Efficiency Practices of the Business Elite: Three Tips for Your Daily Life
We’ve all seen articles about how we should exercise every day, get plenty of sleep, and meditate, but one man has gone a step further. If you haven’t heard of Tim Ferriss yet, stop reading and go find The Four-Hour Workweek. Despite being written over a decade ago now, it is still a game changer. After writing several books following his best-selling debut and interviewing hundreds of leaders in different fields and testing things out for himself, Ferriss has become an efficiency master. Here are three tips from Tim and some of the experts he’s interviewed:
1. The 80–20 Rule
One of the most important things Ferriss advocates for is the 80–20 rule. This is also known as the Pareto Principle or the Law of the Vital Few. The idea behind this time-saving tip is to analyze your business or life. Around 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
This can be applied in many different ways. For example, 20% of your current activity at work is responsible for 80% of the positive results. From another perspective, 80% of your sales are coming from 20% of your customers. You can apply it to taxes as well. 80% of the tax pool comes from 20% of the highest earners in the population. In the more abstract and personal, my guess is that 80% of your happiness comes from 20% of the activities you enjoy most.
The idea here is that you can easily free up time by focusing in on the 20%, whatever that is, and cut back on the rest. They’re not worth your time and effort. We can also look at this in the negative perspective. What 20% of sources are causing 80% of my stress, and how can I eliminate their effect? Or what 20% of things am I doing poorly that are leading to 80% of my bad results?
“The goal is to find your inefficiencies in order to eliminate them and to find your strengths so you can multiply them,” Ferriss says.
By going through and seeking out your 20% in different categories, you can find ways to eliminate inefficiencies or projects that should be left behind. As a business leader, you need to prioritize. This will help.
“Look at the 20% that are the highest leverage positive things, and I’ll focus on those. I’ll look at the 20% most negative things that are consuming the most time and try to eliminate those. There’s quite a bit of in-between that in the end, often takes care of itself, but really keeping your eyeball on your to-do list are the 80–20 positive and the not-to-do list for the 80–20 negative is huge,” Ferriss describes.
Even after your 80–20 analysis, there will still be efficiency work to be done. This is where people like to get creative. Richard Branson prefers to hold company meetings standing up. The idea here is that no one likes to stand all day, so everyone gets to the point much quicker. Both practical and clever.
2. Go distraction-free, and work in blocks.
Ferriss also advises single-tasking and blocking out a few hours each day or each week to focus on one thing without distractions. There are at least five different distractions from wherever you’re sitting now. There’s a weird-looking bird that looks like he’s going to dive-bomb your window. That dust ball has been hiding out under that side of the desk for at least two months. Clean. I should clean. Or mow. If I mow, maybe the bird will fly away, and I can prevent injury. You know how it goes.
No one wants to lock themselves in a silent, white-walled room without a phone or internet. Single-tasking is the exact opposite of multitasking and takes much more focus due to the aforementioned disturbances.
Neil Strauss, best-selling author of The Game, uses an app called “Freedom” when he writes, preventing him from getting online. If something comes up he needs to research, he adds it to a list for later.
CEO of Asana, Dustin Moskovitz does the same. He says, “My biggest hurdle to productivity is interruptions.” He even goes so far as to implement a no-meetings-on-Wednesdays rule. The idea is to allow employees at least one day with an interruption-free period that they don’t have to squeeze between meetings. By scheduling a block of time for a single, specific task, you are using “blocking.”
Ramit Sethi, successful entrepreneur and author of “I Will Teach You to be Rich,” also uses blocking to get things done. Spending a few hours on your most important and challenging to-dos vs. 15 minutes here and there, aka task switching, and allows you to do deep work.
When you do deep work without distractions, you will find that you get things done better and quicker, because you really give yourself permission to focus. Schedule different tasks in different blocks and don’t cheat by trying to multitask.
In an effort to really get into the zone, many people, including Ferriss, recommend turning your phone on airplane mode until your done with a task. For some of you, that might mean putting your number two in charge for a bit. This is good practice for both you and him/her.
3. Create a routine to increase productivity and reduce decision fatigue.
The story of how Steve Jobs got his signature black turtlenecks has been talked about for years. Not only did Jobs wear the same thing every day, but President Barack Obama and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took note as well. Obama only wears blue and grey suits. He told Vanity Fair the following:
“I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing, because I have too many other decisions to make.”
This phenomenon is called reducing decision fatigue. If you make 1,000 choices every day, it can be exhausting, and the choices that come later in the day are affected. You can deter this from happening by eliminating some of the low-stakes options. Some top business people even eat the same thing for breakfast every day. It has become so ingrained into their routine, they don’t even think about it.
Getting rid of some of your necessary decisions and creating a routine will train your mind and body to prepare for the day. For some people, this means waking up with a cup of coffee and reading the news. Tim Ferriss meditates, journals, and makes the same cup of specialty mixed tea he created. He also makes it a point to leave out checking emails first thing in the morning.
Whatever it is that gets you ready to go is perfect. Not all of us can wake up at 5am and “hit the gym.” With that in mind, consider a morning like a stretching period before the big race in your office every day. You can certainly run without stretching, but you’ll be more focused and feel better if you warm up.
There are many more tips floating around the internet. Try to find the ones that work for you and implement them gradually. The tips above are some we find most valuable, but they definitely aren’t easy. In a time where multitasking is the norm and we need explosions every ten minutes to be able to concentrate on a movie without checking our phones for “likes” or emails, single-tasking, as Tim Ferriss puts it, is a superpower. As you start streamlining your life, remember efficiency is only as good as your effectiveness. Prioritize the right tasks, and getting them done will be a breeze.
