In a previous post about Tim Ferriss‘s best-seller the 4 Hour WorkWeek, I ranted on about Tim’s fantastic opinions on the 80/20 rule, Parkinson’s law and elimination of unnecessary actions.

I have now finished the book and continued with my entrepreneur self help guide binge with The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber. The book has a tag line of: Why most small businesses don’t work and what to do about it.

So what have I learnt from these micro-celebrities from the small business self help genre? Is there anything here that can improve my design and marketing business in these trying times?

Both books concentrate quite heavily on removing yourself from your business. The logic behind this is that if you can get others to do your work you are free to do something else or take on more work and therefore expand the business. I have tried to get other people to do what I do with mixed results.

Automation and the 4-Hour Workweek

Tim Ferriss promotes the use of virtual assistants from the third world to do administrative or clerical tasks. And even marketing, website development, technical services or buying your wife an anniversary gift. To be honest the prospect of this strikes fear into my heart. And I don’t think my wife would be too happy either!

I have heard horror stories of the language barrier causing tasks to take 2, 3, 4, 5 times longer than they would normally with Indian web development companies. I’ve made connections with many of these companies but I’ve yet to take the plunge.

And is it really as easy for a designer or a marketer to instruct a virtual assistant on how to deal with their clients as a lot of the work is based on relationships and built on inspiration?

Practice makes perfect. So I shall try to outsource more and more this year.

The E-Myth and small business development

Michael E Gerber, on the other hand, paints a great picture of why this automation is so necessary. He describes the personality of a small business owner as being split three ways – into the Entrepreneur, the Technician and the Manager. This was so familiar to me it was kind of scary.

• The Entrepreneur is the visionary in us. The dreamer. He thinks up the idea that got us here in the first place and his imagination needs to be nurtured in order to come up with more fantastic opportunities to move us along.
• The Manager is, of course, the pragmatist who is there to plan, to order and to predict.
• And last but not least there’s the Technician. The Technician is how we all started out. The Doer. The “if-you-want-something-doing-properly-you-have-to-do-it-yourself” guy. He’s the one with his head down doing the work. At least that’s what he thinks.

All businesses need a mixture of these three personalities. But in reality we are more like Technicians trying to get on with it whilst being bugged by another “great new idea” from the Entrepreneur and compartmentalized by the Manager who’s trying to establish order.

With these three inside my head all the time it’s a wonder I get any sleep!

But this is the reason, according to Michael E. Gerber, most business fail – because the Technician’s in charge. So automation and outsourcing is vitally important to your business as it frees up the dreamer in you to work on your business rather than in it.

So where do we go from here?

Well, my business has changed beyond all recognition from a few years ago when I started out. Back then I promoted myself as a freelance print designer whereas demand from this site pushed me to offer complete design and web marketing packages.

If I cut down on the time spent on the individual jobs by outsourcing and automation I can view my business more as a product and start tweaking it to make it better and better.

Maybe these books are teaching me to spend less time reading tweets and blog posts about the minutiae of the design business (as rewarding as they are) and more time on the larger picture and the future.

I shall be returning to these points later.

So what about you?

Have you read either of these small business Bibles? Have they or any of the issues discussed here caused you to act differently in your business? Let me know in the comments section of this post. And don’t forget to tweet or link to this post if you enjoyed it.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

The book I am reading at the moment is The 4 Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. I had heard about it from Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress the popular blogging software that powers this site.

I’m only halfway through the book but already I’ve been introduced to some interesting principles and have acted upon them.

Pakinson’s Law

C. Northcote Parkinson was a writer who arrived with this perceptive dictum from his experience in the British Civil Service.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

This is something that I used to observe while working for design consultancies and advertising agencies in London. People, when given a day to do something, will spend the day doing it even though the task could be completed adequately in a few minutes.

I have often wondered why billions of people trudge into an office every day arriving at 9am and leaving at 5.30pm. Is 7.5 hours the time they need to do their jobs? Not an hour more or less any particular day?

So, yes, people spend countless hours and days indulged in essentially useless activity. I knew that. So tell me something I don’t know, Tim!

