If your an artist, you might want to consider how you can use the Pareto Principle to your advantage in your art business to make a quantum leap in your finances.
The Pareto Principle says this (via Wikipedia) “The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.”
Of course, the key being “80% of your results (ie; money and wealth) come from 20% of your efforts”
So are you willing to look every 2 weeks (at most a month) to really look at your day-to-day activities. Be honest with your self and really ask “What do I do during my day?” with the realization that’s it’s only 20% of what I do that results in 80% of the money or wealth that comes to me.
Therefore you want to keep re-adjusting what I do so MY day is focused on high return activities and not low return ones.
For example, I have a very successful artist friend who spends roughly 3-4 hours per week going to the art supply store and buying his own supplies. I just had to scratch my head. I just asked him “What is your return on that? How much did that activity make you?”
Bottom line his answer was “really nothing” he just thought he had to. And I mentioned (which were fairly obvious) that he had a number of options to convert his time to HRA (high return activities).
The obvious one being to order them online (saving all the travel time, etc.) another being to hire a part-time assistant who could do that activity as well as others.
Many people (including you) as so very good at certain things (like art producing, marketing – the 2 most important) but just waste their time doing activities they are not good at and waste their time with activities that return them nothing.
The breakthrough is to admit that 80% of what comes in results from 20% of what I do.
Look, really look, with a brutally honest eye at my last week’s activities. Can you now see that you wasted a lot of time? That you wasted a lot of hours chatting on the phone, getting supplies, cleaning, organizing, reading, researching, answering email, – “oh, here’s another one, have to answer that. Ding. Another one. Have to answer that one, too.”
Now you have a virtual “time-suck” that you’ve spiraled down-into and, again, results in nothing.
It’s sort of like if you work half-days you would get more HRA because your forced to concentrate on these HRA’s. Ever notice how you get 3 day’s work into one the day before you go on vacation? That IS the 80/20 rule because you are focusing on only the most important (and high priority items) the rest can fall by the way or be delegated.
So the trick is to take that “day before vacation” and expand that into everyday. Take a survey of your activities over the last 30 days and expand your high-return activities.
You might even consider shortening your day. Instead of 8 hours try working 6 so you can focus even more. Make a written list of no more than 3 high-return activities per day.
Also, take that activity survey on a regular basis ( I recommend every 2 weeks – no more than a month) so your art business is dealing in primarily high-return activities.
This survey might also include noting how systems or business processes can be implemented to make an even smoother business of your expanding empire. I will be touching a lot more on business systems in the coming months.
Final thought: 80% of what comes in results from 20% of what I do.
Image: “Learning Russian Music” by Howard Hodgkin
