ElementsDaily

There is a general consensus that 80 percent of results are produced from 20 percent of the work. Think about this statement for a second. What this is really saying is that 80 percent of the work you do only contributes to a small amount of the results you produce. It also means that 20 percent of your customers or clients are responsible for 80 percent of your revenue. How much time do you spend each week working with the 80 percent of your clients who don’t buy from you?

I remember when I discovered the 80/20 Rule (Pareto Principle) – I was plugging away at a development project which looked like it was about to go over schedule and over budget. I looked at what I was doing and realized I was using a lot of time answering phone calls, emails, and building modules that didn’t need to be built to get the project out the door. I turned off the phone and email and focused completely on the required parts of the project. I finished the project in two hours!

After this experience I realized that I could apply this to many areas of my life and ended up developing a simple set of rules for getting through the work day:

1. Batch process as much as possible: This means taking common, repetitive tasks and grouping them to a specific time of day. For me, this means I read and respond to email only twice per day. This was hard at first; people would come by my desk (and still do) to see if I received their email. I setup an auto-response message letting people know when I am available to answer their email and if they needed me immediately they could send a message to my cell phone. This one step saved me at least three hours every day.

2. Get rid of the distractions: Turn off the email program and disable any audible notices that sound when a new message arrives. Turn off the ringer and all phone calls go immediately to voice mail. I have an out-going message stating that callers can email my cell phone for emergencies, otherwise I returns calls at a specific time. This saved me another hour each day.

3. Automate as much of the work as possible: ElementsConnect and ElementsLocal are built on this principle. We create a template or templates (we can provide this service) that websites will use and choose a default for new pages that need to be created. We also built a set of page layouts (we provide several of these upon install) that can be inserted into content pages once they are created, again with the ability to select a default.

This covers 20 percent of the effort needed for getting a site up and running, and 80 percent of the work is done! Hiring a copywriter is a good way to produce your site content. I had an excellent experience with elance.com (craigslist.org also has a lot of freelance listings). The copywriter I hired from elance.com gave me a very affordable rate and produced some of the best content I have ever read. Once your copy is ready, copy and paste it into your pages and your site is nearly done. The navigation builds itself, as do the sitemap.xml and robots.txt files. You may want to add a few extra features here and there (slide shows, a blog, etc.) but your site is effectively complete. Automation is your friend!

4. Duplicate relationships that bring you the most benefit. For example: if you have two clients who responsible for 80 percent of your orders, and twenty that you are always talking to but never buy anything from you, stop calling those twenty people. Concentrate on finding more clients like your two high volume customers. For me this was finding more people who I could have interesting discussions with, which eventually lead me to meeting my wife.

There you have it, 4 simple rules to make your life easier to manage. The hard part about all of this is getting everything in place – and having the strength to put down the Blackberry.