Post a Productivity Tip

[WalkinDude]

1. If you are building a commercial ecommerce site with tangible products, ask your granny, mother-in-law or someone who's never seen the site to buy something, then watch what they do (without interfering). It can be an eye-opener & non-techy folks will probably be your real customers.

2. In relation to the above, remove every possible hurdle between the customer & checkout. Each hurdle loses you a percentage of potential sales.

Really agree with this point. When testing out a new idea. Getting someone with absolutely no interest, aptitude, or tech savvy to try it out gives you information you'd be wise not to ignore.

.....

Tip. Don't be afraid to retrain, take a course. Personally the shorter the course the better I like it. But amazing what you can learn in say 12 weeks.

I think one of the most underrated skill sets amongst domainers is the importance of becoming skilled at marketing or at the very least understanding the basics of it. I had a rather costly disdain for marketing that I sense when reading threads in here sometimes. But like it or loathe it, it is essential.

 

[Edwin]

Think about "pain vs gain". "pain" is anything you have to do to keep your business running, e.g. renewing domain names, and it does not help you make more money. "pain" activities may be possible candidates for outsourcing. "gain" activities are optional activities which are going to help you make more money, e.g. deciding to attend a domaining conference, identifying a valuable new business sector to get into, making an industry alliance or new contact etc.

Think about how you can spend less time on your "pain" activities, e.g. outsourcing, efficiency gains, and more time on your "gain" activities.

There is a third category of activities: "time suck" which are neither things that need to be done to keep the business ticking over, nor things that will generate more money.

If at the end of an activity you think
A) I didn't actually NEED to do that for my business to keep ticking over
AND
B) By doing it I haven't advanced my business at all
THEN
it's a "time suck" activity and better either abandoned entirely, or relegated to hobby/spare time at the end of the working day - but then be honest with yourself and treat it as what it is: a bit of fun.

So for example, learning to be "a little bit good" at something when it would genuinely be better for your business and more cost-effective to outsource that thing from the start is definitely a time suck. Ditto spending a lot more time learning to be "expert" in something, if you're then rarely going to actually carry out that activity and have no intention of providing it as a service to others.

A specific example: setting out to learn CSS and HTML from scratch if you don't know them at all and all you're really going to "save" is the $50 it would cost to buy a decent Wordpress template.

Productivity tip: get rid of the time suck activities FIRST. Then outsource the "pain" and focus on the "gain".

 

[Edwin]

BTW, it's worth considering that increased productivity manifests itself in 2 ways:
A) Achieve more in the same amount of time
B) Achieve the same amount in less time

Most info sources I've seen are focused on A), but it's just as valuable if you're satisfied with your current "output" to work out how to achieve that same output more quickly, freeing your time up for other things.

 

[Admin]

Another thing to look at is your To Do list in general.

Focus on 3 really important goals (not 10, this is too many to retain any focus) and do a weekly cadence to see how you are progressing. Focus!

Admin

 

[PoshTiger]

Stick an SSD into a 2.5" external housing and use that as a glorified USB stick to carry data around on.

While it's admittedly going to be much larger than a USB stick, if you're regularly having to cart big files around you'll find that you can read/write to a SDD from 2x to 10x faster than you can to even the top USB sticks on the market. Plus of course you can get drives up to 1TB in size.

(Of course if you only have USB2 rather than USB3, then the above is irrelevant since the speed limiter is the interface, not the thing plugged into it)

I use this for my media as you can usually plug them into any newish TV and they play fine as they require very low power.

 

[accelerator]

When lacking motivation, listen to "motivational" playlists using Spotify. This also works for non-business activities such as housework, and can make them much more exciting.

 

[accelerator]

Carry a small notebook and pencil (or pen) around with you at all times. When a business idea strikes, write it down straightaway. If you don't have these, invest the £3 or so it will cost to get them. This is the single biggest return on investment you may ever make, as it may allow you to capture a multi-million pound idea instead of forgetting it.

Rgds