What are the biggest distractions for your business? This is an issue that I have come up against a lot lately and have decided to focus on those things that best help me build up nPost. Whether that be the media site, job board, events or other areas that we are looking into.
With Twitter, Facebook, events, coffees, Hulu, more Twitter, and even a MySpace or two it is easier and easier to lose focus on your startup. I try to ask myself one simple question:
What value does this (insert activity) contribute to my business?
With all the great events, activities, and social networking that can be done, it has been hard to step back and determine what has the most value for my business.
A number of other entrepreneurs have said they have the same issue. There is simply too much going on…
Hopefully a balance can be found, if possible.
About nathan kaiser
My biggest distraction for my business is… my other businesses. It’s probably not a good idea to split your time, energy, etc. between businesses if your goal is to have one succeed (on a large scale).
A large distraction is also my love of learning. Kolbe.com helped me define the way I work – which is to do a lot of research. I like to deep-dive into new subjects. It doesn’t hurt to know a subject well but our time is limited and often the level of knowledge was not necessary to move the business forward.
-Morgan
I think networking events can become a HUGE distraction, because it’s easy to stop being targeted about which events to attend — and “easier” to attend when there are a lot of familiar faces present. Most people I’ve spoke to don’t go into networking with any metrics, or they don’t have a good mechanism for evaluating the sales leads and word-of-mouth generated by being there.
While it’s good to maintain ties with people who support you, networking with the startup community (for example) might not be the best idea if you’re trying to sell a product to a completely different market. This is hard to say since I obviously have a vested interest in a successful startup community, with high attendance to events, but for my startup I definitely think this is a huge area to protect against waste.
You have to be brutally honest about how you spend your time. I went to the Lunch 2.0 at Windows Azure and after hearing the marketing manager read his slides for 30 minutes and admit to not having the SDK installed on his machine, it was time to go.