Thanks to darkmatter for letting us use this image!
You’re probably working on a big project that takes up most of your time — a new business, a marketing strategy, a mobile app. If you’re like most people and suffer from “shiny object syndrome“, it can be difficult to focus on one project to the near exclusion of others. Yet the most successful people in web business manage to work on one big project at a time and turn it into a win. What’s the secret?
Momentum. Everyone knows about it, but so few of us realize how much it matters. The accumulated power of days worked, items checked off the to-do list, important emails sent and blog posts written creates a base for future work and helps propel it at increasing speed.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint
How do I know this? My one big project, right now, is the blog you’re reading. Between writing, editing, emailing back and forth with our regular contributors and guest posting on other sites, time slips by a little bit too quickly some weeks. I track the blog’s progress in a few ways, but one is especially good at showing why momentum is crucial: plain old traffic stats.
I traveled for a few weeks in May and June (and met up with some of Flippa’s users in Montreal and Los Angeles!). See that low, flat line between the last week of May and the middle of June? That’s when no newsletter was being sent, no new posts were going up, and I wasn’t answering questions and linking to our blog on forums and social media. The drop was expected. What wasn’t was the amount of time it took to get our traffic stats back to normal. It took nearly three weeks for traffic to normalise — that’s one week longer than my trip!
For a more positive case study of why the accumulation of days worked has a massive effect on future work, have a look at this post on the Mack Web Solutions blog. Their traffic graph after 10 months of consistent work is shocking. This is a team that set a goal, worked towards it consistently, and saw some big results.
This happens everywhere
Web business isn’t the only place where momentum is crucial. Parents in the audience might have heard of the summer learning loss, which describes the way children lose about one month’s worth of academic skills during the summer school break. Unused learned skills progressively wane, and it then takes valuable time and effort to build up these skills again. Some countries (including Flippa’s home, Australia) have even adopted year-round schooling to counter this, since most of us don’t need kids to help out with farm work.
Interruptions have a negative effect on a smaller scale, too: apparently it takes, on average, 25 minutes for someone to fully return to their main task after being disturbed. Checking for new email, refreshing Twitter, answering the phone — these small, harmless events eat up huge chunks of productive time by interrupting the flow of ideas and concentration.
You’re not doomed
There are ways to keep momentum going strong. Let’s start with an extreme solution: the 7-day workweek. If the Monday blues are affecting your productivity and your business, you can simply get rid of Mondays altogether by working every day of the week. While the article’s author opted out of his experiment after two weeks, a regular work habit can build great momentum for shorter projects.
Not ready to give up on weekends? Jerry Seinfeld has some productivity advice for you: don’t break the chain! Working towards a goal regularly builds a habit, which in turn builds momentum. It’s easier to break a habit you’ve only held for a few days than to reset the clock after two weeks of great work, isn’t it?
As great as it is to regularly work towards a goal, time away from work is important. That’s when you gain perspective, generate new ideas and try new things that can lead to your next passion. You don’t have to sacrifice your project’s success in order to take some time off, though: as Derek Sivers wrote in his recent guest post, building a robust team lets you step away from your work when you need to, and still have confidence that your project is in good hands.
How do you do it?
Have you noticed a drop in your site’s traffic when your attention focuses elsewhere? How do you keep momentum going when you’re working on multiple projects? I’d love to hear how others make this happen!