5 Business To Dos That Are SECRETLY Wasting Your Time

Odds are you're running out of time in your day to get all the things done right. But I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you're wasting your time on tasks that aren't going to move the needle in your business or are going to make you money in your business. But you're not alone. So many of us get sucked into these tasks because we think we need to do them, when actually you've got to stop doing them. So I'm going to break down some of the most common tasks that most of us waste our time on and what to actually do instead to start seeing better results in your business. The first thing is spending time on social media. Now, I'm going to talk about this in a specific way. Spending time on social media, meaning creating content for social media like Instagram or TikTok or YouTube. Yes, I said YouTube. Because hear me out. Spending time on these platforms are going to waste your time if they aren't making you sales. So what you need to be able to do is to track which platforms are sending you traffic, meaning which platforms. What content are you creating is getting people to your sales page, to your coaching page, to your work with me page. This is something that I tell my clients as one of the first things to do in my YouTube coaching experience is to get their Google Analytics set up. Because if you keep creating Instagram content and Instagram content is not sending people to your sales page, you're not going to make any more sales. Because it can feel like as business owners, what we need to do is Instagram when Instagram may not work for you. In fact, one of my coaching clients, Emily, actually said this about Instagram. On Instagram, people have to follow you for months to build that Trust. But on YouTube, she only needed one video to make a sale. She had somebody watch one of her videos videos and then immediately bought and worked with her. So think about the time you're putting on Instagram and how if you redirected that to a platform that was actually sending you quality leads. So your action step here is figure out where you're posting content. Is it sending you sales? You can do that by setting up Google Analytics. I will link to a Google Analytics, Carrie Poppleton's YouTube channel who can help you get Google Analytics set up. But if you keep doing something that's not sending you sales, you're going to keep not getting sales. The next thing you're wasting time on is overcomplicating the content creation process. This is a time waster because I see so many business owners spend so much time on content to make it perfect, whether it's scripting their content, whether it's filming their videos, their real, their post for Instagram, their stories. And what I do see is the perfection leads to procrastination. And when we're not posting content consistently, we're not building our audience and we're not making sales. And so that can immediately lead to frustration and panic because we're not making sales, which is what we need to keep our business going. What you really need to do is get out of your head when it comes to perfectionist because people want to connect with real people. Especially with AI becoming more and more prevalent in our lives. We want to be connecting with a real life person that we can realize is a real life person. Like I'm going to assume you're watching my videos because my personality shines through and I talk like I'm speaking to a friend. And you probably don't think I'm an AI person because I show as much personality as possible. And that's what's going to matter in content creation in 2025 and beyond. Getting out of that perfectionist mindset and just being you to make that connection with your viewer. So what is your action step here? Think about focusing on a minimalistic YouTube strategy. One clear message for each video. Simple production and straightforward editing. Delivering the value. If you want to hear more about my minimalistic strategy for YouTube, I just wrapped up an entire series on it. I will link to that playlist right here for you to watch next. Another thing us business owners are spending a lot of time on is actually, I would love to hear from you in the comments. If you're considering leaving Instagram for YouTube or you've already left Instagram, let me know kind of where you're at, where you're spending your time creating content down in the comments. The next thing we generally as business owners spend way too much time on is administrative tasks. Where it really becomes a time waster is when we are doing it over and over and over again manually. Things like scheduling, sending invoices, or responding to the same email over and over again. It's going to take your time away from focusing on the things that are making you money, like maybe making a weekly YouTube video. What you want to do is look at how can you automate these things. And I know getting this off my plate was huge, not needing to send invoices all the time. I use Funnel Gorgeous, which has not only an invoicing system, but also a contracting automation. So when I have a client sign up for YouTube coaching, not only does an automatic message go out welcoming them to the program, an automatic contract goes out asking them to sign the contract. Once they sign the contract, they're automatically added to the portal of the YouTube coaching experience classroom and given the Slack link to join. And another fun fact, I have an automated Slack message happen as soon as a new client joins my Slack program. So it instantly welcomes them to the program, welcomes them to the Slack community, and lets everybody know we have a new person joining us. This all happens in the middle of the night while I'm sleeping. You can also use tools like Zapier, which we use a lot in our business and I'm looking at coming up with more ways to use Zapier. So every Wednesday we have our coaching call and we have Zapier automatically send a message in our Slack channel letting them know today is the day for our call. Here's the link to the call, here's the form to submit your questions. That's all done automatically. The action step for you here is to write a list of things that you do over and over and over and over again and start to figure out if you can find a way to automate things because I'm telling you it is going to be life changer. And I forgot the other thing that you can do do is write some templated emails for specific questions that you get asked all the time. So I know for me one of the questions we get asked a lot about the YouTube