Within my own community there are many successful people who own and run large businesses with staff either based locally or internationally, others who have a few staff and work in the town.
A characteristic shared by so many of these neighbors who are truly successful is that they rarely travel far from their businesses. Another way to interpret this might be to say that they avoid having the distractions and hours lost in travel and having to respond or react to other people's timetables. Instead, they recognize the importance of maintaining a strategic focus on their work, staying close to the pure heart of what they excel at doing.
Take a close look at your own work routine. Of the time that you allocate to being either at or in work, how much of that is productive in the sense that it creates revenue and other measurable benefit for you. If as an example, you could determine that perhaps one third of your working time is what yields the results, how much more might you create if you successfully expanded this block of time and received a corresponding increase in results?
The opportunity to spend a better proportion of your time in the activities that bring you rewards is not best served through wasting time in traveling, being away from your own work place or getting involved in roles that could be better delegated and left to others.
When a successful friend of mine was asked by a start-up business owner why he no longer did some of the basic jobs, his reply was both very simple and most illuminating. "Why", he said, "would I want to do anything that only pays me $10 or $50 an hour if I can pick up a phone and dial out for someone else to do it? That leaves me free to create ideas and products where my involvement and leadership is worth perhaps 10 or 20 times that?"
Are you doing what works and what matters? Can you let go of some of the stuff that comes across your desk and give it away, keeping your focus on what gets the best results for your own investment of time and attention?