Managing your time inefficiently, when it comes to your business, can lead to many problems and undesirable consequences. If you don't have strong time management skills, it can result in missed deadlines, poor quality of work, excessive stress, ineffective workflow, and much more.
If you don’t effectively manage your time, it will become more difficult for you to finish your work on time, which can cause you to be seen as inefficient and unreliable. Your clients, customers, and colleagues will end up having far less faith in your abilities to run a successful business. Missing deadlines and tardiness will significantly hurt your reputation, which can, in turn, start to affect your personal life and wellbeing. As an entrepreneur, if you want to be successful and get more done in less time, then you have to master your time and figure out how to improve your time management skills.
Apply The Pareto Principle To Your Business
The Pareto Principle, or what is better known as the 80/20 Rule, was first considered in 1896 by Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto during his time at the University of Lausanne. Briefly stated, the 80/20 rule states that only a minority of effort, inputs, and causes lead to the majority of results, outputs, and rewards intended by a specific person. In other words, 80 percent of what you achieve in your life comes from just 20 percent of the activities that you spend your time, effort, and energy on. Therefore, for all practical purposes, for 80 percent of the time, the effort and energy you spend on a specific undertaking aren't important in accomplishing your objectives.
To put it in perspective, the 80/20 rule asserts that there is an inherent imbalance between:
• Causes and effects
• Inputs and outputs
• Efforts and rewards
The question then becomes, wouldn’t it be great if you could focus your time, effort, and energy on the 20 percent of the activities that will bring you the 80 percent of the results, rewards, and outputs you desire?
The Importance of the Pareto Principle
All too often, people tend to expect that all causes have the same significance over the results intended by them. For example, with new businesses people tend to assume that every customer is valuable, resulting in them feeling the urge to meet that customer's demands, however unproductive they might be to the operations of the business. Another example would be the businessman who expects that every product or service that he
offers his customers is equally valuable and should be focused on. Unfortunately, nothing can be farther from the truth.
The Pareto principle, on the other hand, affirms that when two sets of information are put to a cause and effect analysis, more often than not it will result in a pattern of imbalance. The imbalance is that only a minority of the inputs produce the majority of the outputs initially intended. Why is this important to you? Understanding the Pareto principle will give you valuable insight into how you can better manage your time and increase your productivity.
Apply The Pareto Principle To Your Business
When it comes to productivity in business, 80 percent of the tasks that you have to complete during the day can be achieved by using 20 percent of the time.
As an entrepreneur, implementing the Pareto Principle to manage your time better is simple. The first step that you need to take is to examine your to-do list and determine which ones make up the 20 percent of activities that will be responsible for providing you with
80 percent of the results. These are the activities that you want to focus on during the day and should be given the highest priority.
The remaining 80 percent of the activities that are responsible for just 20 percent of the results can be delegated or outsourced to a professional who has the time and skill set to complete them successfully. Outsourcing the 80 percent of the activities that don’t produce the majority of results will allow you to focus your time and energy completing those tasks that will help you grow your business and increase your profits.
Time management isn't about your ability to make important choices regarding the sequence of events that need to be completed that would, in turn, determine the level of productivity you can achieve. With time management, you can take control of the tasks and activities that you work on every day. Truly productive individuals have mastered their time management skills and always work on the most critical tasks first. This results in being more productive, allowing them to get more done in less time.
Comments