And your point is?

When was the last time you emerged from a deep well of intense online research – you know, where you click one link, which leads to another, which leads to another, ad infinitum – only to wonder, “What the hell am I doing this for, anyway?”?

Obviously, in an ideal world, every activity is carefully and strategically chosen to advance you toward your goals. However, you may be one of the many entrepreneurs who fall prey to activities that actually pull you away from them.

Why is this so common? I believe there are two key, closely related reasons:

• We often move quickly but not necessarily with clear intention.

• We fail to consistently ask ourselves, “Is this necessary to get me to my ultimate goal? If so, how and why?”

I recently took a dive into the Black Hole of Link Clicking as part of my weekly productivity session with accountability buddy Nancy Tierney of Firecracker Communications. When I was reporting in at the top of the next hour, I expressed my frustration with all the backing-and-forthing my task seemed to entail, but then I had the most delightful realization:

Every single step I had taken had a clear, well-defined purpose.

Wow.

Yes, I did some back-and-forth clicking, and it was always to gather additional necessary information for the next small step, or to check my work before hitting “enter,” or to do something else that would specifically result in the outcome I was creating. In other words, every action I took was intentional and purposeful.

As someone who has more than once wondered how and why I’d gotten so far down a particular rabbit hole, this was a huge achievement. Thank goodness I had easy access to celebrational chocolate.

What’s been your experience with staying focused on your goals and being strategic in your choice of activities to get there? If you have any especially useful tools to help in this regard, please, please share them; this is an area where there’s no such thing as “too many useful ideas.”

And if you have not nearly as many such experiences as you’d like, I encourage you to check out Zoom In: How to Do What’s Important and Let the Rest Go. This e-book will take you less than an hour to get through, and you’ll have a ton of ideas to pick and choose from. You’ll find several that will work great for you.

(BTW, thanks to synx508 for posting the image of the deep well in the Creative Commons Section of Flickr.)

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