this week but you only have 5 peoples contact info, you’ll fail.
If you want 10 people contact info, but only have two people in mind, you’ll fail.
The first step is always the bottleneck. It also is usually such a small step that it feels pointless and beneath us.
Doing the research to see who would be interested in your product.
Posting each day to slowly build an audience.
Documenting your journey to build your personal brand.
Each of these are the first step in a much longer outlined process and these will become the bottleneck.
You can’t get the result until you take the first step.
Until then, everything else is a distraction.
