Do Productivity (Or Procrastination) Have Long Tails?

It is estimated that more than half of the searches done on Google daily are unique. ie not everyone is searching for Justin Bieber, although according to trending topics in Twitter it may seem that way. As I work in real estate I will give an example from that. Valencia Property may be a general search term but “3 bed townhouse near the beach in Valencia” may well get you a very much better result. (The Google results are in red.) The person searching will find exactly what they want with the second search supposedly but a lot more people will search for the first. This means that although you are small, as a business or in this case an individual house seller, you can compete against the big guys because they will not optimise for those phrases.

Long Tail

The long tail works for publishers as they will have certain books that sell well, think “Harry Potter”, and compare with others that do not. They get subsidised by the main sellers in he hope of an explosion or maybe even just gravitas for the publisher, think “Wedgewood Teapots of the Court of King Canute” or something similar.

In the Google case it is unlikely that the long tail keyphrase search will become a regular but in the book case it is possible, although highly unlikely, that suddenly a slow seller can become a hit.

My point is the following though to go back to our title. Does productivity have a long tail? There are things that you do that are revenue generating of course in any business. There are things that are organisational and there are things that require a process. You cannot always be doing income generating activities because then the little things get forgotten, eg filling in tax returns and other small matters. Those little matters may though become a major part of the business in the future.

A blog post done out of necessity, “Oh I haven’t posted for a week on my blog!” may be the thing that leads to a huge explosion in visits to your site as it can get picked up in so many ways. A new idea that you investigate online may just fester in the back of your mind for a few months before “Bingo!” you come up with a fantastic monetising method for it. So many different things can happen from any given input that it is difficult to actually qualify what constitutes productivity and what is just messing around on the web or having a yap with friends or simply procrastinating.

So just to tell you where this post comes from. I spent over an hour setting up Google Chrome this morning as Flock, the browser I have been using for two years, was becoming slower and slower over time. I have been dilly dallying over changing it as I have Flock set up extremely well to help me in my workflow. That hour was not massively productive in the traditional sense of the word, browsing what could be installed and installing it. However, the seconds and microseconds I save over the next few months using the tools I installed and the faster browsing speed should easily make up for that hour and I would suggest that within a week I will effectively have that hour back without noticing it.

Going back to our question though, when you are definitely being productive, putting out content for your websites, making contacts and doing face to face meetings and closing contracts the ROI is easy to quantify, contracts signed = money generated I suppose. The little time-eaters are not so easy to quantify but they may be the most productive times you spend working today.

(Yes I am giving myself an excuse for not having done too much that is cash generating today)

Related Reading

1) Hobbies. The Activityholic Post

2) Brand Control

3) The Woody Allen One

Originally posted 2010-03-10 19:23:50. Republished by Blog Post Promoter