Those Ten Minute Tasks
Every business has the ‘ten minute tasks’ don’t they?
- The quick email reply – it will only take ten minutes
- The quick call back from a voicemail – it will only take ten minutes
- The quick price update on your website – it will only take ten minutes
Well, these will all probably take far longer than ten minutes. Data says that ‘quick ten minutes’ takes you out of your business for 24 minutes. Sounds excessive doesn’t it?
So let’s have a look for ourselves. Let’s assume all these tasks take ten minutes and I’ll keep things simple as maths is not my strongest subject.
For arguments sake, let’s say you have 6 ten-minute tasks a day. Reading and responding to 6 emails.
That’s 60 minutes out of your day. 5 hours out of your week. 20 hours out of your month.
Twenty hours! Imagine what you could do with 20 hours a month. You could spend that 20 hours working on your business. Writing content, learning facebook ads. Scheduling a whole month or two of social media posts. Re-writing your website. Writing several blogs. Crafting a newsletter. Crafting emails. Updating your knowledge centre.
The list is endless but they’re all tasks that will move your business forward. Responding to emails will not. That’s a job and it’s not your job.
Unlike those 10 minute tasks. So get rid of them to someone that will probably do them a lot quicker than you will. Particuarly those outbound calls as they are NEVER ten minutes when you’re the business owner as you’ll have a mardle (nice Norfolk word there).
Now be honest with yourself – how many emails are you replying to each day. It’s certainly going to be more than 6. So using the very conservative maths I’ve used, how long are you spending each month on those 10-minute tasks?
Be the CEO, not the worker.
