There is not much that we can do with what is already in front of us, but we can always decide what to do with the time we are given. To truly find a fulfilling life, we have to create a life design by following three critical actions: plan in three to five years chunk, plan for each task in fifteen minutes, and plan backwards from three to five years. Understand how this works in both your life and business, and learn the value of your time and become more productive as you learn the Pareto principle, taking to heart how 20% of your activities will contribute to 80% of your success and happiness.
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The Pareto Principle Of Productivity
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf. “So do all who lived to see such times, but it’s not for them to decide and all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us,” Said J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring. You need to be motivated to do life design for a fulfilling life. Also it produces tons of benefits like having a clear sense of direction. Remember one major priority that everything revolves around. More than that, eventually lackluster overwhelms you and you get pulled in a thousand different directions. Every time you manage time for a fulfilling life, there are generally some critical actions that you take. You need to plan in three or five-year chunks. Plan for each task in fifteen-minute chunks and plan backwards from three to five years to the present.
List three actions that will help you out in good life design. More importantly, they bring forth other improvements in your life. A life design for a fulfilling life will be something that has often many people feel better about themselves. Those who start planning in three or five-year chunks, they recognized significant adjustments in their mental well-being. These people will feel better prepared to tackle other things in life. Preparing ahead of time allows you to be stronger than you were before. This enables you to complete more than you could before and not run out of energy as easily. More importantly, it helps to build mental and emotional muscles so that you are more resilient and capable when the situation calls for it.
The Pareto Principle is extremely important for growing any business or even for running your life. The 80/20 Principle has been tried and tested in situations. It holds up under scrutiny but there is a downside as well as an upside. The Pareto Principle has been successfully applied to a variety of different areas and holds true in an astonishingly wide variety of fields. The Pareto Principle applies to you because 20% of your activities will contribute to 80% of your success and happiness. The Pareto Principle is perhaps most famous for its suggestion that successful people tend to achieve 80% of the results from 20% of the activities. The 80/20 rule is often used to improve productivity in people and business and usually to identify how time can be saved or use more effectively. One will insert 80% effort and just achieve 20% results if one does not abide by this rule. The idea is small but consistent actions over time.
In business, your time should be spent conducting business with your best clients. Efficiency should never be the end in itself because when efficiency alone makes the goal, you are more often just making yourself busy than making yourself productive. Effective time managers will spend your time on important objectives that will help them attain important goals. Even in developing short, medium and long-term goals, you can organize your time and tasks well where you choose to work on your own productivity curve largely determines what you accomplish in your work and your business. The end of the curve, the things you do will have great value.
The principle known as the Pareto is often referred to in business as how you will get 80% of profit from just 20% of your clients. There are some business experts who will go as far suggesting firing 80% of unprofitable clients. By increasing sales for your best clients and businesses, you can reduce costs. By letting go bad clients and focusing on selling and improving the best services, the best clients, your business will flourish. This may seem very harsh but the reality is that given how little time, energy and resources you have, if you’re going to get better at what you do and you’re going to get better at serving people, you need to ensure that effective on how you spend your time, effort and energy to get the best possible results.
Question, are you spending 80% of your productive time on activities that only produce 20% of your results? Are you spending 20% of your productive time on activities that produce 80% of your total results? To help you discover which position you are in, let’s start doing some research on your work habits and how you spend your productive time. I did this exercise for myself and made some amazing discoveries and breakthroughs. Notice how much time you spend on activities over a three-day period on one business-related profit-producing activities. Two, business-related non-profit producing activities. Three, personal activities. For those of you who feel you’re not in business and you are working, look at business relates that profit-producing as work-related, results-producing, business-related, nonprofit producing as work-related but produces no observable desirable results.
As you go through each day, jot down everything you do and how long you spend on each activity. Be as accurate as you can. After you complete the three days’ worth of activity tracking, go back and categorize your activities by business-related, profit-producing, business-related nonprofit producing, plus a category for personal activities. You can also include any categories you think are important and applicable to this exercise and your business. Make sure you make a note of the results you have achieved from the time spent on each activity. Add up the time you spend on each category of activity over the three-day period and the total time spent. Then calculate the percentage of the total that was spent on each category. Take a look at what this exercise shows you. How did you spend your productive time? Was it on profitable activities or non-profit producing activities? What result was produced? What percentage of your productive time did it take to achieve these results? Was the time spent on personal activities more time than the time you spend on business activities? Was the time spent on non-profitable business activities more than the time you spent on profitable business activities?
If you’re getting 20% of your results from 80% of your business activities, think about what will happen if the 80/20 rule is in your favor. It’s all about knowing the value of your time and when your most productive time occurs. Then you can start leveraging your strengths to achieve your profitable activities before you spend time with anything else, especially the non-profitable activities. The time management habit patterns from the age 25 or by the next 40 years will result by age 65 in the following statistics. By 65, 1% are wealthy, 4% are financially fit, 5% are still working, 28% are dead and 62% are flat broke. Let’s roll up our sleeves and figure out what the value of your time needs to be to get to where you want to be. When you’re filled up and actually done the exercise, you will realize that you can only maximize your dollar value per hour by increasing the time that you spend on business-related profit-producing activities.
Here’s the reality check. You can have your best year ever, but if you want to get progress towards the things that matter, then we have to change our approach. We have to be clear about how our big goals translate into our day-to-day actions. We are going to take the first steps with this specific set of simple actions. Whatever you like to accomplish in your career, your relationships, your health or the impact you want to have in your community and the world, this too will give you what you need to know and exactly what it takes to stay on track so life doesn’t pull you astray. That’s why this podcast is focused on this. It’s designed to help you get intentional about how you spend your time. One lucky listener that posts a review in iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering your life’s and soul’s purpose. I will lead you on a journey to discover the unique mind-body, psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a personal 45-minute consultation with me that is worth thousands.
On this podcast, I’m going to help you design a life that works so you’re able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The clearer you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you step into your true potential, stay on track, and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen? Feel free to reach out to me, to ask questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift. Design it. Do what matters and join me each week as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams.
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