Why Multi-Tasking Is Worse Than Marijuana For Your IQ
So you face these challenges and important issues …
1. Your business is facing too many competitors.
2.Your sales are poor
3. Wondering how you can convert your social media connections to
customers.
4.You lack effective digital marketing know how
5.You dream BIG
6.You enjoy learning new ideas
7.Your current education isn’t suffice for digital marketing
8.You spread yourself thin through multi-tasking
9.You have a lot to do but little time
About Author
Hie ! Iam Cain Ndhlovu the founder of Sunrise Digital Marketing Agency in Harare, Zimbabwe. I help startups and entrepreneurs
through provision of outsourced digital marketing services that generate sales
on their behalf so that their businesses can grow to medium sized enterprises.
In summary the benefits gained from this are; (1) increased and sustainable sales (2) relieving the marketing function / helping entrepreneurs focus on less (3) gaining digital marketing skill (4) achievement of business goals .
I do relate …
Here is my own story. A generous friend called Thando helped me in 2007
to get employment as a Sales Negotiator at a real estate agency.
As the national economy went under my father always told me to start my
own thing. So the entrepreneurial nature of commission based employment
resonated with me but no one told me about what needed to be done to earn the
commission.
The property market had vicious competition. I was not prepared for it. I
was just a school leaver who only knew poem writing.
I still have fond memories of my masterpiece Wilderness Wanderer which talked about a beautiful girl searching
for true love. Indeed, I was equipped with a table knife for a gun fight. I
lost the fight because I was eventually fired.
I joined another estate agency. This time I wasn’t fired but the agency
owner simply told me the words, “maybe selling real estate isn’t for you.” I
left on my own.
Ultimately, I had to answer one question, “How
can I improve my sales?”
I wasn’t prepared to quite yet. Being penniless and at the deep end I
tried to make do with what was there.
So I managed to turn poem writing into property article writing. Noticing
the new development my friend helped me set up a blog.
I am forever grateful for this because the blog published my property
articles on the internet thereby marketing myself to a wider audience at zero
cost (blogger is free).
A
turning point …
The year 2014 was a turning point because after years of try and error
the new approach finally paid dividends as I earned USD 1 000.00.
It all started when I wrote an article titled,
This article resonated with a Harare lady. She had just purchased a Msasa
(Harare) house from a seriously-ill seller and there was an outstanding
balance.
After reading the post she decided to clear this balance by selling another
property - a piece of land in Madokero (Harare).
I was the real estate agent she commissioned to do the job on her behalf.
Finally, I had discovered the winning formula!
Success happened when I was at my last real estate agency. Of course I
wasn’t fired this time but I left with full honors!
Are you smoking marijuana ? If your
answer is yes then you must be really worried because the drug will reduce your
IQ.
Being that as it may if you are multitasking
you must be more worried than the drug addict because multitasking damage IQ
more than marijuana – research has shown.
According to
the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, researchers studied
1,100 workers at a British company and found that multitasking with electronic
media caused a greater decrease in IQ than smoking pot.
The research indicates an increasing
addiction to technology, with people checking emails and text messages
constantly when they should be paying attention to something else like a
conference call.
The constant barrage of messages, which researchers
termed “infomania,” was shown to result in a 10-point decrease in IQ among
participants.
Successful Entrepreneurs Focus On Key
Activities
Apart from information technology related multi-tasking
entrepreneurs do multi-tasking in their businesses too.
The effects of this is that it reduces quality of work
because if you work on two things at once, you aren’t devoting your attention
to any one thing. With limited focus, you’re bound to make mistakes.
Your brain simply can’t juggle several tasks at once
efficiently.
A leading entrepreneurship thinker respected by Silicon
Valley called Dr Alexander Osterwalder says
your company has nine parts namely; value propositions, key activities,
channels, customer relationships, revenue streams, key resources, key partners,
key activities and cost structure.
He called this the business model
canvas.
Osterwalder says you do not necessarily need to do all nine things
yourself but you can let other people do many of these things for you through ways
like outsourcing, joint ventures and strategic alliances between non-competitors.
There are however, those you really need to do like key activities. Key
activities are things you need to be expert at. Key activities differ with the
industry you are in.
Example of these industries are production, problem solving (e.g consulting
and engineering) and supply chain management.
Having other people do for you other things of the business helps you in
a big way to focus on key activities thereby increasing your chances of
success.
Toyota outsource to BMW, Subaru and Mazda
In 2013 Toyota became the world’s largest-selling automaker.
According to Forbes Toyota outsources about 70% of vehicle production
using only those suppliers who have proven their ability to deliver on time,
maintain quality, control cost and continue to innovate.
However, the company tightly controls design and engineering which are
their key activities according to the business model canvas.
Here are examples;
Toyota 86: designed and built by Subaru
Toyota Yaris: designed and built by Mazda
1.
Not marketing your website or blog
Many believe
that once a site is live it will market itself and visitors will flock to it in
their millions. This is not true. Why ? Because without real efforts to
distribute your site’s content especially on social media and search engines
your site is wasted resource.
There are
over 1 billion websites on the internet today so what are the chances of
someone stumbling upon yours?
2.
Having unrealistic expectations
Sometimes
this is caused by the assumption that online initiatives have overnight
results. Yes there are cases of exceptional success but these are rare at best.
If you are wise you don’t base strategy on exception but on rule . The rule is
that online success is built upon hard work not shortcuts.
3.
Engaging in shady practices
A programmer
once told me he could improve my blog’s ranking on Google for certain key
words. When I asked him to explain how I discovered that his methods were what
Google Inc call SEO spam or black hat methods that may involve tricking the
search engine into giving you a better search ranking for certain key words.
Google has
invested millions for combating SEO spam that is why they have developed Google
Penguin a software dedicated to punishing websites involved in what it may deem
black hat methods.
Being
penalized by Google is something difficult to fix.
4.
Marketing to everyone
Many
companies erroneously measure a website’s success by the quantity not quality
of visitors. For start-ups, micro and small enterprises successful marketing is
usually niche marketing.
A site require the right visitors because at
the end of it all you need visitors who will convert to customers.
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