When I was 17 years old, I used to work and study for about 20 hours a day. I went to school, did my homework during breaks and managed a not-for-profit organization at night. At that time, working hard landed me countless national campaigns, opportunities to work with A-list organizations and a successful career. As I got older, I started thinking differently. I realized that working harder is not always the right path to success. Sometimes, working less can actually produce better results.
Consider a small business owner, who works non-stop. However, working hard won’t help him compete with his multi-million competitors. Time is a limited commodity. An entrepreneur can work 24 hours a day and 7 days a week (the most amount of time anyone can work, really). His or her competitor can always spend more money, build a bigger team and spend a lot more time on the same project. Then why have small startups accomplished things that larger corporations couldn’t? Facebook bought Instagram, a 13-employee company for a billion dollars. Snapchat, a young startup with 30 employees is turning down offers from tech giants Facebook and Google. Part of their successes were based on luck — the rest is based on efficiency.
There’s a notable distinction between being busy and being productive. Being busy doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being productive. Being productive is less about time management and more on managing your energy. It is the business of life. We need to learn how to spend the least amount of energy to get the most benefits. I am so lucky to work with an amazing team here at Filemobile. Everyone always challenges me and helps me sort my priorities to become more productive. I learned to reduce my work week from 80 hours to 40 hours, and get a lot more work done in the process. In other words, less is more.
Have you ever wondered where the 40-hour work week came from? In 1926, Henry Ford, American industrialist and founder of Ford Motor Company, conducted experiments with interesting results: when you decrease your daily working hours from 10 to 8, and shorten the work week from 6 days to 5, your productivity increases.
The more you work, the less effective and productive you are going to become over both short and long term. “Scheduled Overtime Effect on Construction Projects”, a report issued by The Business Roundtable in 1980 states.
In an article for AlterNet, editor Sara Robinson referenced research conducted by the US military that revealed that “losing one hour of sleep per night for a week will cause a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level.” You can get fired for coming to work drunk, but it is deemed acceptable to pull an all-nighter.
It’s important for us not to overwork ourselves and get enough sleep to maintain a high level of productivity. Next time you’re wondering why you may not be working productively, the reason may be simple as you being one of 70% of people who doesn’t get enough sleep. Once you’ve started your small business it’s important to have a good Internet presence. That means you need a good website. Many small businesses supplement their bricks and mortar sales with online sales, and they do this by selling downloadable files from their website. The best way to do this is to go with a web host that specializes in developing sites specifically for selling digital files — a web host such as MadBeeTech at http://www.madbeetech.com will provide you with such a site.
Once your site is live, be proactive as far as marketing it and gaining traffic. No visitors means no sales. A website doesn’t just magically appear near the top of Google search results — a site owner needs to spread the word about the existence of the site. Getting backlinks — having other sites link to your site — is key in improving your search engine results. That usually involves the work of SEO professionals to optimize your website such that Google likes the content and also finds other, authoritative websites linking back to your website. An SEO firm such as SEO MadBeeTech at http://seo.madbeetech.com can help your site rise in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
According to the Pareto Principle, 20% of the effort produces 80% of the results; however, 20% of the results consumes 80% of the effort. Instead of working harder, we should focus primarily on those efforts that produce 80% of the results and forgo the rest. We will have more time to focus on the most important tasks. We should stop saying “yes” to tasks that bring low or almost no result.
This begs a question: what should you say “yes” and what should you say “no” to? If you can’t figure if something is going to be worth your time, consider running a simple split test. Track everything you do and optimize if it is possible.
Most of us say yes more often than we should because it is so much easier than saying no. Nobody wants to be the bad guy.
At some point in my career, I was managing a very large community and couldn’t handle it. I tried to do everything myself. I burnt out, but the community ended up taking over and managing itself. Surprisingly, members did a better job than I have ever done. I learned the power of community and why brands need user-generated content.
Consumers understand what they want and how they want it better than any marketer. Did you know that, according to Octoly, user-generated videos are viewed 10 times more than brand-generated videos on YouTube? When seeking information about a particular brand,over half (51%) of Americans trust user-generated content more than the content on the brand website (16%) or media coverage on the brand (14%). It’s important for marketers to open up and seek help from the brand’s community.
Being a great content marketer is not about creating the best content, but building a great community that will generate high-quality content for you.
In the business world, reputation is everything. If you perform a Google search on your business name and see negative information or reviews about your business, you need to get on top of things and work to either remove those search results (very hard to do) or at least move them down in the results so they aren’t as noticable to searchers (easier to do). For this task seek the help of an online reputation management (ORM) firm such as Fix Your Search Results at http://www.fixyoursearchresults.com.
It’s important for us to realize we can seek help when needed. We cannot do everything ourselves. It is better for you to let someone who can do a better job taking over some of your tasks. It will give you more time to focus on your most important tasks. Instead of wasting your time trying to figure something out yourself, let the experts help you.
A lot of time, even if your friends can’t help you, having them around can help you become more productive.
“We found that perfectionism trips up professors on the way to research productivity. The more perfectionistic the professor, the less productive they are,” Dr. Simon Sherry, a Dalhousie University Psychology Professor who conducted a study on perfectionism and productivity, tells University Affairs magazine. Dr. Sherry found a robust correlation between increased perfectionism and decreased productivity.
A week ago, I spent 15 minutes writing a basic Python program. The idea was to generate content from the data, which I pulled from Twitter API using a Ruby bot, and use Hootsuite to bulk schedule them. While it used to take me an entire day to accomplish, it now takes me less than 5 minutes. Nowadays, whenever I do something repetitively (more than 5 times), I would ask myself if I can find a program to do it for me.
You don’t have to be a coder to able to automate your repetitive tasks. It’s nice to have the skills or the resources, but it’s not a requirement. If you cannot build it, buy it.
People often forget that time is money. People usually do things manually because it’s easy and requires almost no research. It is manageable to moderate 30 images on Instagram for your user-generated campaign. But if you have to manage 30 000 photos and videos from 5 different platforms, you need a good digital asset management software. At Filemobile, we help people to solve that problem generate even more user-generated content. Just like managing rich media, you can easily purchase a software to solve almost all of your problem on the internet.
If you can optimize websites for search engines, you can optimize your lives to grow and reach your maximum potential.
There are so many research studies out there that can provide answers in a range of areas. For instance, did you know that most people are more easily distracted from noon to 4PM? This random statistic comes from recent research led by Robert Matchock, an associate professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University. Even if you can’t find the data you need, it doesn’t take a lot of time to run a split test.
For instance, last week we did a few tests to figure out the best way to optimize images for Twitter in-stream preview.
Keep asking yourself how you’re going to measure and optimize everything you do.
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