The Pareto principle – also known as the 80-20 rule

This principle is something I’d heard of before but maybe hadn’t realised it’s significance, here it is:

For many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes

Here are a few examples:

• In 1992 United Nations Development Program Report showed that the richest 20% of the world’s population controlled 82.7% of the world’s income.
• Microsoft noted that by fixing the top 20% of the most reported bugs, 80% percent of the errors and crashes would be eliminated.
• In business, 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.

Is this true for me, I wonder? Certainly, 20% of my clients account for over 50% of my income, but I’m not sure it’s as much as 80%. However, thinking about it, I would say that about 20% of my working day is spent generating 80% of my income as I spend a lot of time doing other things, some of them I would consider important (writing blog posts), some of them not so important (reading the news, Wikipedia, Twittering). This brings me on to another of Timothy Ferriss’s bugbears.

Interrupt interruptions

So, it follows that one should cut down as much of this 80% unproductive time as much as possible to free yourself up to do other things you may find more enjoyable. There are a number of ways to do this.

Ferriss suggests turning off the audible alert for when you receive email (or “brain farts” as he likes to call them, I love that!). I have done this and this has definitely worked for me. I’ve hardly ever received an email that was so urgent that I had to stop everything and concentrate on it. The author actually recommends cutting down emailing to two times daily: the first mid-morning (not first thing, after you’ve completed your important first task of the day); and the second at 4pm before your close of business. I haven’t quite done this but I have grouped my emailing together more.

The author suggests further methods to cut down interruption: don’t answer your mobile if you don’t recognise the number; don’t watch or listen to the news; don’t surf the web; don’t do meetings. I agree with him that meetings are usually a useless activity but then I hardly ever have them myself and as for the other things – I’m trying to cut down my non-productive web surfing but I still always answer my mobile as it could be a great new client!

Looking to the future

Now that you have stopped interruptions and are working more productively you can find time for what Tim Ferriss calls a “muse project” which could be reselling a product on the internet or creating one yourself and selling that.

I have created many e-commerce sites for clients and have been involved in the marketing of products for many years so this is something I have wanted to do for a long time. I haven’t thought of a product yet but I’ve got a few ideas!

What is your experience?

Have you ever read this book and what is your opinion of it? What do you think of interrupting interruptions and working more productively? Will this book make a lot of people rich and happy as a result of it’s advice and procedures? Or will the only person making money as a result of this book be the author?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Before I start of this post I would like to ask you to think of an answer to this question: What one thing could you do that you aren’t doing now that if you did on a regular basis would make a tremendous positive difference to your personal or professional life?

One book I enjoyed reading very much was Stephen Covey‘s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. One of the concepts in this book is about time management and the four quadrants of time.

Quadrant I: Urgent and important matters. Crises, pressing problems, deadline-driven projects. We all have these things; we’ve all got to do them.

Quadrant II: Non-urgent but important matters. Relationship building, planning, recognising new opportunities, improvements to your workplace, exercise, recreation. Things we know we should do but don’t because they’re not urgent.

Quadrant III: Urgent but not important things like phone calls, email, interruptions, popular matters, some meetings. This is visible stuff on-hand at the moment that isn’t really important. It’s easy to get caught up in this quadrant!

Quadrant IV: The worst of the lot – non-urgent and non-important matters. This includes trivia, spam, time wasters, distractions, non-productive activities.

OK. I bet your answer to the above question was a Quadrant II activity!

For Covey, time management, is all about minimising the Quadrant III and IV activities so that you can concentrate on Quadrant II (Quadrant I just has to be done!). It’s so easy to get caught up with your head down gardening that you don’t look up to realise you’re in the wrong garden!

Think about what it is you really want to achieve. A successful design business? How are you going to achieve that? How can you expand your business without neglecting what you’ve already worked hard to achieve?

I’m also a big believer in meditation to clear your head and realise your goals. I’ve talked about the method on my quitting smoking website. It’ll work for non-smokers as well.

This was written in response to a productivity meme. I was invited by webee‘s productivity post. Who was invited by Paul Enderson. Who was invited by Instigator Blog. Other excellent posts in this meme are Aaron’s 5 tips, Chris’s flow state and Tara’s productivity secrets

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.