91. Don’t confuse activity with accomplishment.

Don’t confuse being busy with being productive. Or as one manager I know puts it, “WORK = FORCE × DISTANCE. Your team can spend the whole day pushing against the Empire State Building, but if they don’t move it, they didn’t do any work.” While this theorem originally applied to physical work, it can be applied to any kind of effort. If you didn’t get anything measurable done, then you didn’t do any work.

Here are a few strategies to turn activity into accomplishment:

• Learn from the past. Think about the last time you faced a similar task. What helped you achieve results? Start with that.

• Ask an expert. If there’s someone in your organization or a colleague in your field who has had success on a similar project, get their advice.

• Track the relationship between your efforts and your results. Don’t just count the number of brochures you sent out or the number of calls you made. Track the number of leads each activity generated. Instead of thinking only about what you are doing to improve customer service, pay close attention to how your work is directly affecting customer satisfaction numbers. Over time you’ll start to see which of your activities get the best results.

If you performed tasks all day but accomplished nothing, you did no work. You only wasted time and energy. Keeping track of what’s worked in the past is the fastest way to achieve success now.