When working online, it’s easy to get distracted and find yourself down a rabbit hole of videos, games and social media posts! Today, I want to talk to you about how to reduce these distractions and become more efficient with your time and efforts when building your business online.

Knowing how to spend your time and efforts online is key. I take you through where is best to spend your time, plus the core skills that you should be focusing on to create your own successful online business.

It’s Matt here and today I want to share with you one of the challenges that we found in the early days, when working online from home.

So, when we started doing this full-time – one of the things we found that was a little bit different to traditional bricks and mortar businesses, was that when you’re online and you’re sitting in front of that little computer screen, there’s a lot of distractions! Emails are coming in, there’s this thing called Facebook, there’s cat videos to watch (which are good fun!), there’s lots of supposed activities that you need to be doing to drive traffic to your website….

But at the end of the day these are all pretty low-outcome activities, so my suggestion to you (or food for thought) is you need to know where your time is going. In particular you need to learn what are the high-value outcomes, or things, are that you can spend time on that gives you the biggest bang for your buck.

So presumably, you’re online and you like the idea of creating semi-passive income, or freeing up your time, or giving yourself leverage. And we find a lot of our students are like that. They’re basically there so that they can have these semi-passive websites that pump out money and basically, one of the reasons why is because it frees up time.

The problem is if we’re spending time on doing the useless little activities like answering lots of emails, or being on Facebook all the time, or trying to keep up with all the newsletters that you’ve signed up for, then you’re not actually freeing up your time.

So, for Liz and I, the keyword that we use is FOCUS – intense focus. So when we do go to work on a website, we’ve got a list, we’ll brainstorm a list of things that we’ll do to renovate a website, but really we need to break it down. We need to look at that list – what can I outsource what’s really essential, what’s going to give me the biggest bang for my buck?

We call it our MRA, our Maximum Return Activity. So, when I sit down, I look at my watch I know I’m here, that I’m working today from 9:30 till 3:00 and then I’m out of here. Or I just want to do a few hours work in the morning and then I’m off on my mountain bike or whatever.

So for me, I need to be really focused on what is the highest activity, and I’ve got to keep asking myself “Matt, don’t think, just do! Get into it, do it and make that phone call, or make that Skype connection, or send that really important email to try and network”. Because those sorts of things are really important.

Networking in our industry and in our niches online, look for advertisers, get my staff or my outsources to be compiling lists for me of different websites that we can approach to get certain deals or get advertisers on board or whatever, working out guest posting opportunities, getting back-linking and getting the teams going on the sites that we need to have certain jobs done. So, be aware of those sorts of things.

Now admittedly we’ve got a lot of experience, but that’s just part of your journey. When you first start out online, what I would suggest is your main Maximum Return Activity is going to be learning the process, learning the system, and spending the time on doing that.

Another big thing that I would strongly suggest (if you’re a beginner) would be to learn how to build and renovate a really good website. This is so that you learn how the traffic works, how conversions work, how you get it making money. These are really the core skills that you need and once you’ve got those, the great thing is you can outsource them!

So, they’re the main things that if I were you and I was starting out again, I would be focusing on in the first part of journey. I wouldn’t be trying to do everything at once, just learn the basics of how to build a good site, get traffic to it, get it making money, learn some basic money-making systems and away you go.

So, there you go, have a think about that, next time you jump in front of your computer.

If you want to learn how else you can free up your time and work less online, then you can find out more in our free training session – just click here to register.