Working to accomplish a goal or working to stay busy?

I decided towards the end of 2010 to make 2011 the year I got serious about my website / blog. I have lots of ideas about things to write about and lots of “drafts” started but as of yet, no posts (this is the first post of 2011).

Instead of writing and focusing on creating value by creating great content, the first thing I did in 2011 is change the theme of this site. Why? Well, a few reasons:

1. I wanted to work on my blog.
2. I thought my old theme might have been causing some performance issues that I wanted to address.
3. I wanted to see if I could flex my designer muscles by customizing an existing theme.
4. I love the Woo Framework and wanted to take advantage of their awesome code.

After a few hours customizing this theme it finally hit me: Is the work I am doing helping me to accomplish my goal? Or is the work I am doing preventing me from accomplishing my goal?

Here I was a week and a half into the new year and I hadn’t recorded one single new piece of content. Not one scrap of words or ideas that can help others or help drive traffic to my site. I was just tinkering.

Quit Tinkering

I think that “busy work” is the cousin of procrastination. It’s just as evil, perhaps even worse. Worse because by occupying yourself with busy work you can actually get tricked into thinking that you are working towards something.

Does a site re-design help me accomplish my goal of improving my blog? Maybe. Should it have been my first priority? Absolutely not. I’m glad I did it. But I’m also glad it’s done. Now I can focus on the important part…which is writing stuff that people want to read.

How about you? Are you tinkering?