Early in my business I remember going months without making any increase in revenue. Despite this, I was exhausted from trying to keep up with my business. I was working hard, but getting no results.<\/p>\n
Eventually I learned a distinction that changed how I viewed work. Now my business grows faster, even though I\u2019m working less than I was during my lengthy plateau.<\/p>\n
The distinction I learned was between working on<\/em> my business and working in<\/em> my business. Working in your business is the maintenance needed to survive. Working on your business is growing your success.<\/p>\n My problem was writing 7-8 articles per week, trying to sustain the blog. Eventually, I realized that most of those articles weren\u2019t increasing my traffic. It was like running against a treadmill; I was working hard, but not getting any further.<\/p>\n This distinction doesn\u2019t just apply to business\u2014it applies to your life. The more time you can spend working on your life, instead of working in it, the faster you\u2019ll be able to improve.<\/p>\n My problem was that the key distinction I was making was between work and leisure. If I wanted to improve my business, that meant grinding myself out to work more hours on it. Those hours at the grind took away from other areas of my life.<\/p>\n While working more is one way to improve, it turned out not to be the most important distinction. Instead of thinking about work\/life, I should have been focused on the difference between maintenance\/growth.<\/p>\n Work\/life balance isn\u2019t a terribly useful concept. It only suggests that you avoid working too much, it doesn\u2019t offer up an ideal solution. Maintenance\/growth is a more useful concept because the solution is obvious: maximize growth and minimize maintenance.<\/p>\n If you ask how much you should work, you won\u2019t get a consensus. Some argue that you should work as little as possible. Others suggest you should find your passion and work even more.<\/p>\n However, the question becomes trivial if you start seeing work in terms of maintenance\/growth. The goal is to minimize maintenance work and maximize growth work. Whether total work goes up or down isn\u2019t nearly as important.<\/p>\n If I\u2019m currently focused on my business, I may work far more than full-time to reach a new milestone. If I\u2019m focused on my social life, health or learning, I may work only a few hours per week. But in both I\u2019m maximizing the effort I spend on growth, so the two states aren\u2019t really that different to me.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the distinction between maintenance tasks and growth tasks is less obvious than with work and free-time. Take writing this article. Is it a maintenance task, sustaining my writing schedule on the blog? Or is it a growth task, allowing me to improve my writing skills and create evergreen content pulling in traffic?<\/p>\n There\u2019s a temptation to think of every task as a potential growth task. After all, even something as seemingly routine as washing dishes could be a chance for mastery if you are mindful of it.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to resist that temptation, however. While, in theory, almost any maintenance task could be an opportunity for growth, in practice, that is rarely the case. If a task hasn\u2019t resulted in growth in the past, then it probably isn\u2019t a growth task.<\/p>\n When I started writing, I thought creating new articles was a growth task. It took experience to learn that individual articles contribute only a small residual to growth\u2014they are mostly necessary for maintaining readership. New projects, strategic guest posts and site improvements are all more reliable growth tasks.<\/p>\n Once I learned this, I completely altered my strategy. I cut my writing from 5x to once per week, and invested considerably more time in projects. The result? Traffic remained constant and I was able to build out a business to more than quadruple my income.<\/p>\n A side lesson of this story is that many assumptions are empirically testable. \u201cExpert\u201d wisdom said article writing was a growth task. Rather than blindly following it, I ran an experiment and showed that, at least in my case, it was not.<\/p>\n Some of you might be concerned that trying to eliminate all maintenance tasks would eliminate your source of practice. After all, won\u2019t my improvement as a writer slow if I\u2019m writing only a fifth as much as I had been?<\/p>\nThe Problem with Work\/Life Balance<\/h2>\n
Making a Maintenance\/Growth Distinction<\/h2>\n
Which Tasks Maintain and Which Grow?<\/h2>\n
What About Practice?<\/h2>\n