Continually look for ways to reduce the complexity and clutter
of your daily life. If you only had six months left to live, what
sort of things would you do, all day long? This question helps
you to identify what is really important to you, what gives you
the greatest pleasure and satisfaction when you are not working.
The highest-paid activity in America, and in your life, is
thinking. The time you take to think about who you are and
what you want is more valuable and has a higher payoff to you
than any other single activity.
Most people act impulsively. The phone rings, someone
knocks on the door or comes in, they get an idea or the mail
arrives, and they are off! The average person is like a dog that
sets off to chase a rabbit across a summer field. As the dog.
The Principle of Simplicity—Take the Direct Approach
bounds after the rabbit, another rabbit jumps up, and the dog
veers after the second rabbit. Then a third rabbit appears, and
the dog changes course once more. By the end of the day, the
dog has been chasing rabbits back and forth around the field
for hours and is completely exhausted. But the dog has caught
no rabbits. This is the way many people live their lives.
The opposites of complexity and confusion are focus and
concentration.
The most important life skill you can develop
is the ability to focus single-mindedly on your most important
goal or activity and then concentrate completely on achieving
that goal. Work without diversion or distraction. Keep coming
back to your key task. Discipline yourself to work on your
highest payoff activities even when you don’t feel like it.
One of the best antidotes to stress is commitment and closure.
Commitment means that you make a clear decision that
you are going to do something. You then throw your whole heart
into doing it quickly and well. Closure means that you discipline
yourself to stay at the task until it is 100 percent complete.
You are designed in such a way that you get a tremendous
sense of satisfaction and accomplishment whenever you complete
an important task. Your brain releases endorphins, which
give you a generalized feeling of well-being and happiness.
These endorphins cause you to feel more creative and competent.
You feel more alert and aware. You feel energized and
motivated and eager to tackle new tasks. You trigger these feelings
whenever you make yourself complete the most important
task you have to do at any given time.
Streamlining and Simplifying Your Life
There are seven ways that you can simplify your life and
increase the quality and quantity of your results:
Work faster:
Get on with it. Develop a sense of urgency.
Pick up the pace. Whatever you have to do, begin immediately
and move quickly from step to step. The very act of moving
faster energizes you, increases your creativity, and improves
your ability to get even more done.
Work longer and harder:
Start a little earlier, work a little
harder, and stay a little later. Begin your work one hour
before anyone else gets there. This allows you to work without
interruptions and get a leap on the day. Work at lunchtime when
most people are out socializing. This gives you another hour of
uninterrupted time to catch up on your tasks and responsibilities.
Stay one hour later, after everyone leaves. This enables you
to conclude all your work for the day and plan for tomorrow.
By coming in a little earlier, you beat the traffic. By going
home a little later, you miss the traffic as well. By working during
lunch hour, you stay on top of, and get ahead of, your work
and everyone else. In no time at all you will be producing
twice as much as the average person, and your paycheck will
soon reflect it.
Bunch your tasks:
When you do several similar tasks
together, each subsequent task becomes easier. You get it done
faster. Return all your phone calls, one after the other. Answer
all of your correspondence, one letter after the other. Do all of
your expense reports together. Do all of your business proposals
at the same time. Do all of your prospecting at once.
Efficiency experts have discovered that if it takes you ten
units of time to do the first in a series of similar tasks, it may
only take you two units of time to do an equal or better job on
the fourth or fifth item in that series. This is called the “learning
curve,” and it is the key to high productivity in every area.
The Principle of Simplicity—Take the Direct Approach
Do things you are better at:
A small percentage of the things you do
account for the majority of the value of all the
things you do. There are things that you do in an excellent
fashion. When you are working on these tasks, you get more
done of higher value, faster and more easily. You contribute
greater value in these areas than on any other task.
One of the great secrets of success is for you to do more
and more of the things that you are better at and get better
and better at these tasks. Simultaneously, do fewer and fewer
of the tasks that you are not particularly good at and eventually
outsource, delegate, and eliminate them altogether. This
will simplify your life and increase your results more than any
other strategy.
Prepare thoroughly before starting:
You’ve heard the Five P Formula:
“Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.”
It is much easier to focus and concentrate when you have everything
you need at your fingertips rather than having to get up
and go looking for essential information and materials.
Do things together:
There are some tasks that you can
complete far faster when you do them in cooperation with
other people. The entire process of manufacturing is based on
the “division of labor,” where a task is broken down into
smaller chunks allowing each person to specialize in that task.
In this way, each person gets onto her own “efficiency curve,”
becoming more and more efficient at her job. The combined
results of several people working together in harmony at specialized
tasks can be extraordinary.