Another helpful exercise: sort your tasks by payoff horizon, from immediate need to long term investments. Immediate needs like invoices and bill pay, resolvin

Another helpful exercise: sort your tasks by payoff horizon, from immediate need to long term investments. Immediate needs like invoices and bill pay, resolving service disruptions and support tickets can be the loudest contenders for your time. Make sure you set aside some time to build tools to address the root cause of your biggest time wasters: automate repeated tasks, build diagnostic tools to speed up support responses, restructure systems to prevent bugs which happen repeatedly. Once you've matured your operations, invest time in documenting them so you can sell the business (or delegate to staff.) Don't allow short term demands to derail your progress toward accomplishments that will make life better in the long run.