This is an update to a post from about a month ago.
While chatting with some fellow business owners in a Slack channel about goal setting for 2023, a theme that came up a few times was (in my own words) trying to be less wasteful.
Waste shows up in a lot of ways… here’s the previous list with a few additions – I’ve been guilty of every single one at some point in time:
🙋♂️ Time waste – busywork, procrastinating, focusing on unimportant tasks because they’re easy, looking for 1% improvements when 80/20 is more than enough.
🙋♂️ Physical waste – things I’ve decided I don’t need anymore and can’t be bothered dealing with.
🙋♂️ Marketing waste – buying more flyers or booklets or business cards or whatever “just in case”.
🙋♂️ Promotional waste – junk with my logo on it because I think people will care about my brand as much as I do (they won’t).
🙋♂️ Digital waste – hoarding analytics, heatmap recordings, browser screenshots, cookies and other data, a very small percentage of which is useful but for the most part, is useless.
🙋♂️ Financial waste – spending cash on services that a product isn’t ready for, like SEO or digital ads.
🙋♂️ Resource waste – hiring people or contractors for longer than I really needed them.
🙋♂️ Emotional waste – working late into the night on a client request that I know from their track record is poor use of time, and will likely be changed.
🙋♂️ Clothing waste – I have old t-shirts and shoes that I “love” and can’t part with, but I’m really not sure why… I’m never going to wear them!
🙋♂️ Career waste – droning away in an unfulfilling job when you know a more purposeful calling is waiting elsewhere (and fully appreciating that changing jobs is not always easy at the best if times, let alone with a career change).
The words of the folks I was chatting to included things like “find a better way to promote this tool we just built”, which revealed several failed ad campaigns, which to me translated to contributions (probably) to some marketing, digital, financial and/or time wastage.
Waste is fascinating because there are so many ways it can manifest – anything you’d add here?
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