“The Secret to Enjoying More with Less”

As small business owners, we fully understand the concept of “wearing multiple hats” in our day-to-day responsibilities. We are marketers, salespeople, CEOs, hourly employees, designers, photographers, videographers, accountants, and even the cleaning crew. I can very clearly remember when our business first started hittin’ hard. We had the IRS sending us semi-threatening letters in the mail (yikes), our personal lives were on steroids - we had just bought a “fixer-upper” and renovations were in full swing, our editing backlog was starting to pile up, and we were still working our 9-5’s. I don’t know about you, but when things start to get crazy, I THRIVE on “to-do” lists and I had a never-ending one.

but I could not get clear on the most important things to do first.

I knew ALL the things that I needed to do, but for some reason the sheer number of things I needed to do kept me spinning in circles and extremely overwhelmed. It’s the strangest phenomenon, when you have too many things to do - you get into a paralysis of sorts. You know what else I noticed? I was doing the most simple tasks first, just so I could check them off of the list. It felt like I was getting things done, but I was actually getting nothing of importance done. Barely “moving the needle”. If any of this resonates with you - do yourself a favor and keep reading on with an open mind. If it at all sounds interesting to you, I’d highly encourage you to explore this concept in greater detail. The 80/20 rule is one of the most helpful concepts for life and time management.

20% of your activities will account for 80% of your results.

The original concept comes from Vilfredo Pareto and was first used in macroeconomics to describe the distribution of wealth in Italy in the early 20th century. He simply observed that 80% of the wealth in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. It really caught on in the 1940s when it was applied to quality control for business production. Without boring you to death with the details - it started to become a highly studied phenomenon in every industry you can think of.

So let’s put this into action.

Take a new piece of paper and jot down a list of 10 things you need to do (you can start with 5 if that feels like too much). Now underline or highlight the top 3 things on your list that you KNOW are the most important to your business. This is going to help you accomplish two things - 1.) You’re going to ask yourself to sit there and think about the most important “next step” for your business. 2.) You’re going to force yourself to get hyper-focused on that top goal and you’re going to stay focused on it until completion.

Think of your to-do list as an ever-evolving, organic priority list.

Once you check off that top priority - remake your list. Our business shifts and moves all the time and you have to respond to its’ needs. After you have done this for a while, you’re going to start seeing some trends. You’ll find that those “bottom of the list” items stay at the bottom of the list. They will almost never make their way up towards the top. So what do you do with those? Those are the clear winners to be outsourced. These are the time suckers, the energy expenders, the tasks that just don’t deserve your precious attention. Someone else would be fantastic at completing those for you.

Once you start to train your mind to prioritize the most impactful tasks, you’ll start to find inefficiency elsewhere.

This is a massive, positive “side-effect” of the 80/20 rule. I started finding trends and ways to analyze other facets of our business through a similar lens. You can think about your footage culling, your customer service, your audio mastering, your final gallery delivery, etc. in terms of the 80/20 rule. It starts getting you extremely focused on the most important tasks in your business and keeps that conversation at top-of-mind so you don’t get lost in the spiral of indecision. Don’t hustle for the sake of hustling - create an impact with purpose.