This evening we decided to have tacos for supper. I volunteered to cook dinner.
Started cooking up the lean ground beef, good so far. Got the onions, mushrooms and peppers ready. Looked for soft tortilla shells. None in the fridge or freezer. Looked for hard taco shells, none in cupboard. Now what? We are a 15 minutes drive (each way) from the store.
Well, I decided to make my own taco shells. They did it on survivor so it can’t be that hard. (Peanut gallery said it’s harder than it looks, I didn’t believe her.)
Round one: Found an empty wrapper for the soft whole wheat tortilla shells. Read ingredient list. Decided all the additives were not required. Made a thin whole wheat batter and heated up the pan. Poured the batter in… ended up with something resembling crepes.
Round two: Broke down and looked at recipe book. Tortilla shells are made from dough, I never really wondered before. Made some nice dough. Floured the counter, and rolled out the first tortilla shell. Nice. Problem! Can’t get the shell off the counter in one piece. Started again and kept adding more flour as I rolled it out. Hard to get them really thin and how do you get the excess flour off the bottom without tearing them? Heated up pan and did up the flour tortillas. Success.
After 2 hours of making shells plus another 30 minutes of cooking we finally ate dinner at 9:30 pm. Still have to clean up the flour.
Effective use of my time? Hardly. I could have went to the store and saved over an hour.
It’s much the same in business.
You must always be asking yourself if what you are spending your time on now is the most effective thing you could be doing for the business. Sure you need to balance long and short-term objectives, but focusing on the right things each day is how you really make the dough.
