Avoid This Big Business Mistake!

In my book, Dominating Your Mind, I talk about moving towards your goals, and and I also talk about little steps here and there. Move us towards our goals or away from our goals. But something I want to talk about today is there’s a law, if you will, a principle called the Parkinson’s law. And, basically, what that means is that work expands to whatever time you give it. Why is this important? Well, because one of the big mistakes I made when I was building my first company is I was working all the time because I loved it. And when I was home, I was still kind of, you know, still working, taking phone calls, and and there is just no end. I was on the clock 247, and I didn’t really care because, again, I loved it. It was awesome.

Wasn’t awesome for my family, and it wasn’t awesome probably for me either. Wasn’t awesome for me mentally. And so what happens is after a while, you have this thing called diminishing returns. Right? It’s it’s another principle. So the longer you work, the less productive you become.

My point to all this is that I’m glad that you love what you do, and I’m glad that you’re able to put in as many hours as you can and and your spouse supports you. But what if you don’t? What if you say, listen, I’m starting at 8 o’clock in the morning, and I’m done by 6 o’clock in the evening. And from after 6, I’m gonna go do stuff with my family, or I’m gonna do stuff for myself.

I’m gonna go volunteer. I am gonna get out of my head and go do something else. And I think that this is a vital principle, realizing that after whatever it is, 40, 50 hours, you become less productive, and you start to get burnt out. And even though you love it and you could talk about it all the time, it’s still affecting you. So I’m gonna urge you to consider Parkinson’s Law and consider a start time and an end time for your workdays.

And also think about this, when you’re gonna go on vacation because there’s this hard stop, this deadline, most people tend to be very productive 2 or 3 days before they go on vacation. Why? Because they wanna get all those work done. So when they come back, they’re not being overwhelmed by a bunch of work.

So all of a sudden, you get this burst of focus and determination and energy, and, man, you’re killing it. You’re getting all this work done. One of the reasons that happens is because of Parkinson’s law. There’s a limited amount of time. Another example is this. When a media company calls me up and says, hey. We need you to prepare an article for us. They want me to predict what’s happening in the world of small business, and they’ll give me a week to do it.

You wanna guess how long it takes me to finish that article? And if you said a week, you’re absolutely right. On the other hand, if other media outlet calls me up and says, hey. We need this back in 24 hours. I get it done in 24 hours. Just think about this. Be more productive. Be more be more present for your family. Work on other things besides just your business.

There’s a lot of people out there that besides running a business, they play a musical instrument. They volunteer. They have a pretty decent relationship with their family, which is ultimately the more important thing. So think about a start time and an ending time.

Kevin O’Leary from Shark Tank, he has 2 cell phones. One is for his family and only his families and best friends. The rest is his work phone. At the end of his day, he no longer answers his work phone.

That to me is a great example. It’s a great strategy. Think about that. Think about how you can be more productive by actually working less, by resting more.

Remember, you were created to succeed.