Before you begin work, always ask yourself, “Is this task in the top 20% of my activities or in the bottom 80%?”
The 80/20 Rule is one of the most helpful of all concepts of time and life management. It is also called the Pareto Principle after its founder, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who first wrote about it in 1895. Pareto stated that 80% of your efforts produce only 20% of your results, while the remaining 20% of your efforts drive 80% of your results.
Read also: Your Job Is A Waste Of Your Life. Here Is How We Know.
The Problem
Small-business owners waste their time on what we call the RM 50 an hour work, like running to get office supplies. Meanwhile, they forgo the activities that earn RM 1,000 an hour, such as sending the right email to the right person, or negotiating a lucrative contract, or even convincing a client to do more business with you.
And we can understand: Entrepreneurs are extremely prone to rationalise, “I can do it myself.” Basically, they will spend six hours trying to extract a virus from their computer or fix a leaky faucet in the office.
We’re not saying that you’re not competent to do that little job. And sure, sometimes you have to do everything when you start out. But now you’re doing a RM 50 or RM 80 per hour fix-the-faucet job and you’re not doing your #1 job, which is getting and keeping customers. That job pays Rm 100 to RM 1,000 per hour.
Utilising Time Management
When someone says “time management,” you probably think of time logs, goal lists, and to-do-list. Sadly, getting busy is not what makes you rich.
We’re tempted to hire out the more complex jobs, such as sales, marketing and public relations. These are extremely high-skill tasks. But, in actual fact, it’s almost impossible to delegate those tasks to someone else. How about hiring someone to do your laundry, or sort through your email?
The Solution
Here are 5 of the 80/20 things you should do immediately in order to stop wasting time and start earning the real profit:
1. Hire a maid. If you have a significant other, he or she will thank you. It is easy to find someone who knows how to clean and cook. They will love you for paying them to do those jobs. As a go-getter, your core entrepreneurial skills can earn you hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So there’s no reason why you should be wasting time doing house cleaning. In fact, we argue that it is your moral obligation to hire someone to do that.
2. Get rid of your RM 50 an hour stuff. Let’s assume you are no longer wasting time vacuuming your own carpets or scrubbing your own toilets. You are still hurting yourself if you are obsessed with being “efficient.” This is not a 80/20 approach to time. Instead, ask: “What else am I doing that is so menial, it could be cheaply outsourced? What am I doing that I should stop doing altogether?”
3. Hire a personal assistant. With some effort you can hire a perfectly competent person and you can even hire them virtually. For example, top corporates always have an executive assistant to help their CEOs to save time. Especially when it comes to managing their email box, doing triage to ensure that they only read what really matters. The time saved is definitely worth its weight in gold.
4. Don’t feel guilty about relaxing. The most productive people are a little lazy. If there are really only a few hours a day in which you do RM 1,000-an-hour work, does it really matter if you take time off for the rest of the day? Downtime gives you the mental space you need to think. You can’t be a great strategist when you’re hustling from morning until night. Feed your brain instead, so you’re sharp when you’re negotiating the next sales contract.
5. Focus on your most productive time slot. Everybody has a timeslot in their day when they do their finest work. Ernest Hemingway wrote first thing in the morning. Barack Obama is a night owl. If you do your best work between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. You should not be doing emails before 10 or 11 a.m. Keep that space open and reserve the most productive hours for writing or doing really strategic jobs.
By understanding the 80/20 Rule, you can make these changes and hit consistent stretches of RM 1,000 an hour many days of your week. Then and only then will you reap the true rewards of being an entrepreneur.
