A statement everyone’s heard or said at least once.

Approach any undertaking can be a challenge.

I started to reflect on how I introduced consistent reading into my schedule a while back so I can do the same thing with writing. I remembered a few months into my reading pursuit I started mentioning my goal of 60 books a year and it seemed that the few times I mentioned this goal I kept getting similar responses: Where do you get the time to do that?

This statement nagged at me the more I kept hearing it and the more this concept kept appearing as my reading progressed. So, I figure to reflect on my thoughts about the topic of time.

Let’s start with a simple fact; Everyone has the same amount of time in a day, a week and a month…

Think about that statement. I’m telling everyone that their role models, and the most successful people in the world like Bill Gate, Warren Buffet, Mark Cuban, and Oprah Winfrey all have the same time as everyone else. So why do so many people harp on how they are “too busy”?

It comes down to priorities. Often people get caught up doing the unimportant. I’m sure you’ve heard of Pareto’s Principal of 80/20 but just in case you haven’t it can be summed up into the fact that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes, and to take it one step further some argue that 96% of the effects come from 4% of the cause.

This really means that almost 80% of what someone is doing is highly ineffective or useless.

Why do people end up doing so much useless work?

One of my favorite writers, Tim Ferris, give’s countless great examples in his book 4-Hour Work Week, as well as many of his blog posts, but it comes down to three things.

People don’t want to address the critical tasks that will help yield the highest result because they’re hard or uncomfortable, so they procrastinate with unimportant and easy tasks to feel like they’re working and busy.
People often don’t know the difference between the critical tasks that yield the highest ROI and the non-critical tasks that provide little value.
Humans follow bad habits they’ve been taught from others or learned by watching what majority of others do i.e. monkey see and monkey do.

Luckily everyone can fix these things with a few different strategies.

Stop what you’re doing and think. Before approaching any new task or challenge understand the end goal and define it. For me I’m trying to expand my writing. To create a defined object from “expanding my writing” I would define it as producing an article/blog a week.

Analyze the components that make up the goal. For something like writing an article/blog a week its components can be broken down to finding topics, researching content, outlining structure, writing and editing.

Determine what elements are the most critical to the end goal. The object is to get to the end goal as quick as possible because we don’t have enough time, right? For writing structure is the most critical component to creating a good piece.

Rearrange and reallocating resources to apply focus to most important tasks and reduce effort on the least important tasks.

Using writing as my example say it takes me 10 hours to complete the task:

Finding a Topic – 1 Hr.
Researching Content – 4.5 Hrs.
Outline – 1 Hr.
Writing – 3 Hrs.
Editing – 1.5 Hrs.

To hit my goal of an article a week 10 hours won’t do, but 5 hours seems like a reasonable place start. By Focusing on the most critical element I identified the time I need to accomplish this might looks something like:

Finding a Topic – .25 Hr.
Researching Content – .5 Hrs.
Outline – 3 Hr.
Writing – 1 Hrs.
Editing – .25 Hrs.

“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” ― Yogi Berra

Once there’s a plan it’s just executing and refining.

It can be difficult to follow plans we give ourselves. Like I mentioned humans tend to follow what everyone else is doing. We form bad habits and have difficulties breaking them, but with the right tools in the tool belt we can make it easy to do the things that give us the best returns.

If you find yourself falling back into bad habits…

I recommend reading a the Power of Habit. This book dives into the topics of what habits are, how they’re formed and how to change them.

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If you interested in approaching learning something new…

I recommend reading the 4-hour Chef. This book follows a very similar principals to learning something quickly and effectively.