Today, learn how to apply the 80/20 rule to eliminate meaningless work from your life — and focus on what really matters — to earn more, work less, and spend time doing the things you love.

• How to work 2 fewer hours/day
• How to double your salary (at age 26)
• How to take a $12,000 around-the-world trip for $297
• How somebody named Jamie earned $11,000/month working 20 hours/week

What do all of those have in common?

The 80/20 rule.

Most of us complain how busy we are, whether it’s with work, our family, or just the basic upkeep of life. Yet there are others — who have exactly the same amount of hours as we do — who do remarkable things. How?

In fact, if we actually analyze our time spent on any given week, we’d find that the vast majority of the actions we take have very little impact.

A bleak conclusion? Perhaps. But if you can tweak your actions and focus on the actions that really matter, you can leapfrog your peers and live a remarkable life.

For example, people often believe that they can do everything when it comes to personal finance. Pay off debt! Save more! Invest! Stop spending on lattes! Earn more! Shop frugally! Make your own dinner! JUST DO IT!! AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!

The truth is, we are cognitive misers and we have limited cognition and attention. That’s why it’s critical to focus on the most IMPORTANT things, rather than everything. That’s why I write extensively about automating your finances. It’s also use the Tripod of Stability in my life.

Below, in an extensive guest post, Tyler Tervooren shows you several examples how to focus on the things that matter (along with some fascinating charts).

I have to add one thing. When Tyler pitched writing a guest post for me, he had a little too many examples of me, even when you factor in my extremely large ego. I sent it back and told him to tone down the praise. So below is the edited version. It’s like hearing your own voice on a recording — uncomfortable and weird. But the rest of the material is gold, so check it out.

Tyler, take it away…

Applying the 80/20 Rule to earn more, work less, and dominate

Tyler Tervooren tests the boundaries of reality and writes for a team of highly skilled risk takers at Advanced Riskology. You can follow him on twitter at @tylertervooren.

Do you know what people like Ramit, Tim Ferriss, and Erica Douglass do that you don’t?

Nothing.

Yep, nothing. When it comes to day to day living, these guys are just like you and me. Ramit had to create a budget before he realized he was spending 70% of his money on food. Tim doesn’t always pick the perfect investments. Erica has bad days just like the rest of us.

Most people don’t see it like that, though. They just see a couple of people who somehow worked harder, got a little bit lucky, and made it further than them.

Most of us think Ramit, Tim, & Erica have just straight up beaten us at life. Well, they have, actually, but not by working harder or getting lucky.

You see, there’s this thing about humans that everyone knows but not very many people acknowledge and even fewer actually take advantage of:

They’re lazy.

Human beings are inherently lazy and the few people that take it upon themselves to rise above the bar that’s set, well, pretty darn low, enjoy a lot of benefits for doing so.

Ramit, Tim, Erica – they don’t really do anything different than the rest of us. They just do the things that actually matter a lot better.

And that’s the ironic part about this universal truth. While I certainly wouldn’t call any of them lazy, in the end, these guys enjoy the benefit of less work because they’ve improved their life processes so dramatically that they don’t have to work nearly as hard to kick ass anymore.

Over time, they’ve built up what I call “compounding awesomeness” while the rest of us stick to comfortable things that don’t work or reinvent the wheel every week with no idea if what we’re reinventing actually works or not.

Don’t believe me? Try this exercise for an example of what I’m talking about:

Pick out your 5 closest friends that say they care about personal finance and ask them how many hours they spent last week optimizing their budget or their 401k allocation. Then ask how many hours they spent watching TV.

Let’s move on.

Truth is, what Tim, Erica, and Ramit do that’s propelled them above the rest doesn’t take genius, but it does take work and sustained effort. It takes a little bit of measurement every day and an undying focus on improving things that work and dropping things that don’t.

It takes some creativity. It takes some ingenuity. Most of all, it takes some strategy. Here are few strategies for you to chew on.

Strategy #1: Ctrl+Z 80% of your life

Ah, the good ol’ 80/20 rule. Maybe you know it as Pareto’s Principle, which demonstrates that in most things you do, 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. Pretty cool.

But not so cool? It also means that 20% of your results come from 80% of your efforts.

Do you see the incredible opportunity here? You can do more than just eliminate 80% of all your hard work; you can take the remaining 20% and scale up to even better results.

But what the hell does that even mean?

Let’s say you’ve just started a side gig as a freelance dog walker and you charge $20 per dog for a 20-minute walk. Maybe you’ve even kicked ass and gotten yourself 10 clients.

Pretty soon you realize that 8 of your clients have just one dog and are paying you $20 a day while the other 2 each own a dog compound with 10 dogs a piece. They’re each paying $200 to walk the pooches.

A 20-minute walk is a 20-minute walk whether you’ve got 1 on a leash or 10, right? Your dog compound clients are making you far more money and using up much less of your time than the single dog owners. You want more clients like that, but you’re exhausted and don’t have time for them.

