1. Use the 80/20 rule
In business, this rule is the most fundamental of them all. 80% of your money comes from 20% of your clients. Find those 20% and make sure to make good business with them. Because you are high in the hierarchy, you don’t have much time to spare. For that matter, apply the 80/20 rule again. What is taking 80% of my time but only generate 20% of my revenue OR what takes 20% of my time and generate 80% of my revenue?
2. Delegate, and then delegate, and then delegate even more
Find every possible action that you could do and find someone else to do it for you. This will allow you to focus on higher goal and higher priorities. If you’re the CEO of your entreprise, do you think it is “normal” for you to answer to clients problems? Hell no! You should be focusing on your business direction, the next step to grow, etc.
3. Parkinson’s Law
Work expands to fill the time available.
Often noticed in offices, if you give job to your employee, but don’t give them deadlines, the task can take MUCH time. It expands as time is available. Don’t make time available to others or yourself.
When planning deadlines, make them short. People are fuel by last minute stress. When they do, they generally focus on what is the most important to be accomplished and they do a good job out of it.
4. Occam’s Razor
All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.
When in doubt in front of two solutions, this is the best advice to follow. Always look for what is simple, since simplicity often equals less time consuming.
5. DO
Just Do It, as Nike would say. Everyone is good to find goals and stuff they’d like to do, but almost no one is good at starting or doing it. Most will have ideas, but they won’t do it because they know that it’ll involve work in-between. Instead of being like the rest of the world, why not do the stuff that you talk about. Use a single step: “What is it that I need to do next?” The general idea behind this is to make progress slowly. In order to head toward the right direction, make sure you have a goal in mind. If possible, be descriptive as possible about the next step, and again, if possible, write a plan of what you’ll need to accomplish.
This is all good, but now, you must do the most important step, DO IT!
7 ways to create new content
1. Do a brainstorm
Throw any ideas you have on a paper, don’t judge them, let your imagination flow. When you’ll be done, you can take the time to review each and every idea you had and decide whether or not they are worth writing about.
2. Comment about articles you’ve read
If you’ve read something that interest you on another blog or in a book, you can write a post about it making sure you reference the blog or the book (this will help you get found by people looking for reviews).
3. Do a rewrite of an article you’ve read
Take this article for example. Say you don’t agree with one of those point, you could take the point that you don’t feel is good and write it in another form or simply write something else. People are always looking for options and maybe your idea could interest some of them.
4. Explain terms or techniques or whatever needs explanation
When you’re in a field that is quite complex, more than often, terms needs to be explained. You can also add examples to your explanation in order to increase your visitor understanding. The more visual, auditory and kinestetic you can add to your presentation, the better.
5. Write tutorials
You might know how to do certain things, let say a recipe. How about writing how to make that special recipe? Many are looking for “how to” guides. It’s not a mystery why the serie of “for dummies” books have been working so well, it’s because they’ve wrote about many various subjects and did their best to turn them into simple how to tutorials you follow and learn from.
6. Answer questions
When you go on the internet, you’re generally looking for answers or just to spend some time. If you have the opportunity to know the answer to questions many people are asking themselves, answer them. They might have technical problems (problems with their computer, softwares, etc), or it might be social problems (confidence, fears, etc). Those answers might also be answers you’ve been looking for yourself and have found the answer to.
7. Write short X ways to do X
It’s amazing how much people eat those. They’re efficient because they are generally short, they go straight to the point and are easy to read. When people are going through your blog or website, they generally don’t have much time to spend on reading long and boring posts, especially if you’re not going straight to the point. This will get them leaving pretty soon even though your content may be really valuable.