Where will you invest your energy in 2008?

Been really under the weather for two days so was a dud on New Year’s Eve/Day (nice timing, heh?) so have been behind on what I wanted to get done and feeling the bum on the fun I missed out on. Today I feel like $900k (close to a million bucks) so have been investing my energy in a bunch of different places faster than normal I guess. Email discussion lists, developing new products with the staff, having strategic discussions with my partner, working on the launch of a new site for Minnesota (more to come) and scrambling around like a madman.

I’m REALLY aware right now — more than I ever have been before — that you can only invest your energy once and a unit of time is gone once it passes. So one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to pick-n-choose carefully where I intend to invest my energy, be better at saying “no”, and place my energy where it can multiply.

Since I underpromise and overdeliver as a matter of doing business and in life, I have a tendency to try to do everything. Over-volunteer, try out and be involved with all the latest gadgets and technologies, read-read-and-read, and continually try to absorb and extract meaning from everything.

As I write this I’m looking at my “Firefox workspace” (a series of sites I have open in tabs): Google’s Gmail, Analytics, AdSense, Notebook, Reader; Typepad; Feedburner; Techmeme; Blogrunner; Twitter; Wikio; Facebook; a wiki I’m running; and LinkedIn. That’s just my “MAIN” workspace! I have several other bookmarks folders that I can load into new browser windows (workspaces by client project; banking and financial sites; funstuff sites; etc.).

Just writing that made me chuckle with the insanity of trying to stay on top of all that happens inside of each of those tabs. At the same time it’s incumbent upon me to stay abreast of what’s new so I’m constantly scanning my RSS feed reader, looking at both older and new offerings, applications and trying out someone’s new alpha or beta site.

I make my living doing this but Joe Average does not. If *I* am feeling deluged by everything out there, how does Joe feel?

So when the newest site in 2008 comes online and asks me (or Joe) to:

a) Fill out a new profile
b) Invite all my friends in to it
c) Start to invest energy, time and effort into using them…

…they’re not a social site competing with another social site or a Twitter vs. a Pownce. They’re competing to be SO compelling that I’ll want to either give something else up or dig down deep and come up with some energy reserve to give to them. As such, it’s going to be even tougher in 2008 to convince people to invest their energy in what you’re offering so it better be really, really worth it.