Part 2: E: Eliminate Activities That Waste Your Time | Chapter 5: Learn the Laws

Part 1 covered step D (Define) of the DEAL process and Part 2 will cover step E: Eliminate activities that waste your time. Step E explains how to start making the time to achieve the dreamlines you set in step D.

The 4HWW lifestyle requires you to reevaluate your ideas about time. First, note that unproductive busyness is bad. Busyness takes up a lot of time and it’s a form of procrastination. Doing unimportant things gets in the way of doing things that would actually have a high impact but are uncomfortable.

Second, abandon time management. Time management implies that you have so many things to do in a limited amount of time that you have to tetris things into your schedule. This isn’t a situation you want to be in.

Instead of being so busy you have to manage your time, decrease the number of things you have to do and decrease the amount of time you spend on them. If you want to get more done, you have to do less.

The Difference Between Effectiveness and Efficiency

Effectiveness is doing important things that help you achieve results. Efficiency is doing things (regardless of whether or not they’re important) in the fastest way possible.

Even though effectiveness is more productive, the conventional workforce focuses on efficiency because it’s easier to measure. Efficiency can be useful, but only when applied to things that actually matter. Remember that how long you spend doing something, or how well you do it, doesn’t have any effect on its importance.

Pareto and the 80/20 Rule

Italian economist Pareto discovered that, generally, 80% of results are generated by 20% of the effort. (In some cases the ratio can skew even further to up to 99/1.) This rule applies both positively and negatively. For example, the top 20% of your friends probably generate 80% of your social happiness. Your bottom 20% probably generate 80% of your problems. Therefore, you can use this rule to both win yourself time and decrease your problems:

• Make a to-do list of the 20% of important things in your life that create results or happiness. (If you don’t know what the most important 20% of your activities are, pay attention to each of your actions for a month or two to determine which create the most results.)
• Make a don’t-do list of the 20% of unimportant things that waste time or make you miserable.

For example, when the author learned about the 80/20 rule, he evaluated his company BrainQUICKEN LLC. Five out of his 120 customers generated 95% of his revenue and they always ordered regularly and professionally. The other 115 customers that generated only 5% of his revenue also generated nearly all his problems.

Realizing this, Ferriss immediately stopped approaching most of his unproductive customers. If they ordered, he’d fill the order, but he wouldn’t contact them. There were two rude companies who did contribute enough to his revenue to be mathematically worth pursuing, but they weren’t worth the toll on his mental health. He contacted both of them to say that if they couldn’t be polite, he wouldn’t serve them anymore. He didn’t really need their money; he just thought he did because workforce conventions told him so. One customer left, and the other changed its behavior.

Finally, Ferriss studied his top five customers and used the commonalities between them to find other, similar customers. He ended up with eight top customers that ordered regularly without him needing to intervene. His income went up and his hours went down.

Parkinson’s Law

Parkinson’s Law states that the amount of time you have for a project will dictate how important and difficult you think it is. You’ll use all the time allowed, even if the project doesn’t actually require it. In addition, you might actually do a worse job on the project than if you had less time, because the time pressure forces you to focus.

Employees fall prey to Parkinson’s law all the time. It’s not necessarily their fault—because they have to work 9-5, they find things to do to take up all this time.

Entrepreneurs, however, don’t have a set schedule, so if they’re using more time than they need, or giving themselves extravagant deadlines, they have no excuse. They’re either copying the status quo or caught up in a bad habit.

The Best of Both

To gain yourself the most time, you want to employ both the 80/20 rule and Parkinson’s law. Only do important tasks, and give yourself short deadlines to achieve them.

For example, Charney is a technology salesman with young children. To win himself more time to spend with his family, he followed the 80/20 rule. Three times a day he asked himself if he was being productive or just busy. If he was only busy, he stopped doing whatever he was doing and moved on to a task that was actually important. To apply Parkinson’s law, he took Mondays and Fridays off to cut down on the amount of time he had to get his work done. After five weeks, he was working 18 hours a week and being four times as productive as he had been working 40 hours.

Applying the Laws

There are several questions to ask yourself when learning to apply the 80/20 rule and Parkinson’s law to your job and life. While answering, keep in mind that you want to negatively affect your income as little as possible.

• If you could only work two hours a day, what are the things you would do? Pretend your doctor’s forbidden you to work more than this and there’s absolutely no way to get around it.
• If you could only work two hours a week, what are the things you would do?
• Are you making full use of Parkinson’s Law? Do some or all of the following:
  • Try to minimize the amount of time you spend working. Take a day or two off per week, and leave at 4 p.m. every day. (There are more details about how to do this if you’re an employee in Chapter 8.)
  • Keep your to-do list short and give yourself short deadlines. This will help you ignore details.
• Do you use a countdown timer to keep track of deadlines?
• What three things do you do to procrastinate doing important things?
• Are you procrastinating important things by inventing busywork? Consider this question three times a day. You can stick a post-it to your monitor or set a digital reminder to remind yourself to ask. You can also use time-tracking software to tell you when you spend over a certain amount of time procrastinating (on email, social media, and so on).
• When you feel like you need more time, what can you get rid of?
  • For example, consider people, commitments, and thoughts.
• If you had to stop 80% of time-consuming work, what would you stop?
  • For example, most people find checking emails and attending meetings time-consuming.
• If you can only get one thing done today, what’s the thing you’ll be glad you achieved? Create tomorrow’s to-do list tonight. The list should never have more than two really important things on it, and the author recommends using a piece of paper for the list because there’s a finite amount of space.
  • For example, if something seems time-sensitive but isn’t that important, consider what happens if you don’t do it. If you return a book to the library the day it’s due rather than doing something important, you might save yourself a $1 late fee, but you won’t have achieved the important thing, which is a much bigger consequence than being out a dollar.
• Are you multitasking? Never multitask. It’s inefficient, and if you find yourself wanting to do it, it’s because you haven’t prioritized. Multitasking may make you feel more efficient, but this is a ruse.
• Of the people you know, which 20% creates 80% of your most rewarding social interaction, and which 20% is responsible for 80% of your negativity? Think about who’s positive and how you can increase the time spent with them, and who’s negative and how you can decrease time spent with them. Of the negative people, what happens if you totally stop seeing them instead of only decreasing time with them? (Fear-set if you need to.) Breaking up with people is hard and it hurts, but it’s very important, as you’re heavily influenced by the five people you’re closest to. There are two ways to disengage from negative people:
  • Tell the person you’re concerned about their negative effect on your life. If they respond negatively, you’ve proved your point and you can stop seeing them. If they want to change, spend at least 14 days away from that person, so you can focus on the positive people, and then try interacting with them again. There should be a deadline for the relationship.
  • Politely avoid contact. If you don’t want to outright break up with someone, have a reason not to see them (being busy is a good one) every time they want to talk or meet.