Spend 80 Percent of Your Time on the 20 Percent of Things that Create the Most Value

There are a thousand things that can distract you every single day. There’s a new social media service that’s all the rage. You should be on it. You’re missing out. Or are you? For many people, the value that is added by participating in yet another distraction is minimal considering, the effort, energy and attention required to deal with it.

When I looked at my online activity, a disproportionate amount of value, both financially and in terms of other metrics was created from three main activities:

• Writing articles
• Interviews for the Unmistakable Creative.
• Anything related to my upcoming book.

Between that, and the desire to spend my time immersed in deep work, I drastically reduced my time on social media and implemented Jake Knapp’s suggestion for dumbing own my phone. Cal Newport makes an incredibly convincing case for this with his results:

By the summer of 2014, I had nine full papers accepted for publication more than doubling what I had managed to accomplish in any preceding year.

That was in addition to writing a full-length book.

Focus Increases Momentum and Leads to Escape Velocity

In his book, Inside Steve’s Brain Leander Kahney has a chapter titled, How saying no saved Apple.

• Apple went from a company with a smorgasbord of products to only 4 and making those products amazing.
• Nancy Duarte and her team went from being an agency that did a bunch of things to doing one thing, presentations, exceptionally.

When my business partner Brian Koehn joined me and became the CEO of Unmistakable Media, he made one very wise observation:

Up until now Unmistakable has existed as a hodgepodge of projects some of which have been lucrative enough to get you to this point. But that’s not sustainable or predictable.

Our goal for 2015 was to stop existing as a hodgepodge of projects and narrow our focus. I have about a dozen new ideas a day for things that I want to do. This isn’t uncommon for anybody who starts things. But if you want to run and grow things, your best bet is not to start a ton of new things and focus on improving the existing things. You also probably want to cut it down to the 20% of your work that produces 80 percent of your results.

When we looked at our business, we realized that we had 3 core products and our entire focus would be to make these products amazing. Conveniently all of these core products integrated with each other. They were also the 20% of our work that created 80% of the value.

The Podcast

The Unmistakable Creative Podcast is our bread and butter. It’s where we have built the biggest and most loyal audience. And it’s also the biggest revenue generator of the 3 products. If you’re a company who wants to reach creative professionals with your app, service or product get in touch with us.

The Sunday Quiver (Our Weekly Newsletter)

Some people think email marketing is dead. But what we realized, after all these years was that email was the asset that we own. And it’s the one way we can connect with our community that’s guaranteed. According to Tim Grahl, the number of one driver of book sales for authors is e-mail. In an effort to properly integrate it with the podcast, we decided that the theme of each newsletter would be based on the content of each week’s interviews.

My first Traditionally Published Book

In August of this year, my first traditionally published book comes out. Fortunately, it’s all heavily integrated with the other two products above, given that a significant amount of it was driven by the lessons I’ve learned from all the years of running Unmistakable Creative.

If any opportunity doesn’t align with the growth of these 3 products, we say no.

The Rule of 3

I can’t take credit for the rule of 3. It was something I learned from Chris Bailey, when he and I spoke about bridging the productivity gaps in our lives.

When you look around, there are countless examples of threes embedded everywhere: the three bears, three blind mice, three little pigs and three musketeers…… Our mind is wired to think groups of three. — Chris Bailey

• Set 3 Goals
• Pick 3 Projects
• Build 3 Features

The thing with saying no to a thousand small things is that it might initially make you feel less productive. But if you add it up over a period of about 5–6 months, it will result not only in a significant increase in focus, but a drastic swing in momentum, and eventually, lead to escape velocity.

I’m the host and founder of The Unmistakable Creative Podcast.

Every Sunday we share the most unmistakable parts of the internet that we have discovered in The Sunday Quiver. Receive our next issue by signing up here