 satisfaction?
Many small business people fail to follow the age-old time management/prioritising principle that you hear at every ‘management seminar’ – doing what is ‘most important’. Once you know your goal, and you’ve structured your basic work role and life activities around your high-performance flow-state activities, the third key is focusing solely on the truly important things.
This principle has arguably been best illustrated by the world-renowned Stephen Covey through the Rocks, Pebbles, and Sand analogy (though I believe this teaching actually originated from a university professor who used golf balls). Basically, think of a container that represents your business. The container has sand filling the bottom and pebbles filling the top. The sand represents all the ‘small stuff’ that takes up your time and energy, but doesn’t really lead to your bottom-line business results. The pebbles represent the ‘nice’ things. They’re smooth, shiny, and look good, but at the end of the day, they also are not the key drivers of your business success. In a typical business, the small or nice things ‘may’ include (it will differ for different businesses) – excessive e-mailing, sending Christmas cards to clients, having flashy brochures, fluffy marketing campaigns, taking non-sales phone calls (e.g. incoming telemarketing calls), doing basic accounts/bill payments/office organisation (all possibly better outsourced).
The key point is that, like the container, if your business is full of sand and pebbles, when it comes to putting in any ‘big rocks’, which represent the fundamental, bottom-line drivers of your business success, there is no room left.
When we fill our time up doing all the small things and doing what’s ‘nice’, there is no time left for the really important things.
This results to … more stress … less success.
The solution? Starting again with a new, empty container, the professor first puits three big rocks in. He then pours the first container full of pebbles and sand into the new container. What happens? The pebbles and sand all distribute themselves around the big rocks… without overflowing. The point! Everything else finds a way of fitting in. And it is exactly the same in business.
When we do the big (truly important) things in our business, we often find that much of the ‘small stuff’ that we thought was important, doesn’t even need to be done.
 Get out your diary or electronic organiser, and where there’s some space in it, whether that’s two weeks, two months, or six months away, start putting in actions related to the big rocks of your business. These might include, getting super clear on your end goals, big-picture strategic planning, spending extra time getting the best possible staff, setting up face-to-face meetings with your key customers/clients/suppliers…whatever the truly important things are that only you can do.
C) Constantly think how you can restructure your day so you are spending the majority of your time on your ‘big Fish’ activities – the activities that drive 80% of your results.
In order to spend more time on the really important things, we of course, have to get rid of some of the ‘small stuff’. How do we do it? There’s three key ways.
High-productivity people are clear about their big-picture goal. Thus, anything that does not align or support the achievement of that goal, is simply not entertained. I.e. they say ‘NO’ to. They might say no nicely, but they say no. What’s something ‘small’ that takes up your precious time or energy that you can say no to or decide not to do anymore? E.g. attending networking functions where you get loads of business cards but little, if any, actual business.
I learnt this saying off Dale Beaumont, a super productive and highly successful Australian entrepreneur. Aim to be good, even excellent, but don’t worry about perfection.
Outsourcing is arguably the most powerful business principle of all. If you really want to turbo-charge your business, get massively more done in less time, with less stress, get comfortable with outsourcing.
The beauty of today’s global world, is that you can literally outsource ‘anything’ (all the ‘small stuff’ you don’t like doing and takes up your precious time), at a tiny cost, and with relative ease.
If you are not familiar with the benefits of outsourcing, here’s a taste from my business. Last year, I self-published my first book. The biggest obstacle for people self-publishing books, is the time and cost involved in producing it. Instead of paying thousands of dollars to get my book produced in Australia, I had the book cover designed by a Canadian designer (through www.designcrowd.com for $250 – usually $1500 for a top-class book cover design). The illustrations were done in India (through upwork.com for $150 – usually $500). The typesetting was done by someone in Italy (through Upwork for $400 – usually $1200+).
Now, for most time-consuming or general tasks related to promoting or selling the book or my related talks, I get my virtual assistant in the Philippines to do it (for $4 an hour – through upwork.com). She researches the internet and sends me a full report about what’s involved in selling books online/Amazon etc. She not only collates database lists that would take me days to get, but puts them into my online database, so I can simply go in and send an e-mail promotion to hundreds or thousands of potential buyers in a few minutes. Aside from the book, she remotely accesses my computer to organise my computer files, de-clutters and systematises my emails, sets up time-saving work systems, uploads my blogs, pays my accounts, buys things online etc etc etc. (I haven’t worked out how she can record my favourite TV shows yet, but..!).
Even this article you are reading, is a result of me recording myself speaking on my video camera for 30 minutes, sending the video to a video guy (in the USA), and for $20, having him send back the whole video transcribed into text, complete with paragraphs, section headings etc. (For another $20 or so, I could get him to strip the audio from the video and make it into a podcast (which I could probably sell for $20), and add some little banners and graphics to the video, and have him upload it to You Tube as well as to hundreds of other internet sites, via video syndication software.
While these specific examples, may not apply to your business, you can see the power of doing less and achieving more through strategically outsourcing. You can work with people all around the world to do all the little time-consuming things involved in your business that you don’t have the time or desire to do – so you can focus on the things you really enjoy and no-one else can do for you. In my case these include, speaking at conferences/events, writing articles/books, doing media etc.
Gradually eliminate some of the ‘small/nice’ things that you spend a lot of time, energy or money on, that don’t really contribute to your bottom-line results.
* Each day in my diary, I include at least one outsourcing activity. I.e. outsourcing something to my ‘virtual assistant (VA) or other virtual helpers, or in setting up a ‘system’ (that once done can be replicated by someone else for ever more). This usually involves a www.jing.com video of exactly how to do it, so that anyone else can do it just as well as I could.
* Screencast-o-matic enables you to videotape your computer screen while you give audio instructions. Beeaautiful!
Principle number 5 is all to do with controlling our environment. In particular, technology-based things like, phone calls, e-mails, facebook. Most businesspeople completely sabotage their productivity because they fail to control these.
Research shows that on average, it takes about 20-25 minutes of focused activity to get into our peak, high productivity (flow) state. 
Every day, we get interrupted before we get into our high productivity state.
Why? Because we let technological gadgets control us instead of us controlling them.
Solution? Start taking responsibility for your environment and setting boundaries. For example, unless you’re in a sales-related role and you have to take every incoming call, can you get someone else to answer calls, or turn your phone off for periods during the day? Rather than making outgoing calls here and there, can you group five or six phone calls into one chunk (maybe while going for a walk and getting some exercise!), and make all the calls in one go? With e-mail, rather than checking them whenever they come in – and always getting disrupted (do you really need the latest Viagra pill or Nigerian ‘get-rich quick’ scheme?) – try chunking your email times into three or four 30-40 minute sections each day. Many high-productivity individuals make a point of never responding to email first thing in the morning, and only responding at set times throughout the day. E.g. 11am, 2pm, 5pm.
Another point here is that it’s not just about how we can stop technology from interrupting us, but how we can use technology to massively boost our productivity? One of my all-time favourite examples of this is voice recognition software.  I also have a little dictaph