So what do you do?

You freakin’ drop all 8 of those single dog owners, quit taking new clients with only one dog and you start looking for just one more client that has at least 8. She’s harder to find, but you’ve got plenty of time now because you just dropped 80% of your commitments and didn’t lose much.

And you don’t have to stop there. You can keep looking for clients with more and more dogs and dropping the smaller ones. This is what we’re talking about:

Let’s take a second to look at some real-life examples.

How Jamie makes $11,000/month working 20 hours/week

Just a few years ago, Jamie was working full-time, making decent money, and hating her job like any good American. Then, she had a baby.

Now, I don’t know anything about these “tiny humans,” so I had to take Jamie’s word that having one changes your life. It changed hers anyway, and she decided to quit her job to start her own business and only work part time so that she could be the mom she always wanted to be.

She also decided that she didn’t really want to give up much money.

Now, cutting your hours down by 60% and maintaining your income is completely possible (It’s Tim Ferriss’ claim to fame after all), but it doesn’t just happen.

Jamie had to take a super hard look at how she did her work and find the little bits of her coaching business that were working well for her – the 20% – and leverage the hell out of them so that she could flat out stop doing all the little stuff that was taking up her time and giving her little in return – the 80%.

After looking at the numbers for her business, it was pretty obvious that going to networking events wasn’t bringing in many clients (sound familiar?), but her limited speaking engagements were doing great. Rather than try even harder to make the networking events work (almost always a bad idea) she quit going to them entirely and started focusing on doing more speaking, which took up even less time.

She didn’t stop there, though. Jamie also decided to quit traveling to meet her local clients so that she could spend less time helping more people.

From Jamie:

Early this year I decided to stop pursuing local clients since I realized traveling to networking events and my clients businesses took up many hours each week. Since I live in Maine and it takes a long time to drive anywhere, I decided that I couldn’t take up 6 of my 20 hours driving each week. I’ve since changed my local clients to over the phone.

She calls these her “bold actions” and while the business professionals out there will argue incessantly about the right or wrong way to run her business, Jamie just had her first $11,000 month.

More money + less time = Domination of the 80/20 Rule (and domination of your friends).

Why I love writing articles like this one

I’ve seen the exact same results when I do my own 80/20 analyses. I launched Advanced Riskology in June and spent the first 2 months chasing every strategy I could think of to grow it. Naturally, there were a few that worked very well and a whole bunch that didn’t.

Here’s the actual break out of where my site traffic comes from vs. how much time I spend on each promotional outlet:

Rather than spend hours every day trying to suffer through the process of keeping up with tactics that didn’t do much, I just dropped them and now spend far less time, maybe 10% of what I was before, focusing on the promotion tools that work incredibly well for me:

That’s why you’re reading this guest post today. I’ve found that writing awesome articles for huge blogs gives me one of the best returns I can get for the time involved. The only other strategy I use is interviews/media mentions that I spend about 15 minutes a day working on.

The result? Explosive growth – almost 2,000 subscribers in the first 3 months for less than 2 hours a week of “marketing.”

I’ll take that over constant frustration any day.

Strategy #2: Travel, get married or do anything else awesome… for free.

I always endeavor to be a supportive friend that doesn’t offer too much unsolicited advice, but it drives me nuts to hear people talk with near desperation in their voice about all the things they want to get out of life and then hear them dismiss it all because they assume they need Scrooge McDuck’s vault of gold to do any of it.

That’s why this strategy has to do with finding creative ways to do really expensive and extravagant stuff either cheaply or completely free. I’d be willing to bet that for every $10,000 dollar dream you have, there’s a way to do it for less than $100 if you’re willing to use your brain juice.

Will work for travel

My friend Sean Ogle got fed up with his corporate job in finance and wanted to do some traveling. When his boss turned down his proposal to work remotely, he just up and quit.

He had some savings, but not enough to make it for long with a home base in Portland, so he bought a 1-way ticket to Bangkok and set up shop over there where it’s far cheaper to live – geo-arbitrage.

Sean found a part time gig when he got over there, and after 6 months hanging out in Thailand and visiting the rest of SE Asia, he came home with the same amount of money that he left with.

Free 6-month vacation. Nice.

A worldwide adventure for $297

Next year, I’ll be flying to Africa and Eastern Europe to climb two of the tallest mountains in the world as well as run a marathon or two. Those are long flights and I’d like to be comfortable, so I’m planning to fly business class. That’s about $12,000 in airfare – not something I could afford even when I had a “great job.”

