Did you know that most of the time, 20 percent of your effort correlates to about 80 percent of the results that you get?

Discovering the business-oriented actions that make the biggest impact for you means that you can do more of that and less of the things that aren’t as impactful yet produce more results. 

Image of people working on laptops to go with the blog post How to Decide if This is the Best Use of Your Time

Learn Your Craft

Whatever your main service or product is, it’s imperative that you continue learning about it. Not only learning about that one thing but learning about how to market your business is also imperative. Understanding your audience, how your work impacts them, and industry standards will make you an expert in your niche. 

Avoid Busy Work

It can be very easy to get into doing things just to appear busy. You may be fooling yourself every day when you get on Facebook to do “social media marketing” and end up playing Words with Friends instead. When you sit down to work, ensure that the work you do impacts something. For instance, listing another product for sale will generate more sales. Make sure you can draw a line right to the impact of the action before you do it.

Study Any Method or Strategy Before Trying It 

When you learn about a new method, for example, a new marketing method – take the time to study it before you implement it. For example, chatbots are awesome, but they’re not right for every single business out there. Are they right for yours? Maybe. 

Set Goals for the Method or Strategy

Once you choose a new method or strategy to put into play, set goals for it. If you’ve been told this method will increase your sale by 100 percent, track and measure so you can prove that to yourself. Plus, through tracking and measuring, you can improve processes to get more out of them.

Check Your Numbers Often 

Always look at the numbers on a regular basis. Generally, you want to check the numbers before you implement a new idea and then check again after the campaign ends is a good test of a new marketing method. However, you may want to check daily for some processes to ensure it’s all working as planned. 

Give It Enough Time to Work 

When you implement any new idea, don’t think you can do it one day, and that’s it. Most business ideas, marketing plans, and the like will take more time to start generating income or results. Set a time limit but give it enough time to truly generate enough data to get a result. 

Be Willing to Change Directions 

When you check the numbers and notice things going differently than you planned, you’ll want to be able to change directions as fast as possible. The only way to do that is if you are creating goals that are measurable in a way that allows you to check the progress. 

If You Dislike Something, Stop Doing It 

Remember, if you hate doing something, you don’t have to do it. You can automate it or outsource it if it’s something that needs to be done. But you may also be able to skip it. For example, if your audience isn’t even on Instagram, why are you bothering? 

Determining the best use of your time has to do with what you like doing, what you can afford to do, and what impacts your business the most.

The trick is figuring out what impact your actions have and to compare them so that you can keep choosing the most impactful actions.