A Meaningful Life

Try these mind games as a way to get yourself prioritised for the day:

1. A reality TV crew rocks up to your offices and says we are doing a show called “Bills Not The Boss”. They ask if Bill Gates can work for you for a day. What would you get him to do?
2. “Google Prioritize” launches and you start getting paid by shareholders and customers to do the highest prioty stuff first so the shareholders capital investment goes up and the customers get a better product. The better you prioritise the more bucks they pay you.
3. A VC is coming to your office in a week and you’ve heard the first question this VC asks in order to get a flavour of your activity is “What have you done this week?”

This morning I found myself deleting RSS feeds from my Google Reader. I was deleting general information feeds that tend to pump out several posts in a day, each one being overly general, long and some cases a bit boring to read. Inadvertently, I was keeping the lower frequency higher quality niche feeds. Of those deleted some are popular blogs, but thinking about it they are tech news or I’m just tired of the content. I’m convinced my readership relates to high quality that doesn’t come with a high time cost. For me the important components are:

1. Explanatory title not just a funny title - Lets me chose whether to read on.
2. Good opening paragraph summary - Lets me read the brief version.
3. Succinct story - I detest writing that repeats itself by saying the same thing in different ways.

Saw a great tip on a show called Neat last night. It was called R.A.F.T.

1. Read
2. Action
3. File
4. Toss

The gist was that any bit of paperwork (or email in after thought) fits into one of these categories. You simply sort your stuff and if you’re like me you will probably end up working on the big pile, “Action”. I think it might have a use in transaction and task handling in Saasu

What do you do when you have a lot of things you want to do but don’t have the time to do them? I have started asking myself this question since leaving the bank. My focus has shifted back to my business and my family. I think my strategy will be to follow a simple 3,2,1 rule. I will spend 3 hours on the most important and urgent thing on my list, 2 hours on the next most important thing, then 1 hour on the 3rd most important. The rest of my day can then be used for any other miscellaneous stuff that isnt critical but is probably still important long term. Having 4-6 hours up my sleeve outside this initial 6 hours allows me to deal with all the froth that exists around the bigger issues and the business in general.

Generally when you are in business you think about trading in terms of money. The reality however is that it’s time your are trading. You buy time, you sell time. You buy and sell it to do things or build things. For example you need to sell a car. It can be quantified in time just as much as it can be in dollars. The salesman spends 8 hours on average selling a car at $20 per hour pay say. You, being the Dealer Principal could have sold the car yourself but then you would have to hire someone into your role at $40 per hour. So you bought time at $20 rather than $40. So time in this case is the primary trading commodity and money is merely the quantitative realisation of time well traded. Trade in time and money will follow.

Increasingly I find that prioritising is key to making efficient use of time in business. What’s the one thing nearly all business owners want more off when asked? …Time. You can purchase time by hiring people to do stuff for you. Then those people can hire more people under them so you can do even more stuff. The trick is that the whole thing collapses when you don’t have sufficient income to cover the neat time pyramid you have created. This is the art of being a good pharoah. Marc

Procrastination is the thief of time…unknown The best way to prevent procrastination is not to try and prevent it, becuase you will not be able to. You have so many things to do in your life its next to impossible to do them all. Simply follow this single rule, 1. Pick a single task that takes less than 15 minutes to do. Later when you make this a habit you can add rule 2, 2. Prioritise your tasks. If you end up mastering these two rules you can group tasks together to complete a project or larger task Don’t follow Rule 2 until you have mastered Rule 1.