Startups, Work Smarter: 3 Types of Work and How to Prioritize It All

There are three kinds of work small business owners do on a regular basis.

First, there’s work that gets immediate results. It might be actually delivering the service your company provides or creating the product you sell. It could be creating content for your company blog or updating product descriptions on your e-commerce website. It could also be ordering supplies or promoting your business.

Second, there’s work that should be done by someone else. This varies depending on your business and core competencies. It could be web development tasks, sending emails, or scheduling clients. Many small business owners delegate or outsource content marketing, advertising, shipping, or bookkeeping.

Third, there’s the work that contributes to long-term growth. Often this is work that requires your expertise, but isn’t the hands-on work that you sell. It’s systems work. It’s process work. It’s relationship building. It’s working on your vision (and the byproducts of it).

Prioritizing Work In Business

Many entrepreneurs probably do a lot of the first and second kind of work.

Who doesn’t want immediate results? Some small business owners (quite a few) also end up doing a lot of work that they really have no business doing because they have chosen not to invest the time or money in hiring support and delegation.

More often than not, the work that contributes to long-term growth gets the short shrift.

The problem with this is when you don’t work towards the future, you leave yourself and your business in the hamster wheel of constant hustling.

Sound familiar?

…while you’re doing it, doing it, doing it, there’s something much more important that isn’t getting done. And it’s the work you’re not doing, the strategic work, the entrepreneurial work, that will lead your business forward, that will give you the life you’ve not yet known.
– Michael E Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited