Subtracting to solve problems

You know that feeling; you’ve been very busy all day – doing nothing – the frustration of knowing you’ve worked hard, but nothing was achieved; no forward movement towards you goals.

In a world where we all have too much to do, and often feel frustrated about not getting to the BIG things that we want to achieve, I found this concept, introduced to me by Tim Ferris (fourhourblog.com), useful.

5 steps to cut out all waste from your day

1.  What should I put on my NOT-TO-DO list?
2.  What should we do less of?
3.  What should we simplify?
4.  Where are the time wasters? I have asked my team to bring all timewasters to our weekly meeting, so we can cut them out of the system. Often we are working with legacy processes and methods that no longer serve us.

And most importantly; this is perhaps the best exercise I have done in the last 5 years.

5. Which 20% of customers give you 80% of problems – eliminate them.

“You don’t have to huff and puff and rush and strain. You can calmly get to 95% of what you need to do by simply putting one foot in front of the other. It’s simply the next step, and the next step. Make them the best steps. Make them count towards your feeling of achievement. If they don’t, delegate or eliminate the tasks”.

Colleen Backstrom

Colleen Backstrom is Director of NeuroMarketing, Kaleidoscope, a global leader in applied NeuroMarketing for Digital.  She specialises in creating B2B email and web campaigns and optimising Zoom/Teams selling by converting existing sales pitches to NeuroMarketing.