80/20 and Heeding your Energy Flows
Listening to Tim Ferris this morning while biking to work it reminded me of a very old adage - 80/20 rule. I’m sure many of you have heard about the 80/20 rule in numerous scenarios. 80% of the output comes from 20% of your input. 80% of your income comes from 20% of your customers. There are numerous amalgamations of this concept. What I thought was interesting was how Tim Ferris used the 80/20 rule in relation to his emotional energy. He was asked how does he know what to work on in a given day. He responded by acknowledging that he surveys his energy. He closely monitors what activities energize him and what activities saps his energy. He therefore says that 80% of his positive energy flows into only 20% of the work related activities he takes on. In an ideal world it would be 100% of your time and energy dedicated to the thing that we love but we know that’s not sustainable or practical. We all have things we just have to muster through. We all wake up in the morning and dread something or a pit turns in our stomach with anticipation. Hopefully that’s not your entire day or your entire job. There are components of everything we love and there are components of everything that are a bit less desirable.
My goal is always to find the things that energize me and pursue them and let those pull me through the tougher/dreadful moments. Then I can look back and make sure that I reflect on the positive things that energized me to help cull through the options in the future on how to architect a day, week or year.
For example, I love my morning writing routine. It brings me tremendous joy and energizes me when I can sit down at my computer with a cup of coffee and start writing whatever comes to mind. I then often hit a moment of dread on Monday morning though when I anticipate a string of standing calls that usually sap my energy and throw me into a psychological negative loop. I suppose acknowledgment and labeling gives me power over it. In the absence of purely omitting those calls, I use my reflection at the end of the day (and week) to remind myself of the day’s positive energy moments. I’ve worked on trying to reframe those calls and that usually works as a temporary solution but eventually my energies speak for themselves.
I’ve come to understand the activities and motions that juice my energies throughout my work day. They include, zoom calls with technology company founders and entrepreneurs, learning new material from industry experts, opining and posting about topics of interest to me, touring through a new real estate project, exploring a new technology platform and drawing up/architecting new ideas for the business. Those activities provide 80% of the energy boosts for my day and are definitely closer to 20% of my calendar’s time. The other 80% is a smattering of inconsistent calls or emails that often live in the category of mandatory and semi-important, but nonetheless put me on my low energy gears.