Canary activities.

Miners would often bring a canary into a mine with them to indicate when the air was getting toxic. The canary would end up dying and the miners would get out.

Canary activities are like this. They are activities if you find yourself doing them, they are a sign that you are not doing the right things and your business is not being profitable. Most of these activities are unproductive time wasters, often times making you feel like you are doing something that is helping your business. If you take the bigger picture you realize they are not.

In the case of myself, I happen to get on Myspace to promote the business. I then realized I was gravitating to multiple times during the day to check on things, and add friends. Well, all I needed to be on there, AT MOST is twice a day. When it goes three or four times, then I am wasting time. The activity is a canary activity to indicate I am being unproductive.

Other examples of canary activities are surfing the web, getting into irrelevant IM chats, surfing the web doing "research", and cleaning up your desk for the 50th time. You could be spending time writing good ad copy, calling leads and so on.

Remember cost per result. Canary activities have POOR cost per result. They are distractions and not result getters.