Aren’t we always finding ways on how to earn more money by giving bare minimum efforts? What if I tell you these aren’t just some words used as a clickbait but a well thought and statiscally proven strategy by a well renowned author/entrepreneur Timothy Ferris.

His book 4-hour work week has changed the way we think about making more money.

We usually think more money equals more volume of work and time. This concept is really old. It doesn’t apply anymore. We need to learn how to prioritise.

How to earn more money by Prioritising

The concept of prioritising is rather old but most of the human race till date fail to understand that.

1. Change your goals

Right now your goal probably is to get a lot of work done in a day. It really shouldn’t be this. Most of us including me are fond of results by volume approach.

We try to fill each second of our day in order to feel productive. It doesn’t matter how important that work is. We don’t measure the amount of time taken to complete a task by it’s worth. And IT IS BADLY NEEDED!

Just because a task requires a lot of time to be done does make it important. We need to engrave this in our head. It’s not always necessary that the more time a task requires, the more value it has. Please please, move on from this illogical thought.

Shift your goal to earning more money by working less. This can only be achieved by prioritising. Analyse the tasks that you have to complete carefully. Note down which task will benefit you more money wise (if you’re an entrepreneur).

If you are an employee, note down which tasks would make your boss happier and are beneficial for the company too.

2. Use the Pareto’s Law to earn more money

You must be wondering who’s this guy. We’ll this guy is going to change your life and help you understand the art of how to earn more money by working less.

Vilfredo Pareto was a wily and controversial economist-cum-sociologist who lived from 1848 to 1923. An engineer by training, he started his varied career managing coal mines and later succeeded Léon Walras as the chair of political economy at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. His seminal work,Cours d’economie politique, included a then little-explored “law” of income distribution that would later bear his name: “Pareto’s Law” or the “Pareto Distribution,” in the last decade also popularly called the “80/20 Principle.”

Pareto’s law states that 80% of the wealth and income was produced and possessed by 20% of the population. I know it’s quite uneven but believe me it is TRUE.

Let’s apply this to our work. Now that you’ve noted down the tasks that make you more money and are profitable for your business, it’s time to apply the law.

How to apply the law?

You’ll notice that only 20% of your tasks are giving you 80% results. And yet you must be wasting your time in completing 20 percent of those unnecessary tasks.

Basically, 80% output result from 20% of the input. Depending on different context, it can be solar Ed as:

80% of the consequences flow from 20% of the causes.
80% of the results come from 20% of the effort and time.
80% of company profits come from 20% of the products and customers.
80% of all stock market gains are realized by 20% of the investors and 20% of an individual portfolio.

So don’t overburden yourself with a lot of unnecessary work thereby preventing from completing much needed tasks.
I know completing a lot of work gives us fulfilment but it drains you. It wouldn’t help you a earn more money. In fact it’ll end up giving you a headache.

Apply this principle everywhere in your business. As an entrepreneur, you’ll understand the true importance of prioritising. It’ll help you save money, earn more money- a both while working much lesser than you’re doing right now.

3. Use the Parkinson’s Law

I know a lot of laws, but just bear with me. Most of the entrepreneurs come from 9-5 work culture. They are so much in a habit of working( even if it’s an unnecessary task). Even after they become their own boss, the habit stays with them. I know it’s really hard to break this habit but not impossible.

As I had explained in my older post- What is 1 Simple Business strategy that can change your life?

Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.

This is the magic of having deadlines.

I’ll explain this with an example. Suppose you’re given a project and you have to finish it in 3 days. Somehow or the other you’ll finish it in 3 days. Now you’re given 14 days for the same project. And I’m pretty sure this time you’ll take 14 days to finish something which you could’ve done in 3 days.

So here’s how you can apply both these laws:
1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20).
2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law).

Both the laws when applied simultaneously will help you get your most important work done in a minimum amount of time while not compromising with the quality.

4. Practice Selective Ignorance

When you are ‘online’ all the time, there is a lot of information that goes inside our head. You’ll be surprised to know that more than 90% of this so called information is useless.
Stop wasting your time and energy and consuming unnecessary information. Put a limit over that. Here’s how you can practice selective ignorance:

1. Go on an immediate one-week media fast. No newspapers, magazines, and audiobooks. Music is permitted at all times. No news websites and television at all, except for one hour of pleasure viewing each evening. No web surfing at the desk unless it is necessary to complete a work task for that day.
2. Only consume information for something immediate and important. Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it. Focus on “just-in-time” information instead of “just-in-case” information.
3. Practice the art of nonfinishing. Develop the habit of nonfinishing the work which is boring or unproductive if a boss isn’t demanding it in case you’re an employee.
   

5. Fix the interruptions

You would agree on this that there a lot of interruptions almost all the time. These interruptions unnecessarily delay our work. So you need to interrupt the interruptions. How to do that?

• Stop wasting all your time on responding to mails or even checking your mails. Limit this to only twice per day, that’s more than enough.
• Avoid all meetings that do not have clear objectives.
• Have an end time for your meeting (aim for 30 minutes).
• Stop the act of decision making going back and forth. If the other person asks you to decide something, just decide. Don’t waste time on playing this back and forth game.
• Force people to define their requests before spending time with them.

There’s a lot more that I can go on about but for the sake of not making it boring, I’m sure you’d have the gotten the gist. So start interrupting the interruptions.

Conclusion

As an entrepreneur, you must practice these if you don’t want to exhaust yourself with a lot of low yielding and unnecessary work. Your goal is to have a business that allows you to have a dream life without having to work endlessly.
So start prioritising and do tell us if this amazing approach made your life easy or not.