I’ve read good amount of books/ blogs/ reddit threads on productivity.
Mainly, I was inspired to work on improving my productivity after reading the book – 4 Hour Work Week.
It has been almost a year now practicing & improving my Productivity and today, I want to share with you some of the best ways (or say my experiments) that can dramatically improve your productivity!
Note: I’ll be sharing the tips in parts (i.e. one tip every week).
Reason: So that you can consume all the tips well! These are ACT Exercises and hence won’t be good if I share all at once!
I’ve already shared three strategies! If you haven’t read it – Go through it once! [Strategy Uninstalling Couple of Apps, Laterbox & Eggtimer]
Time for the Fourth Strategy/ Way to Remain Super Productive! [1 more to go]
4) Using the 80/ 20 Rule to Remove the Low Quality Task
This exercise is a kicker, if you can dominant this –>You will free your time by 10x or Increase your results by 10x.
Since the results are so high, the exercise in itself is super tough to perform. Sometimes you will have to take actions that you may think are nuts.
For example, saying NO to your BOSS when he assigns you some activity or asking him to re-consider the deadline of the task since you understand that it is not of high value.
What’s 80/20?
20 Percent of the causes comes from 80 per of the effects!
In our world:
80 Percent of the results comes from 20 percent of the work activities!
80 Percent of your sales comes from 20 percent of your clients
Real Life Example:
70 Percent of the Webinar Registrations comes from a single marketing activity.
Explanation:
I used to work with a Web Analytics Agency where we do Webinars every month!
I do following activities to reach out to the target audience and ultimately bring more registrations:
- Email Marketing (Sending Invites to Our Subscribers)
- Social Media Promotion (includes promoting on our social media channels, Promoting on various groups on google+, linkedin, Facebook, reddit and inbound)
- Influencer outreaching (Asking Influencers to Tweet/ share about the webinar)
- Random emails/ tweets to strangers who have shown interest in the topic
- Leveraging the Website and Blog to Divert the Traffic to the Webinar Registration Page
Now what’s your Guess, what’s bringing in 80% of the registrations?
Well, 70 percent of our registrations comes from Email Marketing while Less than 33% percent comes from Social Media Promotion & Infleuncer outreaching combined.
Note: I was spending equal time on Email Marketing & Social Media Promotion.
Taking Advantage of 80/20 Principle:
Since – Email marketing is bringing more registration, I can simply reduce time spent on social media promotion, random tweets and email or even influencer outreaching to some extend and replace it with Email Marketing.
i.e. If I spend 5 Hours on Social Media Promotion & Emailing Random People Who Might be Interested,
I Would Now Spend my Extra 3 Hours on Improving the Email Copy or Making Changes on my blog such that I collect more email subscribers which in turn can increase # of registrations!
And the left over 2 Hour on Social Media Promotion
You See by Applying the 80/ 20 Rule, You Allocate More Time to the Activity that is working for you! Doing so, your conversions may increase drastically with less effort.
Atleast, it happen in my case:
Every since, I learned about this, I started investing more time in email marketing (i.e. more time spent on improving the email copy, experimenting with the template, experimenting with the Subject line and experimenting with the send time & frequency of the emails.)
My dejavu moment came with frequency of the emails:
Earlier My Email frequency was:
- First Webinar Invitation ( 2 Weeks Before Start Date)
- Second Webinar Invitation (1 Week Before Start Date – People who didn’t opened my first invitation)
- 1 Hour and 1 Day Before reminder to registered Users (Automate by GOTOMEETING)
Now My Email Frequency is:
- First Webinar Invitation ( 2 Weeks Before Start Date)
- Second Webinar Invitation (1 Week Before Start Date – People who didn’t opened my first invitation)
- Third Webinar Invitation (2 Hours Before Start Date – People who opened but didn’t registered)
- 1 Hour and 1 Day Before reminder to registered Users (Automated by GOTOMEETING)
That third Email brought in new 10 % registrations! That’s a success!
Additionally, I started focusing on capturing more email addresses, this helped me increase my email capturing conversion rate from 0.5 to 2%!
Summary: