Are you busy or are you productive?

I ran into a quote the other day that I really liked:

The main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing. – Stephen Covey

It’s a simple idea, but almost every business owner I know struggles with this at some point and many of them struggle with it all the time. Part of being an entrepreneur is being not only open to new ideas, but excited about them…maybe even having a touch of Attention Deficit Disorder in some way. So it’s natural to lose focus and check out the shiny, exciting ideas that you could be spending time on.

The problem with this is that it can make you extremely unproductive.

There’s a big difference between being busy and being productive – I threw together a quick illustration that hopefully makes the point!

If you’re in the ‘Busy’ mode, it doesn’t really matter how efficient you are with your time, you’re not really getting much done (or at least not anything important done). Alternatively, if you’re spending all of your work time focused on the main thing, even if you’re not quite as efficient with your time, the end result is going to be really high productivity.