If you’re working 40 hours a week, you can bring it down to 1.6 hours a day.
Disclaimer: This will only work if you have a very open-minded boss or you’re your own boss.
Anyway, how can I come up with such an outrageous claim?
After all… 1.6 hours out of a normal workday of 8 hours is… WAIT!
That’s 20%.
As in 20/80. Yes, here we go again with that rule. It’s almost magical and eery so well it fits.
How can you use the Pareto principle on your workday?
First, find what you need to do
Make a list.
Write everything down you normally do and what you think you should do when you’re working 8 hours a day.
Let’s think up an example:
Reply to emails
Write an article
Reply to Instagram comments to my latest-new profile picture
Reply to Facebook comments about same
Get into an argument with a troll saying I had photoshopped my profile picture
Write an email to my list and add five GIFs.
Spend time finding five fitting GIFs.
Check email
Reply to support desk questions - same as yesterday
Etc. etc.
When you have your exhausting list, order them from the task that will affect your business the most to the least.
Finally, pick the top affecting tasks - max 4.
Got it? Great. How do you use this with the 80/20 rule?
80/20 - the Pareto Principle
The Pareto Principle (or 80/20 rule) says that:
You make 80% of your profit from 20% of your work
20% of your customers will provide you with 80% of you income
Sometimes the real numbers are 90/10. At other times they are 78/22. But the 80/20 is pretty precise.
If you’re working 8 hours a day, it means that the 80 + 20 = 100 = 8 hours.
How much is 20% of 8 hours? That’s 1.6 hours or 96 minutes.
Let’s round it up to 100 because that’s easier.
Don’t expect full focus
If you could keep 100% focus 100% of the time, you would only need to work for 96 minutes.
Then call it a day.
Even if you can hyper-focus, you probably can’t do it every day. I suggested a long-term strategy that says, we have 100 minutes to do the job. We’ll split that in four and take breaks between them.
This neatly adds up to 25 minutes, 5 minutes of break, 25 minutes again…
You’ll end up working 4 times 25 minutes.
When you include the breaks, it means that you’ll work for almost 2 hours a day.
How can that be possible?
Well, it can because you’ll only be working on the 20% that really matters. And you’ll be focused, so you won’t be wasting 80% of your time updating selfies on Facebook.
You’ll be busy working on what matters and what can grow your business.
What about the last 2 hours?
It wouldn’t be a 12-hour week, if we didn’t work 12 hours per week, would it?
Five times two hours - that’s ten hours. What about the last two hours? Technically a bit more if we don’t count the breaks.
Use those last two hours for “other” stuff.
Like things you didn’t finish. Or urgent and important stuff that came up. (You didn’t schedule time for accidentally deleting your finished article and having to rewrite it, did you?)
During your daily 2 hours of work (4 pomodoros) you can work on each of the four tasks you choose earlier. The ones that affected your business the most.
During the last two weekly hours, you can tie up lose ends.
Or simply relax, if you finished everything.
Talk soon,
Britt Malka