Elimination

This is a three-part essay on Elimination, adapted from Tim Ferris’s book The Four Hour Work-Week where he argues that cutting work is one of the most essential things to make progress in productivity. So for instance, when working on a business the goal is not just to increase revenue, but to decrease the amount of work required to increase that revenue.

This essay are based on a series of forum-posts I wrote for a BitSharesTalk series I called "Motivation Monday," - updated and improved for Steem! I hope you will enjoy it!

Being Effective versus being Efficient

Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is a common way to get our priorities wrong. It is possible to be efficient on some perverse work-for-work’s sake (W4W) level while still being far from effective.

Two things to keep in mind:

• Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
• Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

What you are doing is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.

The primary goal is always maximum value from minimal necessary effort. But how can we improve on this objective? Two common “laws” are worth stressing: Pareto’s Law and Parkinson’s Law. Let us take each in turn.

Pareto’s Law

Pareto’s law states that for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Putting 20% effort into something will often generate 80% of the results. Imagine working one day each week instead of five and getting 80% of the results. Or keep working five different jobs each week and doing 80% of a full week on each one. Clearly this sounds absurd, but in many instances Pareto’s law has been found to be valid, where businesses get 80% of their revenue from 20% of their clients, and 80% of their leads from 20% of their marketing efforts, and so on.

Naturally, the default mode is to do work 100% and not notice that the the 80/20 rule is in effect. However, if we constantly keep reminding ourselves that this is likely to happen, we can evaluate our work with this in mind by asking appropriate questions:

• Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?
• Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?

Take some time to go through these questions and answer them as honestly as you can when you have time. In the answers and actions section below, there are more questions to help you clarify your answers. Don’t expect to find that you’re doing everything right, I certainly realized a lot of things, and remember that it can be uncomfortable to face the truth.

Being busy can be a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and far more unpleasant, in addition to being unsustainable and harmful in the long run. Being selective - doing less - is the path of the productive. Focus on the important and ignore the rest.

Lack of time is often just lack of priorities in disguise.

Parkinson’s Law

Parkinson’s Law states that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. When we have a short deadline there is something magic about our ability to execute in time compared to our reveling in complexity and distractions when the deadline is further away.

One of the best papers I wrote as a student was written over the course of 3 days while I had high fever and could only muster a couple of hours concentration per day. Because of the limited time and ability to focus, I had to limit everything to the most essential, writing one or two sentences at a time and making sure they were exactly what I wanted to say.

It is fruitful to combine Pareto’s Law with Parkinson’s Law:

• Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (Pareto’s Law).
• Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law).

Using both together you can identify the critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines. If you haven’t identified the mission-critical tasks, the unimportant becomes the important. And even if you know what is critical, unless you have set very short deadlines that create focus, the minor tasks will swell to consume time until another bit of minutiae jumps in to replace it, and so on.

In sum, most inputs (causes) are useless and time is wasted in proportion to the amount that is available.

Questions and Actions

The point of this section is to get you to think about these two questions and help you think of answers and areas of your life where they might be relevant.

• Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?
• Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?
• If you had a heart attack and had to work two hours per day, what would you do?
• Who are the 20% of the people who produce 80% of your enjoyment and propel you forward, and which 20% cause 80% of your depression, anger, and second guessing?
• Ask yourself, “How can I use Parkinson’s Law both on a Macro and Micro level?”

Take some time to think and write down what you think. Even if a 4h workweek is impossible, the very idea can push us to see the problem of time and productivity in a new light, forcing us to think in new ways to get more done with less time.

Elimination Part 2: The Low Information Diet

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." - Herbert Simon

Just as modern man consumes both too many calories and calories of no nutritional value, information workers eat data both in excess and from the wrong sources. If we want to increase our output, we need to decrease our input. In addition, most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals and outside of your influence.

Cultivating Selective Ignorance

"There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant." - Ralph W. Emerson

It can be difficult to stop consuming negative and irrelevant information. To get rid of this bad habit, try asking yourself, “Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?” If “no” on either count, then most likely it is not worth consuming at all.

It can also be difficult to stop consuming information after we have started consuming it. We persist reading or watching something even after we have realized it would be better to just put the book down and pick up another one, or walk out of the theater even if we paid 6$ for it.

Cold Turkey Challenge

“Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace” - Robert J. Sawyer

Go on an immediate one-week media fast with,

• No newspapers, magazines, audiobooks, or nonmusic radio.
• No news websites whatsoever
• No television at all, except for one hour of pleasure viewing each evening.
• No reading books, except one hour of relaxing reading before bed.
• No web surfing at the desk unless it is necessary to complete a work task for that day.

Elimination Part 3: Interrupting Interruption

Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. - Ralph Charell

An interruption is anything that prevents the start-to-finish completion of a critical task, and there are three principal offenders; time wasters, time consumers, and empowerment failures. Let's look at each in turn to see how we can help prevent interruption.

Time Wasters

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace. - Robert Sawyer

Those things that can be ignored with little or no consequence. Common time wasters include meetings, discussions, phone calls, web surfing, and e-mail that are unimportant.

These are the easiest to eliminate and deflect: Simply limit access and funnel all communication towards immediate action. Try to avoid meetings that do not have clear objectives.

Time Consumers

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. - Annie Dillard

Repetitive tasks or requests that need to be completed but often interrupt high-level work. Here are a few you might know intimately: Reading and responding to e-mail, making and returning phone calls, customer service, financial or sales reporting, personal errands, all necessary repeated actions and tasks.

Time-consumers consume time because they tend to interrupt other activities, leading to inefficiencies associated will small scale actions. Batching such tasks to the end of the day avoids distraction and makes the process of completing them more efficient.

Empowerment Failures

The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what's going on so they can do a lot more than they've done in the past. - BIll Gates

Instances where someone needs approval to make something small happen. Here are just a few: fixing customer problems, customer contact, cash expenditures of all types. Both being micromanaged, or are micromanaging someone else, costs your time. In general it’s not scalable because there is a decision bottleneck.

To solve this try to empower others to act without interrupting you. Limit access to your time and force people to define their requests before spending time with them. Going further, by using automation (and out-sourcing) you can empower automata to make decisions in your place.

Conclusion

Stop wasting time, be more efficient, eliminate all irrelevancies!