Your time is a precious resource, it’s never going to come back so you better invest it in good things than waste it in useless stuff. But how it’s possible to know what should and what shouldn’t get your time?

Decide for the right choice

Lots of time I ask myself things like:

• Should I invest my time doing this?
• Is it worth to start doing that?
• This will cost me a lot of hours, should I do it or should I pass?

Those are sometimes difficult decisions but today I have a tip that will help you choosing the right thing to do, but first of all the most important thing…

Setup your goals

It’s very important to setup your goals correctly, start by acknowledging what are you trying to achieve, the big picture. A long term goal. You have it?

Now you need to make small tiny goals that will make you feel the progress, those small steps are the important ones that will make you achieve what you are looking for.

Let’s say for example that you big goal is to get $100.000 with the last product you released, as a separate goal by itself it can seem impossible depending on your situation but if you break it by small goals that can help you reach the target, you can do it.

For example:

• Get a list of 1000 people interested in my product topic
• Send a weekly newsletter to that people and don’t miss any week
• Release a free gift and send it to the 1000 subscribers
• etc…

The magic question

Once you have your list of small goals that sum for the big important goal, you have everything ready. Now all comes back to a question, what I call “The magic question”.

Should doing XYZ help me reach my goal?

Just answer that question for every decision you want to take and the answer will tell you if you have or not to do what you wanted to.

Here is an example, in our previous case let’s say you wanted to write an ebook. So the question would be, “should writing an ebook help me getting a list of 1000 people interested in my product topic?”, probably the answer will be negative as the plan would be to sell the ebook, so that would be discarded.

Repeat now that question to every new process or project that you want to start and this will help you define your backlog.

Now that you know the magic trick, this should help you increase your productivity and take the right decisions towards deciding if its worth it or not.