Pareto's Principle says that 80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts. It's been my observation that when it comes to modern work practices Pareto's Principle is optimistic.

Here are 5 questions to ask yourself during your working day.

Question 1: Is what I am doing now the best choice of activity to help me achieve my objectives.

The first step to answering this question well is to know what your objectives are. Most people have not given much thought to what the real objectives of their job are. They are too occupied with the busy-work to ask "what is the bottom line profit reason why I am here?"

The role of every employee, and self employed person, is to enhance the business's ability to make net profit. No matter how far you are from the money making coal face, if you give some thought to your role in helping the business profit then you will be able to determine what is busy-work and what is profit-work.

Question 2: Who can I delegate this to?

The basic business concept of employment is that the employee should be providing the most valuable service possible for the money that they are being paid. If you are spending time doing tasks that someone further down the food chain could be doing then you are not providing the most valuable service for what you are being paid.

Question 3: What would be the consequence of not do what I am doing now?

This is an enlightening question. The human being is a great time waster. They spend too long on phone calls, too much time searching on the internet, too much time at the coffee machine, too much time in idle chatter and so on.

If you regularly mentally ask yourself what the consequence would be if you didn't do what you are doing in this very moment then you would quite often discover that there would be no consequence, because what you are doing is busy-work.

Question 4: Can I put a system in place to make this task faster?

Are there ways to make some, or all, of your regular tasks more efficient? Over your lunch break, or while traveling to or from the office, give some thought to what systems you may be able to put into place that will help you complete tasks faster or more efficiently. A good assumption to work by is that there is always a way to do anything that is ten times better than the current way.

Question 5: If I was hiring and paying a person to do my job would I be happy if they were doing what I am doing now?

What is good use of your time and what is poor use is all a matter of perspective. If you can change the perspective then you can often gain an insight that you hadn't taken notice of before. The best perspective for assessing whether what you are doing is busy work or profit work is to stand in the shoes of an employer and imagine that you are paying someone, out of your own pocket, for the work being done.

You may think that you are under paid but if you had to personally pay that salary then you would probably think that it was a large amount of money. You would also be very keen to get value for the money that you are spending. Your assessment, from that new perspective, is likely to be very profit-work focused.

Final Words

Even the best workers can use their time more efficiently. Most workers could at least double their profitable output. Make a daily habit of asking yourself the above five questions and your will not only increase your profitable output but you will also gain more job satisfaction.