Partly, I’ve done some worthwhile effort and reaping the results – but I know I can become more productive than ever. My goal: Tim Ferriss’ 4 hour workweek, even less.
I make money online – so, in itself, I cut my commuting time to and from my work place to about… zero. I work at home, and I when I need it, I can deal with problems as soon as I can – at a push of a button of my laptop. Sometimes, I also work while I’m away vacationing – I can bring my work with me while enjoying my vacation.
While the above is good, I work 10 hours a day – mostly looking and exploring business ideas – online and off line. I even work 7 days a week – so I end up working about 60-70 hours a week. Not nice.
So, despite I have all the liberty to set my own working hour, the entire online business and make money online endeavours I do is leading to one thing: A busy day, every day; not the way I want my business life would become.
But that was before I start working on increasing my productivity. The idea is to increase my “per-hour pay” by working less hours but getting more profits from my web businesses.
And believe it or not, what I did is actually a simple thing – the solution is right under my nose all along. Behold – the infamous but underrated Pareto’s Law or The 80/20 rules.
What is Pareto’s Law?
Pareto’s Law, in essence, talks about our live being influenced by a certain pattern: 80/20 – most aspects in our live follow the pattern.
For instance, 80% of time we spend each day only to complete 20% tasks/chores, while 20% of our time can complete 80% tasks/chores. In business, 80% of a business’ sales come from 20% clients, while 80% clients only result in 20% sales.
The bottom line is, Pareto’s Law can help us increase our productivity by managing our resources efficiently and effectively.
How can Pareto’s Law help me?
Implementing Pareto’s Law in our life is not that difficult. Basically, we want to eliminate 80% of “waste” so that the free resources can be allocated to better things – or even, consider the 80% as free time for you to do anything you like (you can allocate those free time into starting a business or growing your business, too!)
Following the example above, we want to reallocate the 80% of the time we use to only complete 20% tasks/chores to do better things – even to do nothing, considering those 80% as free time (!) In term of business, following the example above, we probably need to “sack” 80% clients, and prioritise on the 20%.
Here’s a super simplified illustration on how Pareto’s Law can increase my productivity by 500 percent.
My daily business activities before implementing Pareto’s Law:
- Checking and replying to emails: 1 hour.
- Working on my current web businesses: 3 hours.
- Working on my clients’ projects: 3 hours.
- Searching and exploring business opportunities and ideas: 3 hours.
My daily business activities after implementing Pareto’s Law – with some notes:
- Checking and replying to emails: 15 minutes (I block all junk mails by diverting them to my “dummy” Yahoo! email account.)
- Working on my current web businesses: 1 hour (I outsource and automate some part of my daily activities.)
- Working on my clients’ projects: N/A (the hourly rate is proven to be sub-par – I no longer work on clients’ projects.)
- Searching and exploring business opportunities and ideas: 1 hour (I reduce it because most of the time, I just browse the web ineffectively and often got lost in focus, reading web news, instead.)
So, there you go – I end up working 2 hours and 15 minutes a day in average now, compared to 10 hours a day two months ago. That’s 444.44 percent improvement in productivity – well, almost 500 percent, but that’s pretty close, isn’t it?
I end up making more money from my web businesses during the transformation – about 10% increase. It’s not much, but it’s really something, especially if you do it by working only one fifth of the time you normally did.
‘Dare to try?
Ivan Widjaya
4-hour workweek – here I come!