From the course: Time Management Tips

Avoiding less valuable activities

From the course: Time Management Tips

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Avoiding less valuable activities

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- You may have heard me speak about the importance of focusing on your most valuable activities, the things that are worth the most per hour. But what about your least valuable activities, your LVAs? These are the things that you really shouldn't be spending your time doing but you just simply do because they're easy. Examples of this might be running errands to the store or spending too much time doing janitorial work. Think of the relationship between LVAs and MVAs like a glass of water, the more time you spend in your most valuable activities, the less time you have for your least valuable ones. So here are a few tips to start crowding out those less valuable activities. Number one is just to ask yourself the question, what is the value of this activity? Get in the habit of, as you go throughout your day, just pausing for a moment and saying, what's the value of this? You may even start to track this maybe for a week or two to get a gauge on how much time you're spending on your LVAs. Number two is determine a minimum value. This is the cutoff point at which you're not going to do these things anymore. So, for instance, if your time is worth $50 an hour, yet you're doing many things that are under 20, perhaps you create a cutoff point at 15. That's just a rough example, but the idea is you say, I'm not going to allow myself to do these things anymore, I've got to find a solution. Number three is also write down any LVA that you perform. So as you're asking what's the value of this activity you might discover some least valuables ones. Set aside one note page or one space where you're going to track all of these down. Which leads to number four which is schedule LVA time. Now that may sound weird, why would I want to schedule time to do my least valuable activities? What we're going to do is we're going to limit how much time you spend. So you're going to limit yourself to maybe two or one hours per week to do these kinds of things. That limitation will naturally create more room for your most valuable activities. And then number five, ask yourself, how can I offload these LVAs? Perhaps you could outsource some of these tasks to an online service, or maybe there's just an app that you can install that will help you reduce the amount of time that you're working on a particular activity. Remember, your value is ultimately determined by the value of the activities that you perform. By limiting the amount of time you spend in your least valuable activities you'll naturally increase your value per hour.

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