More than likely if you are an employee your are focusing on efficiency making sure to impress your superiors with multi-tasking and busyness, hoping to be recognized as a productive worker who “gets the job done”. If you are a business owner you continue to cram your day with more stuff to do by figuring out ways to be more efficient, thus in return have more time to add more stuff. Do yourself a favor . . .
STOP!!
I was browsing through “The 4 Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferriss, pondering some of the principles he speaks about within his book. (A book I highly recommend) Personally, I focus on a self analysis from time to time and my current focus is elimination. In the book he speaks a good amount about Pareto’s Principle, AKA 80/20 rule. For those who are not familiar with this principle, it has it’s roots in the lat 1800’s during which a controversial economist brought to light the principle that 80% of a countries economy is really generated by 20% of the people.
This rule applies to almost any area of production, at times even more skewed with 5% producing the 95% results. So with that theory and principle in mind, I focus my energy on elimination. Rather than being efficient to do more let’s step back and see what can we eliminate that is not part of the 20%? As a business owner, evaluate your customers, evaluate your actions, evaluate your employees and measure what action, which customer and which employees are really responsible for the 80-99%.
Trust me, this exercise will be liberating, revealing and at times humbling as you realize 90% of your problems are coming from the customer who brings nothing to your bottom line, the employee who isn’t worth a penny to the company and actions that do nothing for your business growth. As a business owner, help eliminate your actions from your day that are efficient, eliminate “busyness” from your employee base and help steer the ship towards the port of effectiveness.
Employees, this may be a tough one to tackle! There is a good chance your boss is clueless when it comes to this principle and for them all the “old school” ways of a hustling, paper moving, cell phone talking and a busy looking employees is all they know. You can’t blame them for this, your job is to help educate them. Then, take steps towards elimination and liberation as you slowly move towards effective action which is the only action that equates measurable results.
Think about this. If you remove 50% of your “efficient actions” and replace it with another 20% of effective action, you will, in theory, double your production while reducing the time you spend by 35%”
With that I say eliminate, liberate and fill your time with moments and actions that fulfill you, not with more “work”.
(Original content provided by Josh Valentine)
