The 80-20 Day

One of the key drivers of entrepreneurial productivity is a keen understanding and implementation of the 80-20 rule. The 80-20 generally tells us that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts.

Meaning that if you look at a week of work, and you list out each thing that you did that week, 20% of the work that you did accounted for 80% of your results.

So if you worked last week for 40 hours, probably 20% of those hours (8 hours) accounted for 80% of your revenue. So if you made $2000 last week, 8 hours likely accounted for $1600 of your revenue.

The other 32 hours could have been eliminated and you STILL would have made $1600!

Now, another way to look at this is to ask, what would happen if you ONLY worked on the things that made up the 8 hours that were effective. Some folks may call this “working on your strengths” or “working on the power-elements in your day” or “working on the important things only” or “working on the things that only YOU can do.”

But it all comes back to the same thing – if you work primarily on the things that are most important, the things that lead to the most results in others’ lives, the things that lead to the most revenue bumps for you, your impact on the world will go up, and your revenue will go up – and you can work less! Imagine working half as long, but making 50% more revenue AND doubling your impact on the world around you!

You can do it, starting this week:

Let’s go back to the example: we said that in 8 hours you would have 80% of the impact and 80% of the revenue that you currently get in 40 hours.

So what if you were to double the time you spent on the 8 hours of important things, to 16 hours?

You would have 80% of your results + 80% of your results ==160% of your results as opposed to your normal 40 hour week!

AND your revenue would also be 160% of your normal 40 hour week! So instead of $2000, your revenue would be $3200!

Another way of looking at it is to say that if you make 80% of your revenue during 8 hours of the week, and that revenue is $1600, then if you work 16 hours on the important things, your income doubles from $1600 to $3200.

And your impact on others goes up in a corresponding fashion.

Now you are working 16 hours. Let’s say that you believe that some of the 32 hours of “unimportant, non-revenue-producing, non-life-changing tasks” are indeed necessary to make it through your week. Could you scrunch all that into 8 hours if you really had to? My guess is that you could if you really made an effort at it!

I mean, really pushed! Were 100% productive during every minute of the day, NO dead time.

You say, that’s not possible to operate at 100% for 40 hours. You are right. But we are only talking 8 hours. You COULD operate at 100% for 8 hours, right?

If so, and you double your productive time from 8 hours a week to 16 hours, and you add on 8 hours of the “unimportant, non-revenue-producing, non-life-changing tasks” at 100% productivity – you end up only working 24 hours during the week, you have 16 hours free during the week to spend with your family, golfing, skiiing, sleeping, etc – and you STILL help 60% more people and you STILL make 60% MORE revenue than the old 40 hour schedule.

Like it? Try it!

Note: you will need to take an accounting of your time and what’s important, etc. You may not know where all your time goes each day, each week. If you don’t, keep a daily schedule for 40 hours, tracking EVERY 15 minute segment for one week. You will be AMAZED when you realize where your time is going!

Take action!

Change your productivity, change your impact, change your life!