Many of you will have heard of the 80/20 rule in its various forms.

  •  You may get 80% of your income from 20% of your key clients.
  • 20% of your clients may cause 80% of the headaches!
  • 80% of your marketing spend may only be accounting for 20% of the new business leads.
  • But also in a broader sense, you may be spending 80% of your time on areas which are only delivering 20% of  the results.

There are some key questions to ask in refocusing your time, resources and energy:

These questions need us to be honest with ourselves, to face up to the truth and to act based on the answers.

 Ask yourself these questions: 

  • What must I or my business start doing that we are not doing at the moment?
  • What must I or my business stop doing as it is clearly adding limited value?
  • What must I or my business start doing more of which could prove effective use of time, energy and resources?
  • What must I or my business start doing less of as it is not a valuable use of time, energy  and resources?

 

We then need to act and make changes.

Sometimes reducing or ceasing our efforts in an area might simply mean that this can be delegated to someone else or outsourced to another person or business.

But it also means being totally ruthless.

They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results! 

Well there are many businesses that are stuck in ways of working that, when they stand back and reflect, are not delivering the results that they want or need.

The personal development expert Brian Tracey came up with the concept of “Zero Based Thinking”.  Within this you needto ask yourself the question:

“Knowing what I know now, would I start this specific activity?”

Apply this and the 4 questions above to all areas and make some bold changes based on your answers.