Recently, I revisited a great article The 80/20 Rule on Yaro Starak’s excellent blog Entrepreneur’s Journey. If you are not familiar with the 80/20 Rule it goes like this (according to this Wikipedia 80/20 Rule entry):
“… for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.”
Essentially, what this means that 80% of any result comes from 20% of the effort. This is just a broad generalization of the 80/20 rule. You can narrow it down and apply it to just about anything in life which produces a result.
The 80/20 Rule post got me thinking about how I could apply it to my own businesses. One of the points Yaro discusses in his post is the need to identity what should be ignored. This means ignoring what doesn’t help you produce or holds you back from producing the result you are looking for (the 80% part of the equation). It got me thinking what I can start ignoring today which will help me produce the results I want.
The first thing that came to mind is eliminating those sites / blogs from my daily routine which I either visit out of habit or with the inclination that it will provide me with some information which can help me produce results. I’ll be the first to admit that I bookmark or add blogs to my Morning Coffee plug-in for Firefox thinking that they will be handy to read or could be a reference at some point. Going through the 40 blogs I have listed in my Morning Coffee plug-in, I only read 8 of them on a daily basis. So I either deleted or moved the remaining blogs to my Netvibes page. This way, I can skim through them whenever I take a break or am doing some online research. By doing this, I have eliminated time spent on not only waiting for those 40 blog pages to load at one time in my browser but also going through those blogs every morning. By doing this, I know have more time to focus on things which will help produce the results I want.
The Problem With Email
Another area I can start to ignore is emails. I first came across this great tip in Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Work Week book- which I cannot recommend enough! How much time do you spend dealing with emails? Probably more time than you should or really need to. Dealing with emails can literally suck away the time if you let it.
So how do you stop it? By limiting when you check your email to twice a day.
Since starting this, I have saved a lot of time already! Before, I would just leave my email client open and check it whenever a new email came my way. What a time waster considering most email today is spam. So now, I check it around noon time and in the evening after dinner. When I do, I quickly glance over each new email , noting the title and sender. Then I select the ones to be deleted, and press the magic delete key. I then read the ones which I feel are important or need my direct attention. The others I leave to the weekend. While doing this may sound harsh, you have to be if you want to cut down on the time spent dealing with email.
Who Do You Trust?
Further in Yaro’s post he goes over focusing on your trusted sources of information- the opposite of ignoring. Yet another area I will be tackling. What I need to do is narrow down the number of bloggers and other people I follow to those who I honestly learn from or really enjoy reading (such as Ricky Gervais hilarious blog). As I mentioned earlier, cutting down on the number of blogs I follow via the Morning Coffee plug-in will help . I also need to look at my Netvibes page to see where I can make some cuts. I know I could probably cut, at least, half of the blogs out of there and not really notice.
The same can be applied to RSS feeds and even Twitter. Why waste time skimming over headlines in your RSS feed of those feeds you don’t particularly care about or help you in some way? Same with Twitter- why spend time reading Tweets from people who have nothing substantial to say or only tweet about something of real interest or substance once a week- if that? You know you have a couple on your list. I know I did before I began deleting some followers. I didn’t do it to be mean but time is one of your most valuable commodities. You have to use it wisely.
The Bottom Line
While you might think doing any of the above is kind of silly considering it only takes a couple of seconds to skim through your Twitter updates or to do a quick run through of blogs you follow on a daily basis or glance through your RSS feeds to see what is going on with the blogs you follow. Speaking from my experience since I went plurging, I’ve cut out nearly two-thirds of the blogs, feeds, and twitter followers combined! I can safely say I have saved myself around an hour a day by doing this. That might not seem like a lot but I know I can use that hour elsewhere which will help me produce the results I am working towards.
So what can you cut out to save you time which you could use more effectively elsewhere? Who do you follow and gather advice and information from? Are you applying the 80/20 rule to your business? Let me and everyone else know in the comments below. Thanks for reading!
