One of the keys to being Lazy in business is to not get hung up on the small stuff.  There are lot of activities I think I should be doing every day, but when I look at them closer, it’s not about what my business needs, it’s about alleviating my curiosity.  Do I really need to know how many leads we got yesterday or am I just looking to count the dollar signs in my head?

The fact is that I probably don’t need to know.  In fact, there is rarely anything I can do in the short term.  The other problem is that you don’t get a good view of your business looking at it from day to day.  There are just natural variations and you need to look at it over a longer term to see what’s really happening?

So How Do I Avoid This?

I set specific days each week to work on parts of my business and then I don’t worry about it again until the next week.  I would love to know if the changes I made had any affect but I also know that I need more time to see the results.

Here’s how I break down my week:

• Monday - Gather metrics from previous week and set business goals and strategy for upcoming week.
• Tuesday - Review Marketing and sales efforts.  This could be managing our PPC campaigns our examining the results of a mail campaign
• Wednesday - Manage operations.  We have someone working on our customer service now and this is when I check in and make sure that everything is working as it should and tweak anything that needs changed
• Thursday - Project day.  There isn’t anything specific that I have for these days so I just try to focus on my list of projects
• Friday - Accounting and administration Day.  This is when I do the weekly accounting and any other administrative work that we need for our business to run

Now this isn’t to say that this is all I do each day but these are the only days that I do these activities.  If I didn’t have this schedule, I would probably waste at least a day and a half going back and reviewing these things.  By batching them together, I don’t have to worry about them the rest of the week.  Instead, I can focus on the tasks and projects that I need to get done.