The 5 Crucial Principles Of Productivity

The 5 Crucial Principles Of Productivity

The 5 Crucial Principles Of Productivity

Series Note: I have been obsessed with the concept of increasing my productivity for over a year now. During this time, I have read countless books, articles, blogs and exhausted many theories. I believe it is my understanding and application of these 5 concepts that has had the greatest impact on my significant increase in productivity. This is number 1/5 in the series exploring the principles and how they can be applied to produce incredible results.

Number 1 - The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule')

This is the key concept that, once I took the time to think about it and apply it, really opened up my mind to productivity. The Pareto Principle suggests that there is an inequality from the results of our inputs. This is best quantified by the notion that 80% of our results come from just 20% of our efforts.

This 80/20' rule can vary, as the results can be very situation-dependant, but it is important to understand its fundamental meaning that if we can discover the small portion of our actions that are having the greatest effect on the outcomes, we can put a greater emphasis on them and achieve results more effectively.

This concept is best applied to our business/working life where there is nearly always a definable end-product in mind, whereas our personal lives are a lot less clear-cut and it can be difficult to determine the efficiency of our actions. So there are a few (20%) activities we do at work that are contributing to the majority (80%) of our results. You can define these results' more clearly by instead referring to what is often the main purpose of the work, our income.

Personally, I realised that when working on my niche sites, I was spending around 80% of my time reading my email, updating twitter, reviewing my statistics and calculating my income, but it was the 20% of the time I spent trying to write unique content that had by far the greatest effect on my ability to provide visitors with value and increase my income. Some of this lost' time could be put down to procrastination or poor time-management on my behalf; but these are issues that I easily overcome. Most importantly, it was the actions that I mistakenly believed were making major contributions that I needed to uncover and re-consider.

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. " Peter Drucker

I realised that most of my inefficient output consisted of mundane or simple tasks that were just not the best use of my time. So I decided to outsource a large portion of this workload to my virtual assistant at Elance. (This process is probably a lot simpler, cheaper and more efficient than you think, just give it a shot!)

The message here is a simple one, try to avoid this ineffective imbalance and make sure you are spending the most time on the aspects of your work that provide you with the majority of your results. Can you apply The Pareto Principle to your work life? You may realise that 80% of your income comes from just 20% of your customers, or that 80% or your company's output is a result of just 20% of your workforce, or that 80% of a products usage comes from just 20% of its features. Which other areas of your life do you feel you can apply the principle to outside of work? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments box below.

The 2nd instalment of this series will be released on Saturday 5th March. To make sure you recieve the next crucial principle, please subscibe to my free updates here.

Thank you for reading. Leigh.

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