Few people have a work position that requires them
to do only one thing.
Most people have job descriptions
that require them to perform several different activities.
Typically, the smaller the organization,
the wider variety of these activities
you are likely to have.
However, of all the different activities that you perform,
only a couple of them are truly the most valuable.
What do I mean by valuable?
Keep in mind, I am talking about work time only,
not you time.
For instance, there's no way to put a value
on being a parent, or being a friend to someone else.
But we can very clearly put a value on
what it would cost us to replace certain work activities.
To keep this simple, let's measure the value
of an activity by the amount of money
that you would pay someone else
to perform the same task at the same quality.
That means activities you excel at, the ones that would
cost you the most per hour to pay someone else to do,
the top two, would be your most valuable activities.
I sometimes call them MVAs for short.
All the other activities that you do during work time
other than those two MVAs
are your less valuable activities, or LVAs
and if you're like most people,
you're likely spending the majority of your work time
in these very low value, low impact LVAs.
When I speak to executives, I'll sometimes do
an on the spot poll and ask the audience how much time
they're spending on their top two most valuable activities.
And consistently I find the average executive
spends less than 20% of their time
in their most valuable activities.
This is significant, because what it means
is that while they have the capacity to do work
that is worth perhaps several hundred dollars per hour
instead, they're choosing to spend
the majority of their time on activities that are worth
much, much less.
In order to achieve maximum results
during the limited amount of work time you have each week,
you'll want to focus the majority of your time on
your most valuable activities.
In this next section, I'll take you through a process
that helps you discover your top two MVAs.
And then, we'll create a time budget
to ensure you spend appropriate amounts of time
in them each week.