Brian Tracy explains the law of forced efficiency: you can't do everything, but you can always finish your most important tasks. He recommends asking yourself what you're paid to do and what only you can do. Entrepreneurs spend just 11% of their time on sales while the rest goes to busywork.
Your time is your most valuable asset. And your ability to use your time, to spend your time well largely determines your success and your income and everything that happens to you. And this brings us to what we call the law of forced efficiency. The law of forced efficiency says there is never enough time to do everything, but there's always enough time to do the most important tasks. When you start to get under the gun, you have tremendous pressure. You have to have a job or task or project complete by a certain time. It's amazing how efficient you become. You become forced to be efficient. So the key in using the law of forced efficiency is to get really efficient before you run out of time. And the way you do it is you ask a couple of questions. One of the questions you ask is, what are my most valuable tasks? What are my most important tasks? What are the things that you do each day that are more important than anything else? Another question you can ask is, why am I on the payroll? What results have you been hired to accomplish? Of all the results that you can accomplish, what are the most important results that you could accomplish today? It's amazing. If you ask entrepreneurs, how important are sales to your business? You know what they'll say? Oh, they're very important. Then if you follow entrepreneurs around for any period of time, one study showed that the average entrepreneur spends 11% of his time on sales and marketing, and the other 89% of the time is spent just doing busy work. And of course, once you start to do busy work, the busy work, it increases and increases almost like rabbits multiplying. A third question you can ask for the law of force deficiency is, what can I and only I do that, if done well, will make a real difference. Every hour there's an answer to this question for you. What can you and only you do that, if done well, will make a real difference? This means that if you don't do it, nobody else will do it. But if you do do it and you do it well, it can make a difference to your life and to your business. And the final question for forced efficiency is, what is the most valuable use of my time right now? This is the greatest of all questions in time management. And all the books and tapes and courses and time management systems all come down to the answer to this. What is the most valuable use of your time right now? Whatever your answer to that question is, minute by minute and hour by hour, be sure that you're working on that and not something else, and you become one of the most efficient people in your business.
