Stop Doing That

I love reading and learning. Reading affords me the ability to learn, well… just about anything. And so this morning while reading the April 2013 issue of Inc. Magazine I came across an article written about Tim Ferriss (Author of “The 4 Hour Workweek” and multi-millionaire Guru) titled “Get More Done” and just had to share a small portion of the article for you to read. My clients continually want to know how to get more done and be more productive. So…

Stop Doing That…Some Tim Ferriss Basics for Avoiding Distractions and Wasting of Time

·      Check your email just a couple of times a day and train the people you correspond with not to cc you on endless email threads.

·      Avoid meetings, and when you must have them, make sure they have scheduled end times.

·      Adopt a “low-information” diet and read only the headlines in the news.

·      Develop template responses for customer service and supplier or media queries. Empower employees to use them.

·      Calculate how much your time is worth by the hour, and outsource administrative and research tasks to people who will handle them for less (Ferris uses sites like TaskRabbir, a company he invested in to find the help.)

In general, Ferriss says, “Preserve your creative horsepower for things that actually matter, not how much to charge some guy for overnight shipping.

I really enjoyed the entire article but experience has taught me commercial real estate professionals struggle to delegate and have difficulty giving up control over things like email and phoning.

Ferriss has what he calls the 80/20 rule.  Eighty percent of your productivity comes from 20% percent of your efforts, and, likewise. 80% of your wasted time comes from 20% of the possible causes. So, eliminate the 20-percent time wasters, and spend as much energy as possible on the productive 20 percent. An example – fire high-maintenance, time-wasting clients and get twice as many new well-behaved ones instead.

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