What if you’re solving the right problems…

But at the wrong time?

Focusing all your energy on fixing the parts of your business that won’t make much of an impact (at least not yet)?

Things like:

• Obsessing over your website’s low conversion rate, while overlooking the fact that there’s not enough quality traffic to the site to begin with.
• Tinkering endlessly with your job candidate selection and interviewing process, while overlooking the fact that you’re not actually attracting any solid applicants.
• Agonizing over your company’s visual branding, while overlooking the fact that there’s nothing that truly differentiates your product from any other.

Just because you’ve spotted a problem doesn’t mean that it should be your immediate priority. Before you commit to finding a solution, stop and ask yourself:

“Is this problem the critical bottleneck that’s currently getting in the way of achieving my goal?”

In other words, is there a more pressing problem that requires your attention first? An issue that will limit the potential positive impact you’ll get by solving that original problem?

• Fixing your website’s low conversion rate won’t help much if your website gets little targeted traffic.
• Perfecting your job candidate selection and interviewing process won’t help much until you figure out why you’re not attracting any solid applicants.
• Creating the most stunning visual branding for your company won’t help much if prospects don’t see why your product is the perfect fit for their particular needs.

If you’re not addressing the critical bottleneck, you want to take a moment to think about where you could better invest your limited resources.

There’s always an opportunity cost to focusing on any one problem over another. If you focus your time, money, and energy on solving problem B (“your website’s low conversion rate”), you have that much less time, money, and energy left to solve problem A (“lack of traffic to your website”).

What will you do today to start focusing on the right problems at the right time?

Will you take a step back and ask yourself if the parts of your business that you’re trying to fix are actually the parts that most urgently require your attention?