Warren Buffet spends 80% of his working hours thinking. No wonder he is so thoughtful and sagacious! The rest of us including myself spend far too much time doing busy work and getting caught up. If we spent more time thinking and strategizing we might rearrange our workload in a more meaningful way to have more time to focus on the really big things.
3 hours Tuesday night is enough for me!
The question is, should we think an hour per day? Should we ponder during long walks? Or should we go to the beach to be away from the stress of the office to do some serious thinking? For me, a weekly thinking session is perfect. I can write down all of my issues during the week and then think for a few hours on Tuesday night. Tuesday night is a magical time of the week to meditate on business issues. I had a dream years ago where a Rabbi told me to meditate on business issues midnight on Tuesday evening and that miracles would happen. Good things happens and my decisions were much better when made on a Tuesday night as Tuesday is astrologically suited for business!
Where should you do your thinking?
Offices are good for being busy and having meetings. But, not for thinking. Sometimes it is good to think in a calming environment like the beach at night. Or perhaps a trip to the forest might help. I sit in my car next to the offices of creative people in the media district of Los Angeles. I pick up on the though waves of some of the most brilliant people in the city and that does miracles for my ability to come up with ideas for writing and business.
To make time to think, figure out what not to do
If you spend some time and make a list of all the things you do in a month, how long each task takes, what you can outsource, you will be in great shape. The next step is to make a pecking order of how valuable each task is that you do. The least valuable tasks are tasks you should either let stack up, or simply not do at all — otherwise, you won’t have time to think.
To really amount to something
If you want to really be big in business, that is not going to happen by just working the way others do. Those who are ultra-successful are masters at identifying priorities, and opportunities that others miss who are just too busy. So, you need to become a master at picking what not to do, otherwise you won’t be able to focus.
Focusing on Facebook
My personal story was that after a lengthy analysis of my life and business, social media proved to be the most effective avenue of growing my business. I had tried seventeen social media channels and Facebook delivered the most results. I redid my Facebook campaign. I spent a few more hours on it per month. My clicks went from 300 per month to 8000 which is a miracle. I spent time picking the best photos, and analyzing the click ratios of each post that I put on my Facebook feed. My work paid off in a huge way which is driving huge traffic to my site. I have no idea how big this can become, but maybe one day I’ll have 100,000 followers on facebook and 50,000 clicks per month. Anything is possible.
Identifying what was popular on my blog
I had a premonition that my business blog would grow huge. It has been growing faster than normal recently. But, the real growth happened when I stopped trying to write quantity and stopped writing about what interested me. I tuned into what my readers like to read about and put more emphasis on that. I am spending the same amount of time now, but getting better results since the articles are catered to our readers.