Parkinson’s Law: Time Allotted = Time Used And if you really follow through on the lessons you learn, you can transform the results in many areas of your life. If you do this 80:20 exercise, I promise you that you’ll find obvious improvements. I’ve also learned to eliminate less important activities like T.V., useless meetings, and unimportant phone calls or emails. So I’ve gotten better (although I’m far from perfect!) at scheduling these activities first. With my personal life, I realized that a HUGE part of my long-term happiness was a result of time invested in certain activities, like exercise, reading for pleasure, and spending time with my wife and family. The result was the purchase of many more deals than before. I also began creating systems to leverage my time, like lead generation from direct mail, ads, and other marketing. So I began measuring the success of my day by how many seller conversations I had. I was good at it, and it was one of the hardest parts of the business for other people. With my personal time in the business, I discovered that talking to qualified sellers was BY FAR the most valuable, effective, money-earning use of my time. We eliminated that strategy and spent more time on more productive ones. With our real estate acquisitions, I discovered that we spent 80% of our time trying to buy short sales, yet it represented less than 20% of our revenue. Guess which ones we decided to sell? Rent collecting has now become much less of a hassle. With our rental properties I discovered, for example, that over 80% of the problems from our tenants were coming from less than 20% of our properties. When I did this exercise in many areas of my life and business, I experienced some dramatic results. Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness? Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?Ģ. Do you want to try it? If so, ask and answer these questions:ġ. When I first learned this principle, I did an exercise that changed my life. Sometimes this ratio is even more skewed, like 90:10 or 99:1. This is relevant to us because 80% of the results you want are coming from 20% of the time and effort you’re spending. But he also noticed the rule in other many other places, like 80% of his garden peas were produced by 20% of the plants. Pareto noticed that 80% of the wealth and income was produced and possessed by 20% of the population. The 80:20 principle is a popularized term for a discovery by an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto. So how do you decide what matters most? Enter the 80:20 principle. Efficiency is creating 500 filters and labels to process the 1,000 daily emails, 98% of which are not important.Įffectiveness, on the other hand, is only checking and responding to the emails that matter most and delaying or eliminating what matters least. If you are frustrated because you are always busy and rarely get everything done, the solution is not just to become more efficient. Now, that is one busy employee! Give them a raise.” In the strictest sense, you shouldn’t be trying to do more in each day, trying to fill every second with a work fidget of some type… Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions … In fact, if you want to move up the ladder in most of corporate America, and assuming they don’t really check what you are doing (let’s be honest), just run around the office holding a cell phone to your head and carrying papers. Just a few words on time management: Forget all about it. In the rest of this article, I’ll unpack two of my favorite ideas from The 4-Hour Workweek called The 80:20 Principle and Parkinson’s Law. Then I absorbed more great ideas on anti-time management from the The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. I first got into this philosophy when I read about The Urgent and Important in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. You could call this the “anti-time management” philosophy. But I also like the idea of elegant efficiency. There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.”Įfficiency is nice when needed. This was the main message of the following quote by 20th century business innovator Peter Drucker: You could be very efficient at managing hundreds of emails, calls, and tasks per day yet still never accomplish anything significant. Management to me means getting more efficient at organizing and dealing with the thousands of stimuli in your life. Wise use of your time is critical as entrepreneurs and investors. We all have more projects than we do time in the day.īut the traditional word “time management” never struck me as extremely helpful.
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