How Much Time Are You Really Wasting?
Posted On: 2011-01-27
Let's face a sad reality here ... if you've come into this business thinking that life was easy and a small amount of work would produce big returns then you're delusional. The fact is that if you want to make money in this business then you've got to work hard ... damned hard.
Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month ... that's the way it is ... you've got to work ... continually ... and there's little time to do anything else. It's the way to success in this business and if you're not prepared to work that hard then your time here will be short.
Everyone here works hard ... there's just no other way to put food on your table and grow your business but in all those hours of hard work just how much time are we wasting?
I'm not talking about the time we spend posturing on webmaster boards and I'm not talking about all that time we spend wandering around the Net doing other things when we should be working. What I'm talking about is the time that we are undoubtedly wasting even though it's time we spend working.
What if we didn't have to work quite so hard and yet could still make money and even find time to grow our business? What if there you were spending a huge amount of time achieving nothing even though you were working?
Back in the very early 1900s an Italian economist noticed something very interesting. He noticed that at that time 80 per cent of the land in Italy was owned by just 20 per cent of the population. Pareto was the economists name and we wouldn't remember him today if a business management guru, who had read about Pareto, hadn't applied what Pareto had noticed to the world of business.
This guru realized that what Pareto had found went well beyond just land ownership in Italy. He found that it applied to business too and while there was not a strict 80/20 rule ... sometimes it varied either way ... there was a definite line between the amount of time spent working and the amount of work time that actually produced tangible benefits.
So applying what he called Pareto's Principle ... and what others have since called the 80/20 rule ... to any business showed that most of the time work time was pretty much wasted because only a relatively small percentage of the time spend working actually produced any income.
So what Pareto's Principle says ... at its very basic ... is that 20 per cent of your effort will produce 80 per cent of your income. Breaking that down to some meaningful numbers can produce something like this: if you spend 100 hours a week working to produce $2k dollars worth of income then 20 hours of the time you spend working will produce $1600 of the income you earn.
In other words, in this example, you're working 80 hours to produce $400.
So how many hours are you working each week and how much money are you making? When you apply Pareto's Principle what sort of figures are you seeing?
It can be scary and I'm not sure that I'm brave enough to apply Pareto's Principle to my business but if you're brave ... and you're ready to see the true picture ... perhaps it's time to apply that Principle to your business and see where you are really making money and where you're just working for peanuts.
Just remember that there is some flexibility in the 80/20 rule. Sometimes it can be as bad as 90/10 or a little better at 70/30 but there will always be a point where the time you spend doing something will begin to produce less income and that point will almost certainly vary from business to business.
So if a small percentage of the effort you put in to your business produces much of the income what is it that you're doing that generates the largest amount of cash flow for you?
Once you identify that you should begin to see what you need to focus your efforts on and what you can let slide.
But Pareto's Principle doesn't just apply to what you're doing ... it also applies to your customers ... your surfers ... your sponsors ... the people who put money in your pocket ... every aspect of your business.
Understand that, and be willing to put it into action, and you may stop wasting time on things that really aren't working and maybe you won't have to work quite so hard after all.