The last few months have been busy for me and have required some balancing and juggling to make time for everything. As you may know, I also run a small residential construction business, specializing in bathroom and kitchen remodels, and house additions. I do this because I love working with my hands, and seeing the finished product of a room or house after starting from a clean slate.
But I also know it’s important to work smart in life, leveraging your time anyway possible. That’s why I’m also involved in the network marketing industry…No other business model today allows a person to create a full-time leveraged income with such little investment. With that said, thinking of all this balancing over the last couple months, reminded me of an important lesson in building your own business:
It’s vital to focus on income producing activity.
You’ve likely heard of the Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80/20 rule. It basically states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. The 80/20 ratio isn’t exact and that’s not the main point, but the basic idea applies in so many situations. I think you’ll notice that throughout life, most of the benefits come from about 20% of your efforts. But, I believe it directly applies to the time you devote to your business.
The tricky part is focusing on that 20% of your efforts, because that’s where the majority of your income stems from. When you focus on the income-producing actions each day, you’ll be able to be more productive and get your work done quicker!
Here are just a few examples:
Social Media: This definitely falls into the 80% category of non-income-producing activities. You can make money in your business without such things as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They’re great tools to help you, but they’re just tools. They don’t directly influence your business’ bottom line.
Email: This is a trap I’ve fallen into many times. Emails are a vital form of communication, and it’s definitely important to reply back to customers and their questions. It’s obvious emails can’t be ignored, but they fall into the 80%. One thing I used to do was leave Hotmail and Gmail open all the time…every time a new email would come into my inbox, it would notify me, and I would stop what I’m doing, hop over to check the email and then hop back over, but it had completely interrupted my train of thought on what I was working on. Lesson learned, leave emails for when you’re about done working, check them all at once, not throughout the day.
Talking to Prospects: Top priority and definitely fits into the 20%…this leads directly to producing income for your business.
So how do you apply this lesson to what you do now?
The first thing you need to do is define exactly what your targets are based on your end goals… Is your goal to recruit a specific number of people into your business per month? Then more traffic to your website is a target. Or perhaps talking to X number of prospects on the phone per day is another target. On the other hand, something such as number of Facebook friends, or blog post comments is not as much a target as it is an indicator of how you’re progressing toward your targets.
In other words, those things still may be important, but you need to determine their level of importance, if they fit into that 20% of activities that directly produce income and results, or the 80% that can still be important, but lower on the priority list…You’ll still do some of those things, but being fairly brutal with evaluating yourself, you’ll see the relative importance of those activities.
So, how do you apply the 80/20 rule to your own business? Try this:
- Make a list of all the tasks you do in your business.
- Make a separate list of your end goals.
- Now, go over the list you made in #1 and categorize them based on whether they have a direct impact on your end goal.
Knowing this, here is what you can do:
- Realign your emphasis on the 80% activities and focus on the 20% activities. In some cases, you may find that an activity serves no real purpose at all, in which case you need to simply eliminate it. In other cases, the 80% activity is important, but doesn’t directly produce income or get you closer to the end goal…in this case you simply put it lower on the priority list, leaving it to do after some more important tasks are completed. My email problem is a great example of this…instead of leaving it open all day, only check it once or twice throughout the day.
- Evaluate your 20% activities and ask yourself this question: “Am I doing the things which will help me achieve my end goals?” You might find that you’re just spinning your wheels now because you don’t have any daily activities that fit into the 20% category, and you need to add some productive tasks to your list. For example, if your goal is to recruit 10 people this month, and yet you spend all day Facebooking and Tweeting, then you probably don’t have any 20% activities because you’re not really doing anything to help you achieve your end goal.
Taking some time to evaluate this for myself is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in building my home-based business.
Running your business can be quite overwhelming without a system of evaluating priorities of activities. All activities aren’t equal, and you only have so much time in a day to get everything done…especially if you are working your network marketing business part-time. You need to learn to determine which activities are important and which are not as important, then learn to divide your available time accordingly.
Master this and you’ll be way ahead of your competition.
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