How to Spend 100% of your Time on High Value Activities

You may be wondering to yourself, 'But, I am an employee! How can I choose to only do work that is of high value? Who am I going to delegate it to? Many of the low value work like checking emails & paperwork are still necessary, they must be done!'

Yes, if you are currently employed in a job, you must still do everything yourself initially. However, start focusing on doing all the high value activities first. Spend at least 70% of your total workday on these activities.

Then, use non-work hours to clear most of the 30% low value stuff! The hours of 9 am to 6 pm are the critical times when your actions must be generating high profits, like developing new businesses, following up with clients, ensuring product quality, strategizing growth in meetings and so on.

Doing paperwork, organizing your files, surfing to research materials and checking emails should be done after office hours.

Once you have managed to fully optimize your time, you must then take the next step. You must ask for an assistant so you can delegate all your low value activities to this person and fully concentrate your time on high value activities.

Remember, if you do not already have an assistant or one is not provided for you, be proactive, ask for one!

Why would your boss want to get you an assistant and increase the company's monthly expenses? Again, if you can show that by investing in an assistant for you at $3,000, you can be freed to generate an additional $15,000 to $30,000 in value, it will be an obvious decision to do so.

A Lesson that My Staff Taught Me

Another example I can give you is from my own advertising agency. I have got a number of account managers and directors. Some of them generate gross profits of over $45,0000 a month, while others manage only about $22,000. Obviously I pay the $45,000 person double what I pay the other, regardless of age or qualifications.

When I observed how they worked, it was obvious why this was happening. The $45,000 account manager spent 80% of the time, out of the office making presentations to secure new clients and visiting existing clients to get more advertising business.

He would then spend 20% of his time on office admin like checking the spelling, grammar of ad copy & coordinating workflow with the creative and media departments.

On the other hand, the $22,000 manager was spending most of the time in the office on the low value detail work and hardly any time strategizing on new campaigns or on business development.

When I first started out in business, I was not aware of the need to maximize the value of time until one of my staff, an accounts manager, taught it to me! This accounts manager came up to me and asked for a secretary.

At first, I thought that she was just being lazy and wanted to do less work. It appeared to be an unnecessary cost, so I did not approve it.

However, my accounts manager did not stop there. She knew that if she proved to me how it would be a great investment, I would approve. She was paid $4,000 per month at the time and she had to do everything that was necessary to manage the client's advertising account.

She told me that she was already working full eleven-hour days and that she just could not take on more clients and increase her gross profits from the $35,000 she managed every month.

But if I could get her a secretary for around $1,800 a month, she would have 40% of her time freed to bring in and manage additional clients and easily add another $20,000 in monthly profits. Once I saw the math, I gave the go-ahead!

Spend your time on high value activities where you will bring in the most profit and your income will rise as a result of the extra value you can now create. Focus on always creating more and more value!