Page 86 - Benjamin Franklin\'s The Way to Wealth: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation - PDFDrive.com

Prioritisation goes hand in hand with organisation. You have to be
absolutely ruthless about which deadlines are critical and which are merely
desirable. It’s a classic human error to waste time dabbling on two projects
rather than focusing on just one, or to be distracted into working on the
more attractive one despite it being less urgent.

Delegating is part of prioritising. If you’ve managed your time looking
forwards and realise that you’re not going to be able to satisfy the demands
on you, then you may need to look to some personal outsourcing if you’re
still going to hit your goals. Small businesses, sole traders and self-made
entrepreneurs are notoriously bad at this since they tend to resent paying
anyone else for something they can do themselves. Often, however, this
means that while your clients pay you for a skill they value, you are
wasting your own time on skills they don’t—such as bookkeeping or admin.
We know it’s not cost effective, but many of us spend hours doing petty
tasks that could easily be batched up and handed off to someone else for a
fraction of the hourly rate we ourselves are worth.

HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU…
Working to a tight deadline? Stop multitasking. Close down your email
and switch your phone to voicemail. Research suggests that we only
manage three continuous minutes of work before being interrupted.
Taking intrusive but impersonal interruptions out of the equation makes
you much more likely to get your work done.