Find Shortcuts to Success

Stunt time-wasting projects and focus on winners

Having trouble prioritizing projects?

Reduce the frustration of poor results when you analyze the potential for the effort, in time and cost, before you tackle projects. Share on X

Many creators enamored by social media wonder why they don’t see sales results from their time spent developing concepts, writing, recording and posting.

The effort to impact matrix helps highlight projects that aren’t likely to move the needles towards goals and those that for the time and money spent are most likely to generate desired leads, sales or other desired actions.

It’s a no-brainer to execute easy tasks that yield significant impact. An interview by a popular media outlet can stimulate tremendous interest and sales for the amount of time to prepare and record the event.

For content creators, writing books and building courses take a significant time commitment, yet produce the most revenues. Social media posts, on the other hand, likely don’t convert for the time spent. This reassessment may call for eliminating social media, but to spend less time in the aspects to create and monitor. It may appear that doing webinars and speeches might be more worthwhile.

A software developer was so excited about something they built when they took it to Seed Stage, a venture capital consultancy. But the Seed Stage team ran their project through a session to review ten questions every start-up needs to answer. While the develop was excited about what their product could do, this exercise showed they had failed to determine any need or desire for it.

Stop wasting time on projects that don’t yield results. Step each item on your list through the effort to impact matrix to rerank your priorities for a better overall chance of success.

Weed out the losers right away. What are the things that take a lot of time and money, but aren’t converting? Look more closely at tasks that always wind up taking longer and don’t net positive cash flow, donations or even fun that make it worth all the trouble.

Periodically revisit efficiencies of projects and products. With regular pruning, expect progress with better time ~ and money (because time is money, right?) ~ management.