How Much Time Do You Spend Thinking vs. Doing?
Hey Everyone! Dan here with another blog post to help you make more money from your online business. I want to discuss the difference between thinking and doing, and what levels of each you should apply to your business.
So first things first… what exactly do I mean by “thinking” and how much of it should you do?
Active thought invested in your business throughout the day is what I mean by thinking. It is a very crucial element of making your business successful. Here’s what I’ve noticed when progressing in my ventures:
The more thought I invest in my business the better I do.
If you are lazy and don’t feel like working, you sure as hell better be thinking your a** off.
I’m not talking about thinking about which car you want to buy with all your money you’re about to make online, or what you are going to do after you are done building your website either…
We’re talking constant thought 10 hours per day on how you can improve your business and reduce your work load:
- When I am driving my car, I am thinking about my business.
- When I am going to the mall to pick up lunch, I am thinking about my business (in fact I came up with the idea for this post while I was in line waiting to pick up my food)
- While I’m playing video games I’m thinking about what I need to do next in my business.
- While I’m falling asleep for the night I’m going through a list in my head of what I accomplished that day and what I was unable to accomplish so that when I wake up I can put those unfinished tasks on my to-do list.
- And so on, and so on.
A lot of my thoughts are also centered around cutting the amount of time I spend actually working:
- “I’ve got 3 days to reach my deadline but I don’t really feel like doing the work so who is it I need to talk to, to have the work done for me?”
- Whenever I start doing any kind of tedious task my mind immediately switches to how can I automate this so that I don’t have to do this boring crap again?
- If I have outsourcers working on active projects I’m thinking about how to coordinate everything while they are working.
- I’m thinking about meeting deadlines: If I have 7 days to complete a project and the project involves working with two people, I want to make sure I think out the proper dates to have materials ready for each person. On a recent project I’ve been working on, it involved working with 6 different people. 5 of those 6 people required work from the one person before they could even begin their work… so I had to make sure I thought out my deadlines correctly so the 5 other outsourcers had time to get their stuff done.
- If one of my workers fails to come through, do I have a backup plan? If I don’t have a backup plan, how long would it take for me to do the task if it’s worse case scenario?
That leads into something else important…
As you start delegating your work out to people, you’re going to quickly discover that not everything works out how it should. Sometimes your outsourcers fall through. That’s why it’s crucial you know how to do EVERYTHING you have your outsourcers doing. If they fall through, you’re going to have to suck it up and put in some work. While you don’t have to be a master of every task, it’s very important you know how to do the basics of each task.
This is for two reasons:
- You know your outsourcer isn’t messing with you
- You can work on a fix for the problem… and while the fix may not be as good as what the outsourcer can give you, it’ll work just “good enough”. An example of that recently on a project of mine was that one of my web designers was slow on getting me the images my video guy needed to start working on the sales video. If I didn’t know how to work with photoshop, I’d be screwed right now. Sure it may not be the best work ever, but it sure is better than having nothing…
Now we lead right into the “doing” aspect of the busienss… how much time should you spend doing?
Here’s something that is really funny to me…
You all know I take the lazy angle for a lot of my products I make, and I sometimes get some flak from people saying it’s fake because making money online requires hard work…
I often hear these comments from article writers and ghostwriters… people who think that making money online can only be done by slugging it out hour after hour doing some annoying task. In my opinion, this type of mindset is derived from working as an employee where you think you have to put in 8 hours a day of work to receive 8 hours of pay.
I’ve got news for you folks: we are not employees… we are entrepreneurs.
I can tell you right now if you aren’t leveraging your time online, you might as well be working a job. If you are writing article after article yourself every single day, you might as well be working somewhere from 9-5. The advantage to being an entrepreneur is you can leverage other peoples time so you don’t have to do the work yourself.
I learned this very early on with my hosting company when I was 16. I was in school all day, and eventually my company got so big I simply couldn’t do the tech support myself. My options were to spend all day responding to tech support tickets and put a cap on what I could earn per month, or I can outsource my tech support so I can spend the two hours that I had a day to work on my business pushing it forward.
Do you see where I’m getting with this?
Figure out everything you need to do in order for you to work no more than 2 hours per day while growing your business, and I guarantee you that you will see your income explode.
Any comments and thoughts? Feel free to share ‘em below.
