I was thinking about SleepyBlogger Robyn Tippins‘ reply to our discussion whether onsite blogging provides value: “I find it so difficult to live-blog a session and actually pay attention to the speaker. Some are better at this I think.”

So the conversation seems to have shifted from whether “onsite blogging” provides value, to how difficult it is to “liveblog a session” because of the multiple tasks involved:

• Pay attention to the speaker
• Live blog the session

Here’s a secret I learned as a former journalist. I together with the reporters from the Reuters, Associated Press and Bloomberg news wires, sat listening to Microsoft, HP or some other company make their announcement, and we used our strategies, following that, we’d file our reports (the newswire guys generally filed their reports within 30 seconds to a minute to someone in the newsroom), the reports would go live.

Due to our ability to effectively process the information successfully, their reports would be circulated all over the world, and my news stories would make it to page one of Singapore’s business daily, or it’d make the front page of the tech session.

Compared to everyone else, we have the same brain, the same abilities, but yet we’re able to achieve different results.

So the question is:

What made the difference?

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Before we get into that, consider all the tasks you have to get through every day.

You need to:

• Check and respond to email
• Collaborate with joint venture partners
• Develop your own products (or project manage if you’ve outsourced it)
• Update your blog or submit news articles/press releases
• Manage the sales team in following up and marketing your services
• The administrative stuff like filing paper, and probably the least exciting activity (at least for me…) filing your taxes

On top of that, we all only have 24 hours to finish this in.

So again: What makes the difference?

Your time planning and execution strategy you use make all the difference.

I won’t go into time planning, but focus on the execution aspect.

Many business owners and new entrepreneurs fail because:

• They fail to realize what’s important
• They fail to do what’s important
• They fail to follow up on what’s important

The Pareto principle states that 20% of the people in a city in Italy owned 80% of it’s wealth. Since then, the Vilfredo Pareto’s principle has been generalized to:

“20% of what you do will lead to 80% of your results” — So of the 10 things you do, you need to complete 2 of them to become really successful. The problem is that most people choose to do maybe 5 or 6 things.

Unfortunately, those 5 things Continue reading →