Become More Productive Than 99% of People

Have you ever felt like you don’t have enough time? Ever wish there were two of you or that you could freeze time just to catch up?

Today, I’m going to show you a theory, coined by historian and author Cyril Northcote Parkinson—Parkinson’s Law—that tells us our weakness when it comes to managing our time.

It goes like this: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

In reality, we don’t manage our time.

Time goes on regardless of what we do.

Yet, we do manage our decisions. The rub is that in order to manage our decisions we must master (or parent) ourselves.

As a parent there are times when I have to make decisions that are for the good of my two children, and sometimes they get pretty upset with me because I’m not letting them do whatever they want.

As an adult, the expectation for ourselves is that we no longer need to be parented by someone else, but that we will parent ourselves and do what needs to be done for our well-being regardless of how we feel about it.

But, how often do we do a terrible job of parenting ourselves?

The obstacle to this is twofold:

• Our society worships the paradox of comfort and achievement. Its a paradox because discomfort is required to achieve. This paradox causes us to want more, yet choose comfort, so we end up feeling dissatisfied for not having more and ashamed because we don’t put the effort in

• Decision Fatigue kills our willpower. The average adult makes 34,000 decisions per day, and according to social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister this progressively weakens our willpower as the day goes on to the point that we will avoid decisions all together.

You Need Less Time to Create More Time

Here are 3 steps to help you overcome wasting time in your life, so you have more time to do the things that you love, work on your personal growth, and build a better life:

• Throw away your to-do list (kinda…)

• Leverage the Pareto Principle

• Ruthlessly compress time

Throw Away Your To-Do List

I’ve always been a to-do list obsessed person, yet I realized one day that something wasn’t right. I had completed 50% of my list, yet the important things didn’t happen. I chose the easier things first (known as cognitive heuristic, which means we always choose what’s easy and familiar first), so although it looked like I was 50% done, I was actually about 20% of the way done in terms of the time and effort it would take to finish everything on the list.

This is why its critical that you don’t just make a list—you make a list based on your values and priorities. When you look at your daily task list, prioritize the tasks based on your personal values—what is important to you and moves you toward your goals (family, career, faith, etc.)—and what has deadlines, not based on what’s easiest. That kind of To-Do List is the kind you want.

Leverage the Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. Some call it the 80/20 Rule.

When you look at what needs to be done, decide where you can put 20% of your effort and time to get 80% of the results you want. Many times we think things will take more time than it actually takes.

This recently happened to me when my wife was asking me to fix the handle on our refrigerator. I thought it would take forever, and I had put it off for around 2 months. One day I just decided to knock it out, and it literally took me 5 minutes.

So, what 20% will give you 80% of the output?

Ruthlessly Compress Time

Many times we drag things out much more than we need to and complain that we don’t have enough time.

This might be doing laundry every day for a couple of hours instead of buying more clothes, so you don’t run out of clothes, and you can spend 2 hours twice a week doing laundry. Think about it… 2 hours per day is 14 hours per week. If you batch your time and build a bigger wardrobe, you go from 14 hours to 4 hours, and you have 10 hours back to do what is most important to you.

This has 2 benefits:

• You’re mentally present during the tasks, so you work is better than when you attempt to multi-task'

• You move toward your goals, ideal self, and ideal lifestyle faster than you thought you could.

Hope this helps you crush your goals and get more of your life back this week. Next week I’ll walk you through how to set up your week for effortless success.

To Your Life,

MVW

P.S. If this was helpful for you, it might be helpful for someone else. Feel free to share it. My goal is to help as many people as possible stop settling and start living. 🤙