Focus on What's Important For Your Business

When Clive wanted more time to be able to work on growing his business what he was really looking for was better leverage. That is ‘get more growth with less of his time invested’. He was currently under leveraged from a time perspective. I asked him this one question …

“What activities do you do now that take up more than 10% of your time that could be done by someone else?”

It took him less than 5 seconds to say “scheduling”. Next question …

“What would have to happen to get scheduling off your plate?”

In the 5 minutes following that question Clive had laid out a 5 step plan that was going to free up approximately 15hrs per week. In reality it took about 6 weeks to get 80% of the bugs ironed out of the delegation process and get others up to speed with training. The payoff - aside from the extra initial 15hrs - is a new mode of thinking that has allowed Clive to free up even more time by asking himself similar pattern breaking questions in other areas of the business.

And so it goes; the well-known, and largely underutilized, principle called the 80/20 rule or Pareto’s Principle is one most of us probably should revisit. In this context the rule states:

80% of your results come from 20% of your activities.

The question is “how much of our time is spent on those 80% activities”. From what I’ve seen with most business owners, it is usually not enough. Despite my awareness of this I still catch myself doing things someone else can be doing at the expense of time invested in higher value activities.

To implement 80/20 thinking relative to your own time ask yourself this question …

“If I could only spend 20hrs per week working and my business had to achieve the goals I have in place, how would I do it?”

This question forces you into a new mode of thinking. Don’t expect the heavens to open on the first attempt at answering this question. If you stick with this question for 90-days and each day write down the answers that come to your mind, you’ll be amazed at the options available to you.

Achieving bigger goals requires bigger thinking …