If you have recently gone into business for yourself or if you have been an entrepreneur for a while, you might have noticed that it can be really difficult to decide what to work on. It’s not like a job where you go to work in the morning and as long as you complete your duties, the exact financial results that you expect will come. Entrepreneurship is a lot more exciting than that.
Doing the right things is a lot more important than getting things done. Some people are obsessive about getting things done efficiently and checking off their to-do list. In business, 20% of your effort produces 80% of your results. By dialing in on the hyper-effective tasks, actions, and outputs, we can create a power curve in our business and get vastly more output for not a lot more effort.
In the book 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall, we are given a chart of tasks. It starts at $10 per hour tasks and builds up to $10,000 per hour tasks. If you do one of the tasks in the $10,000 per hour column, you’re not going to make $10,000 today unless you already have a business. Most of the time, it’s about focusing on these $10,000 tasks over the long-term.
First, you need to do a time study over a two-week period to see where you are really spending your time. Your results will surprise you. After this, you need to cut out the unimportant tasks and focus on the $10,000 per hour ones. As for me, I do quarterly planning and come up with five big goals I want to accomplish.
Before I go to sleep, I make a very short list of what I’m going to do the next day and I try to focus on revenue-generating activities. I’ve found that I can really only do one $10,000 per hour task each day, and until that one thing is done, I don’t do anything else.
It’s really hard to do in the beginning because it feels like you’re wasting money. If you’re paying someone to bring you groceries because you’re busy working on more important things, you won’t see the payoff right away, but you’ll see the expense. This is why most people stay stuck. They don’t see the payoff from $10,000 per hour tasks instantly.
To learn more about focusing on $10,000 per hour tasks, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast
80/20 Sales and Marketing: https://www.amazon.com/80-20-Sales-Marketing-Definitive-ebook/dp/B00CGNRVHE