Doing a lot but getting nowhere?
Investing more time upfront to identify activities that provide the best results will pay dividends later.
Richard Koch has written two books about the benefits of the 80/20 mindset*. The idea that approximately 80 percent of all our results in business and in life stem from only 20 percent of our efforts. I’ve read both books and am starting to apply this lens to my day-to-day.
Here’s what I’ve found:
There is no one size fits all approach in uncovering what 80/20 looks like. So it’s important to stay positive and remember everyone and every venture/business/blog is different and requires its own version of love to grow.
As this is a writing platform, I applied the 80/20 concept to my blog and looked at whether I was getting better (quality) engagement and growing my readership from posting articles OR was I getting better traction from digesting other content and commenting on other blogs. It’s a pretty simple question. But how to actually validate this?
I didn’t have an approach in mind, so I kept it simple and started logging how much time I was spending writing an article (to completion) versus digesting content from elsewhere and posting comments. This was a good measure point for me because I am a slow writer.
I won’t lie. I was initially quite discouraged to find that while I was spending 90% of my time seemingly perfecting my writing, I was getting better results (more subscribers and better engagement) from non writing activities. Ugh. When I unpacked where my subscribers came from, I realised not all of our efforts are weighted the same.
In his book Richard Koch notes that most people actually over estimate the value of their tasks and that’s why everyone ends up with packed schedules. We do not realise the low-value tasks sucking up our valuable time.
All the successful writers out there have this nailed. They know what is working and what isn’t and they focus only on the high value tasks.
If you are looking to identify where to focus your efforts then try this:-
- Start tracking what you are focusing your time and energy on (actually list the activity and time spent). Do this every day until you can see where you are spending the majority of your time
- Select a recent deliverable (article, blog post or something else) that you are proud of AND that has yielded success i.e. new subscribers, referral, recommendation or other benefit
- Write down every single step that you did to enable that success
- Repeat for other successes
- Identify themes, products, topics that are delivering similarly positive results. Leverage and amplify these.
- If you already have customers/followers, identify who is engaging with you more. (Ideally find out why)
- Last don’t forget to be yourself and focus on what you enjoy.
After a month, you will have a valuable set of data that should hint at areas where you may need to reallocate time, as well as learning how to reengineer successes until it becomes the norm.
Ultimately, this approach can help focus on the tasks that matter, help deliver quality work and add more value to your audience/customers.
*The underlying pattern 80/20 was discovered in 1897 by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. He was studying patterns of wealth and income in 19th century England. He found that most money went to a small minority of the people in his samples, and that the distribution of wealth was typically the same whatever the time period he took, and whichever country he researched.
