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Two Powerful Principles To Getting More With Less

Do you work too hard? Do you have an endless supply of things to get done and not enough time to do them? Well, as it turns out…

A majority of what you do each day is worthless!

It may seem like it’s important, but it’s not. In fact, the things that keep you the most busy are more than likely contributing little if any to your success. And a majority of your success comes from only a brief amount of the time you spend working.

What you are about to learn are two powerful principles that will quickly teach you how to get more done with less.

They are easy to learn and will have a dramatic increase in your productivity. As you will see, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be working harder. It actuality it will probably mean the opposite. You’ll be working much less. Because you’ll start working ten times smarter than you ever have before.

These two principles are going to change your life forever. You’re about to experience rapid improvement in everything that you do. I hope your ready. Here’s the first principle…

Pareto’s Principle (aka The 80/20 Rule)

The Pareto Principle is this in a nutshell…

80% of your success comes from the result of 20% of your time and effort.

Opposite of that, 80% of your time spent working is only contributing to about 20% of your success. A majority of the time you spend is wasted on unimportant things. Doesn’t it make sense to focus more of your time on the 20% that is contributing to an overwhelming majority of your results?

This is what the Pareto Principle is all about. Learning to do more and more of the 20% and concentrating much less on the other 80%. You see…

We all have this myth fixated in our head that work is work and that it is all the same. It isn’t! Not even close. Some work that you do is very important and some of it isn’t. If you worked one hour on one thing and the next hour on something else, it doesn’t mean that what you did each hour contributed equally to your success.

Chances are, you should have spent a majority of that two hours doing more of one thing or the other. Whichever task that contributes more to your success. Let’s give an example…

Let’s say you wanted to speak a new language. You could go about this in one of two ways…

You could practice learning every word in that language equally.
You could learn the 20% of the most common used words in that language and start perfecting the use those words.

Going the first route would take several years. And you wouldn’t have nearly as much knowledge of the words that you use frequently. This is because you spent so much of your time learning all of the words. You know how to say “stagnating” and “enfrith” in Spanish but you sometimes forget how to say “the” and “of”. Even though you use these words in almost every sentence! (Note: If you want to see a really cool tool that shows every English word in order of importance, check out Word Count).

When you go the second route and learn the 20% of the most common used words, these words account for 80% (probably even more) of the words you will actually be saying when you speak in that language.

You can make much better use of your time if you focused more of your time perfecting that 20%. This would help you become conversationally fluent in a matter of months!

The Pareto Principle is a very powerful principle. This is just one example of how it can be used to make your life easier. It should be used as much as possible in as many areas of your life that you can think of. Starting today, frequently ask yourself this question…

“What is contributing the most to my success, and how can I focus more of my energy and efforts doing those things?”

Why spend an hour doing something that is going to do almost nothing for you when you can spend that same hour doing what benefits you the most? The best strategy is to either delegate those other tasks to someone else or simply don’t do them at all.

Many of the things you do only seem like they need to be done. But if you keep putting them off, what happens is you’ll notice that you really didn’t need to do them at all. Try going an entire day without checking your email. You’ll be surprised to see how little of importance some of the emails you get truly are!

The 80/20 principle will dramatically clear up your day. So you can spend more time doing the things that really matter. And also the things that you enjoy doing the most.

Parkinson’s Law

With the 80/20 rule, you’ve already gotten rid of about 80% of the work that you normally do. And your not noticing any drop in your success.

Now it’s time to get the 20% of the most useful things done as quickly as possible. After all, if we start getting lazy with the 20% because we have so much more free time, it really doesn’t do us much good right? And that’s where Parkinson’s Law comes in. Parkinson’s Law is simply this…

“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”

Let’s say you are assigned a project that you need to do. If you are given eight hours to do it, then it will probably take you eight hours. But if you only have six hours to do the exact same project, it will probably only take you six hours!

Now isn’t that interesting!

You can do the same thing in six hours instead of eight if you just give yourself a smaller time for completion.

What happens when you give yourself less time is that you are forced to increase your focus. You are forced to apply Pareto’s Principle and work on only the most important things. You find ways that you can cut corners in order to get the job done faster.

Parkinson’s Law is very powerful. And it’s simple to implement…

Give yourself a specific time in which to complete something. Make it so it would be difficult to complete in that amount of time, but very possible if you really devote all of your effort and energy into it.

It’s truly amazing how much more you will get done when you give yourself a definite time in which to complete something. Your “race against the clock” makes you do everything possible to get things done quickly and efficiently.

Parkinson’s Law will contribute more to your success then you would have imagine. It will significantly add to the amount of productive work that you get done each day.

A Lethal Combination

Combining these two principles together will be like dynamite for you! You will begin to get the things you want in life much faster. And you won’t need to work harder or more to get it. In actuality you’ll probably find yourself working much less.

You’ll be working much smarter because you’ll immediately focus your attention on the things that are the most important.

This often takes courage and it will take some practice. But when stop wasting your time on all of the things that are just “busy work” and don’t really matter, everything starts to change. Here’s a quote that has had a huge impact on my life since I first heard it. I hope it does the same for you…

“What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.”

- Tim Ferriss (Author of The 4 Hour Workweek)

Fight your fears and start attacking the things that in the past you would have put off until later. Start figuring out what it is that you do that is most beneficial to you. Then find ways that you can do more of it and less of all the other stuff.

Apply Parkinson’s Law and give yourself specific and shorter amounts of time to complete your most important tasks. Because work seems to fill in excess to the amount of time that we give ourselves. So make it a short amount of time.

Then get to work!

Your won’t believe how much your life will change.

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