Living more

Effectiveness versus Efficiency.

Effectiveness means doing something to get closer to your goal.

Efficiency means performing a given task well (Whether important or not)

Doing meaningless work in your life efficiently offers nothing but time waste.

In order to live more and work less, you must eliminate.

I would consider the best door-to-door sales efficient— who is, refined and excellent at selling door-to-door without wasting time—but utterly ineffective.

He or she would sell more using email or direct mail.

This is also true for the person who replies to 50 unimportant emails just to feel “Busy.”

Here are four things to keep in mind:

1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.

2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

3. There is a difference between being busy and being productive.

4. It is infinitely better to do something more important than to do something unimportant efficiently.

5. Don’t focus on being busy, focus on your most important task.

So the point here is, in order to have more freedom in your life, you must start with the most important task and move to the less important task when you are for example: Sitting on your toilet, waiting for the bus, or waiting for your food.

You can even hire people to do some of your less important work for you for MAXIMUM productivity.

The 80/20 rule.

Being busy is often used as an excuse to avoid critical and uncomfortable situations.

There are often limitless outcomes of creating “busyness”: You could call a few hundred unqualified sales leads, respond to 20 unimportant emails or walk across the office, just to get some documents that you don't need.

The list goes one and one.

This is where I introduce the 80/20 rule.

80% of the outputs result from 20%c of the inputs, alternative ways of phrasing this:

80% of the results come from 20% of the habits

80% of consequences flow from 20% of the causes

80% of company profits come from 20% of the highest paying customers and the top purchased products.

The list is infinitely long, and the ratio is often skewed even more severely: 90/10, 95/5, and 99/1 are not uncommon, but the minimum ratio is 80/20.

What I am saying here is, if you want to eliminate most of your work, you must identify the TOP 20 percent of your results and eliminate the rest of the 80.

For example: If you want to work less on your business, identify your HIGHEST paying customers and spend the most time on that specific customer and put less effort into the other 80%.

This means: not promoting as many products to them, not emailing them, and not providing information about your latest product.

You must identify the 20% that brings you the most results, and use your efficiency on that 20%.

Another scenario is if you want to get rid of your bad habits, identify the top 20% of the worst habits you have, and eliminate them.

Here are some questions that follow up:

1. Which 20% of sources are causing my 80% unhappiness?

2. Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?

3. Which 20% of my customers result in 80% of my income?

4. Which 20% of subscribers result in 80% of my newsletter open rates?

The goal here is to find your efficiencies in order to eliminate them and to find your strengths in order to multiply them.

So to summarize

If you want to work less and live more:

1. Prioritize your most important task.

2. Use the 80/20 rule: identify the thing that brings the most results and focus primary on that thing and forget the rest 80%.

3. Hire people to do your less important work.

4. Do your less important work during your daily tasks. Examples: Shitting on the toilet, eating or waiting for your bus to come.

If you have anymore questions, shoot me a DM.

I’ll be happy to help you out.

Well all the best.

-Andrey