How To Simplify Your Work

Implementing a simple and effective mindset in your workplace is a recipe for success. When the effort you put in at work is focused, your likely to produce results.

As a more effective worker, you’re able to better take control of your career, finances, and personal self-worth.

Start With The Priority

By definition, you can only have one priority. It’s critical that you understand what your most important goal is. What result in your job, if achieved, would mean that you are successful at your job?

Very few people actually take the time to think about what their one single priority is. They instead embrace the “job duties” that make up their 8-5, Monday through Friday life. This crucial mistake of not defining your focus is what separates the most successful professionals, and those who drift along in their careers.

It’s important to note that being successful at your priority will likely mean you need to have a strategy including many tasks, but you shouldn’t confuse the tasks with the priority.

Examples of Job Priorities:

• Customer Service – If you are in customer service, your priority is to ensure positive customer relationships. This means you need to help customers with issues, point them to the best solutions, and provide the best experience possible. Those actions, and others, will ultimately lead to a positive customer relationship.
• Sales Job – Our priority is to bring in profitable revenue to our company. To do so, we need to effectively prospect, perform follow-ups, write good proposals, treat customers well, etc. But again, the ultimate goal is profitable revenue. So we can always ask ourselves, “is the task I’m spending my energy on leading to profitable revenue?”
• Teacher – For teachers, your ultimate priority is providing your students with the best education possible. To do this, you need to create good lesson plans, provide support, and manage class room instruction.

80/20 in Our Job – What Get’s The Results?

If you know what the most important result is for your job, your priority, you can then work backwards to determine what activities are most effective at achieving the result.

The 80/20 principle shows us that 80% of the results we get are created by 20% of our efforts. While we can use this principle to simplify our personal life, we can also apply it to our professional lives as well. Looking at our priority in our jobs, what actions are you taking that are producing 80% of the results?

In my role in sales, 80% of my leads come from just 20% of my channel sources. 80% of my revenue comes from just 20% of my customers. And just 20% of my time is spent on activities that are helping to get 80% of the results.

Review your job, and determine what 20% of your efforts create 80% of your results. If you are able to determine that, you have the key to become a productive powerhouse. You can do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.

Less Distractions

Reducing the “noise” in our job is the key to becoming better at it. With a focus on results, and an understanding of what activities are most effective at achieving those results, you can create a plan to successfully perform your job.

It’s important to not only recognize what produces good results, but also what unproductive activities we are performing as well. In order to do more of what is effective in your job, you need to make room by removing the things that are not.

Where possible, stop performing activities that are unproductive, and focus that time back on the activities that are. Say “No” to requests that are not going to help you do your job better. Talk with your manager about your plan to be more effective, and get them on board with your ideas.

The Simple and Effective Career

Whether you own your own business, or work for a fortune 100 company, there are benefits of being simple and effective at your job.

Determining your focus, and then simplifying your efforts, will enable you to do the work that matters. For most career paths, this means that you’ll be able to enjoy your work more, increase your income, and ultimately make a larger impact in your organization.