This article from Entrepreneur.com is by Perry Marshall. If you are familiar with the 80/20 Principle, loosely stated that 80 % of your revenue will come from 20% of your clients, so to be more productive, and therefore more profitable, you want to target and increase that 20%. Another interpretation is that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your products/services, so you want to concentrate on those 20%, cut down the effort put into those 80%. For this article, the concept is to put the bulk of our time into those most productive activities, what Perry calls the $1000/hour activities, instead of us as business owners doing the $10/hour work. Some of his advice:

Small-business owners waste their time on $10 an hour work, like running to get office supplies, and forgo or delay the activities that earn $1,000 an hour, such as sending the right email to the right person, or negotiating a lucrative contract, or convincing a client to do more business with you. We rationalize, I can do it myself. Then we spend six hours trying to fix a leaky faucet. Many a promising business has been killed by those little jobs. When someone says “time management,” you probably think of time logs, goal lists, and “Getting Things Done.” But getting busy is not what makes you rich. We’re tempted to hire out the toughest jobs, like sales and marketing and public relations, but these are extremely high-skill and almost impossible to delegate to someone else.

Five things you should do to stop wasting time and start earning real money:

Hire a maid. If you have a significant other, he or she will thank you. It is easy to find someone who knows how to cook. Easy to find people who know how to clean.

Get rid of your $10 an hour stuff. You are still hurting yourself if you are obsessed with being efficient. Ask: What else am I doing that is so menial, it could be cheaply outsourced? What am I doing that I should stop doing altogether?

Hire a personal assistant. With some effort you can hire a perfectly competent person at $8 to $15 per hour. Virtual or real is fine. His assistant now manages his email box, doing triage so he only reads what really matters. The time she saves him is worth its weight in gold.

Don’t feel guilty about relaxing. The most productive people are a little lazy. If there are really only a few hours a day in which you do $1,000/hour work, does it really matter if you screw around for the rest of the day? Downtime gives you the mental space you need to think.

Focus on your most productive time slot. Everybody has a timeslot in their day when they do their finest work: morning, night time, whenever. Determone that time and keep that space open. That’s the part of the day when you are most productive.

Make these changes and you’ll hit consistent stretches of $1,000 an hour many days of your week. Then and only then will you reap the true rewards of being an entrepreneur.

Read the original article: The 80/20 Rule of Time Management: Stop Wasting Your Time.