|
Successfully marketing a product or service can take a lot of time. In an average day, there are dozens of things that can distract you from building your business, such as answering e-mails, attending meetings and dealing with many other things that can interrupt you. When this happens, you can end up putting in a lot more time and effort than needed. |
The truth is that a lot of these things are either not necessary in building your business or they may not need to necessarily be done by you. Sometimes they actually hold you back from achieving bigger and better things: things that may be more interesting to you, that you are passionate about and which in turn will give you the freedom to further build your business.
After learning about the Pareto Principle (more commonly known as the 80/20 Principle), Tim Ferriss, author of the book The Four Hour Work Week, had a revelation: he streamlined his business, eliminating distractions and automating systems until it was not only more profitable but also took less of his time.
The 80/20 Principle’s main idea is that 80% of your productivity comes from 20% of your time and the other 20% of your productivity eats up 80% of your time.
Ferriss argues that by eliminating that 20% of productivity that eats up most of your time, you can enact your marketing and business activities in a much more efficient fashion.
There are three ideas we have adopted from Tim’s work that can greatly free up your time in order to focus on the more important marketing activities that will greatly improve your productivity. These include:
1) Defining what objectives are most important. What things, if achieved, would produce 80% positive effect on your business?
2) Eliminating your involvement in tasks that do not further those objectives. Tim’s idea of the low information diet works well with today’s time-starved, media-addicted society. Some of the best ideas we espouse include:
l Stop multitasking. This means when you’re trying to write for example, close your e-mail program and your instant messenger program and your web browser and just focus on writing, nothing else. This allows you to complete the task much faster.
l Check e-mail only twice a day, preferably in the late morning, and again in the afternoon. Combining this with the ‘no multitasking’ idea enables e-mail to eat up only a small amount of time, rather than interrupting your day.
l Do not attend meetings without a clear agenda. If someone suggests a meeting, request the specific agenda of the meeting. If there isn’t one, ask why you’re meeting at all. Often, meetings will become more productive with an agenda or, if they were really time wasters to begin with, they won’t happen in the first place!
3) Automate as much as possible so that you free up even more of your time.
l This includes delegating non-core, task-oriented activities to staff or third parties. This again frees up your time to work on more strategic, value-added activities, that will build your business. If faced with the challenge of not having someone to delegate to, virtual assistants can be outsourced at very competitive rates. At ACK Solutions we outsourced all non-core activities to Brickwork India (http://brickworkindia.com). In Bangalore we now have a happy team that handles a lot of our day-to-day finance and admin work!
Marketing and building a business can take a lot of time. Using the 80/20 Principle to focus on the 80% of productivity that can be derived using 20% of your time can yield dramatic results. Defining your objectives, eliminating distractions, and delegating non-core tasks are a great way to help build your business.
♦ Ahmed Al Akber is the managing director at ACK Solutions. For nearly 12 years, Ahmed worked his way up to senior positions at Philip Morris International, Dell, and The Coca-Cola Company, in countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the Netherlands and Bahrain. Questions or comments can be directed to him on [email protected]