coaching experience is when does this program start? It never has a start date. You can jump in whenever you want and get started immediately. And so we have an email templated for that. We get questions about payment plans, we have an email templated for that. We have a whole file of templated emails that Aaron on my team can grab and use to send emails quicker than me having to rewrite them again. So if you start to see specific questions coming in a lot from you in your inbox, create an email, copy it and save it to like a file that says common email questions responses. I believe this next one is the most important in where so many of us business owners waste our time and it's chasing the wrong metrics. I talk so much about this in my workshop CEO day. I spend four hours in this workshop walking business owners through what metrics they need to actually be looking at and how to find those metrics and how to start tracking them to make a bigger difference in their Business. If you want to watch this workshop. And I will tell you, every time somebody watches it, it blows their mind. And we get so many responses about how it completely changed the way they were working in their business. And you can get that four hour training at trina little.com forward/CEO. It all comes down to so many of us focus on vanity metrics. And that's okay, I get it. Those are the things that people see and kind of tell people. Our credibility kind of gives people our authority. And it does stink because while I know a heck of a lot about YouTube, I may not have the 100,000 subscriber number here on YouTube, but. But I'm making hundreds of thousands of dollars in my business every year because of the strategy I do. And I'm teaching other people how to make consistent sales on YouTube because of the strategy that I use. But my numbers do not reflect that vanity metric wise. So we do have to kind of change our mindset and not worry so much about subscribers and views and followers. But things that matter, like how many people are coming to our sales page every month, how many people are coming to our lead magnet every month, what is the conversion rate? So based on the people that come to that page, how many people are opting in, how many people are buying? Are we hitting benchmarks? I talk more about what the benchmarks are in CEO day, but some of the benchmarks you want to think about is for a sales page, your benchmark is going to be around 2 to 5%. So if you're only getting 100 people to your sales page every month, you can expect on average just two to five sales a month. So. So if you want more sales, you need to focus on getting more traffic to that page. It's not about creating a whole new page or a whole new product or a whole new offer. You need to focus on how can you get more people to that page because that page is working. It is making the average conversion rate. Your problem is getting people to that page. The same thing with YouTube. I have so many clients, Trina, I'm not getting subscribers and my subscribers aren't growing. And I said, okay, let's dive in. What's working? Usually the most important thing that they need to focus on is click through rates. If their click through rate is below a 4%, I'm going to tell them that's your problem. You need to spend more time on titles and thumbnails. This shouldn't be a quick instant thing that you do while you're uploading your Videos, you need to be planning these out. You need to be spending time on titles and thumbnails because your click through rate here on YouTube, that metric matters way more than the amount of views or subscribers that you have. Your action step here, go ahead and look at whatever you're selling, whatever you're trying to get people to opt into. How many people did you get to that page in the last 30 days? How many people actually opted in or bought? What is your conversion rate for that page? If you're on YouTube, look at your last four videos on YouTube. What was your click through rate? Was it above a 4%? If either of these numbers aren't kind of hitting that benchmark for sales pages, I said 2 to 5%. For click through rate, I said 4%. That's what you need to be spending your time on. The next thing that we do so much is we take it all on and think we can't get help in our business. And we try to do it all ourselves. And I know it comes from a state of fear. We think we can't afford hiring somebody or paying somebody to do something. We have fear that are they going to take my business? Are they going to rip me off, Are they going to scam me? I understand all of that fear. But handling every task on your own, especially things that you aren't good with, and it takes you three, four, five times longer than it should, that's something we need to think about hiring somebody for. Because your time needs to be spent on making those sales. Graphic design, video editing, social media management. We can find somebody to do that and do it better, but we can't find somebody to make those sales to think about marketing messages, that's what you need to be spending your time on. The more you put time into things you aren't good at wasting more of your time than you need to, the faster you're going to get to burnout. The first thing that I ever delegated that I hired somebody for, and I'm not saying like an employee hire, you can hire contractors. The first contractor I hired was Vanessa Kynes to do my Pinterest. And I paid I think around four or five hundred dollars a month at the time. But Pinterest was sending not only my website massive amounts of traffic in the beginning of my business. It was also sending my YouTube channel a lot of traffic. But I didn't have the time to go in there and pin and set up my tailwind and all of that. That took me way too much time. It took time away from creating the YouTube videos that were also sending me people to my email list. That's where I knew I needed to spend my time. The content she could get Pinterest people to my YouTube, and I knew my YouTube could get people on my I actually want to dive more into how to start outsourcing, what you should start outsourcing, and how to prepare for that. So in my next video that is on your screen right now, I'm going to walk you through those first tasks that you should outsource, how to find a person for that, and how to set them up for success so you don't feel like it's a waste of your time. This is going to help you reclaim hours in your week and honestly make your business run smoother. And it doesn't have to break your business bank. So click that video to watch now.