Have you ever felt like there are simply not enough hours in the day or week to get all the work you done that you need to get done? Do you want to have more free time, but take productivity to the next level? I was asking myself the same questions recently, I knew I was spending way to much time working and there always seemed to be more work I should be doing. I decided it was time for a change, and re-visited Tim Ferris‘ popular book “The 4 Hour Work Week“.

I picked up some great steps that can save you easily up to 30 hours per week of work, and give you a laser focus on what’s really important to you. It will enable you to stop working for the sake of working, and work on tasks that deliver you results.

Here goes:

Steps:

1. Your Reasons:
Before you start cutting down your work hours, it’s important to define what you actually want to achieve in your personal life with the newly acquired free time. The idea is not to cram more work into the time, but to actually have something that you will enjoy doing in the new free time you have. Specify some huge travel goals you want to achieve, hobbies you want to revitalise, or personal growth you want to achieve with the new time you have. Do not start doing more work with the additional time you have, you want be as effective with your time that you are working and defeats the purpose of saving you the hours and improving your quality of life 🙂

2. Eliminate:

The next step is to eliminate the tasks that you are wasting time on and put the focus on the tasks that are generating you the most results. Ask yourself 2 questions:

What 80% of my results are coming from 20% of my inputs? Of all the tasks you are working on, which 20% of the tasks are bringing you the most results? Continue doing these. For example if you make the majority of your sales from 10-11AM every day, continue doing these. These are important and are generating you the best results in the least amount of time!

What 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems? Of the problems you face on a day to day basis, which of the 20% of sources are causing you 80% of your problems. Eliminate them. For example if you have one supplier which causes you to spend 80% of your time solving their stuff ups, replace the supplier with a new supplier who can handle the job and not waste your time.

3. Parkinson’s Law:

Parkinson’s Law is: a task will balloon out to the amount of time given to it. Do you remember completing those last minute assignments at school or university? Did you notice that you sometimes did your best work when you crammed last minute, or left an assignment to the last minute and you were under the pump? This is Parkinson’s Law in action.

Limit the tasks you work on to only the important and this will shorten the time you spend working. Next shorten the time frames you give yourself on the important tasks to have very aggressive shorter time frames. You’ll find you work with the time you have, and become a lot more efficient.

How do you know which are the important tasks? There are a few ways to do this, one is to ask yourself the question I mentioned earlier in the piece: “What 80% of my results are coming from 20% of my inputs?” Another
question you can ask yourself is: “If this is the only task I finish today, will I be satisfied with my day?”
Always be asking yourself throughout the day: “Am I being productive or just active? Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?”

4. Removing Distractions:

The 3 main distractions that can derail your productivity throughout the day, and slow your work down significantly are: phone, email, and meetings/direct contact. Here are a few strategies you should follow to eliminate these distractions:

• Check your email only twice per day, at 12 noon and 4pm everyday. Turn off auto send/receive in Outlook – this will only serve as a distraction when email comes in.
• Never check your email first thing in the morning, always complete your most important task of the day by 11am.
• Work on a maximum of 2 important tasks during a day, and use the question “If this is the only thing I complete today, will I be satisfied with my day” to determine if it’s really the most important task to complete.
• Do not take calls on your landline except during the same time you are checking your email. Check your voicemail during those same times of the day.

5. Batching:
Every time you start doing a repetitive task, there is a setup cost associated with starting that task. This means if you have a task that you do daily, everyday you have a setup cost to start doing the task and get full swing into it. Find tasks that you do on a regular basis, for example multiple times per day, daily, weekly, monthly, etc. Attempt to do them in less frequent intervals, for example if you do a task daily, attempt to do the task weekly.

You can keep pushing the batching to less frequent periods by finding out if the cost of your time saving is always greater than the amount it costs to fix issues as a result of doing the task less frequently. For example if your wage is $70,000/year your hourly rate is approximately $34/hour ($70,000/52 weeks/40 hours), if batching from daily to weekly saves you 10 hours per week this equates to a saving of $500/week. If issues arising from this are costing you $250/week, then you can look at batching less frequently. Keep attempting batches less frequently while the cost you save in time is higher than the cost you incur by fixing issues.

This is only the tip of the iceberg with how you can slim down your work day, and become laser focused on the core tasks that generate value in your job, business, or life and stop wasting time doing things that don’t bring any value (i.e. doing work for the sake of working). If you want to take this to the next level, I highly recommend you read “The 4 Hour Work Week“.