But, I’ll be flying for no more than the cost of taxes by using frequent flyer miles and some travel hacking strategies that I spend about 10 minutes or less a day learning. Things like:

• getting tons of miles for free flights through credit card offers without lowering my credit score

• booking tickets on partner airlines so that I can go anywhere with relative ease, and

• scheduling free stopovers in hub cities so that I don’t have to book multiple trips

Just to hit that point home, here’s what that looks like:

If you think your dream vacation is too expensive, you’re probably not looking in the right place yet.

Free Mickey Mouse matrimony

Just the other day I talked to a gal named Tracy that got married at Disney World (her favorite place on Earth) for free. She and her fiancé were taking a joint vacation with their families there and thought, “hell, why not just get married while we’re down there?”

Of course, for everyone else, that service costs at least $5,000 and quite a lot more if you want guests and good food. So, instead, they hired their own minister and paid his way into the park to perform the ceremony for them.

I asked Tracy how much work it took to put that together and here’s what she said:

I only mentioned it because in Disney-fan circles it’s a huge no-no and people think it can’t be done, so it just cracks me up that we did it – effortlessly. We could have done it anywhere we wanted – in a hotel, on a beach, in a pool, on a ride, etc.

When you’re willing to work a little harder and a little smarter, most of the things in life that you thought were too expensive and out of reach are actually right within your grasp.

Give it a shot if you’re inclined, but there is a downside to using this strategy: it’ll get harder and harder to listen to your friends complain about all the things they’ll never do because their excuses are insurmountable.

Speaking of working a little smarter…

Strategy #3: Become an executive by 25 and quit working so many damn hours

Enter Matt.

By 25, he’d worked his way into an executive finance position with UPS and just a few weeks ago, at the age of 26, said goodbye to that job in order to double his already fantastic salary and move to Europe for a change of pace with a certain online book retailer.

The funny thing about Matt is that you’d typically think of a guy like that as a dorky pencil pusher that spends his days in front of his desk and his nights underneath it.

Thing is, he really doesn’t work that much harder than anyone else with a little ambition. In fact, he recently told me that he works about 55 hours a week. That might seem like a lot to some, but consider that at least a few of those are at home watching sports while he chips away at new projects.

One other thing we should clear up is that Matt isn’t the heir to some business throne. It’s not like Daddy was the boss and gave him a management job when he graduated from high school.

When I met Matt in 2003, he was loading boxes into the back of a UPS truck at 2:00 in the morning.

So how did he work his way up the ladder so fast? I asked him, and here’s exactly what he said:

I focus on figuring out how systems work and where people’s motivations are coming from. Understanding how and why something works the way it does is amazingly powerful. This is my fundamental starting point for working smarter. Investing the time to build relationships, dissect processes, and asking why builds a solid platform to base all other activities off of.

Here’s a guy who makes well over $100k/year and the #1 thing he does to be effective at his job is understand people’s motivations and why they do the things they do. That really hammers home the power of psychology when it comes to earning more and mastering personal finance.

And he works in finance. How many people typically lump finance and psychology together? Hopefully a lot more now.

How much further could you get in your own career if you spent more time understanding your boss’ motivations?

How to work less every single day

Before I left the construction industry, that’s exactly the same strategy I used to cut about 2 hours out of my average workday (watch out, here comes another 80/20 anecdote). Rather than spending countless hours half-assing all the work I was supposedly responsible for, I just started working extra hard on the stuff that was really important and quit doing the stuff that wasn’t.

I didn’t need any permission to stop doing it. I knew that if I knocked it out of the park with the important stuff, no one would really care that the stuff at the bottom of the pile didn’t get done. And it paid off.

If you graphed my work schedule with my productivity over time, it would look like this:

And check out what Matt, our Gen Y exec, had to say when I asked him if putting in more hours is a good way to climb the corporate ladder:

My view is that the hours will not necessarily help unless they’re for the right things. I view a job position as something that you have a certain amount of resources for.

The challenge with an entry-level job is that at least 50% of the work is administrative or something that others don’t fully use or understand. I see this as the opportunity area where an individual can look at these tasks and evaluate what the real purpose is and find new ways to do them more efficiently (you will also find that many can be eliminated or scaled down). Doing this will easily free up 10% of the week (4-5 hours).

Now the trick is not to just do “more work”, it is to find out what your boss or team members are frustrated with at the moment and develop a plan to fix it. Keep repeating this and you will build up a reputation for doing so.

There you have it – straight from the horse’s mouth. Working hard is a fine trait to have, but if it’s the only tool in your bag, you’re wasting your time. The real breakthroughs come when you get into your boss’ and colleagues’ heads and actually find ways to fix the problems that are causing them pain.

That’s how you get somewhere fast.

Back to Being Lazy

Remember all that talk earlier about how humans are naturally lazy creatures? Well, it’s still all true, but the beauty of all this is that if you actually get off your ass and use some of these strategies, you’ll get to enjoy more laziness in the long-run, too.

That’s double domination. Not only do you get to flying jump-kick your friends in the face by living it up while they complain about never getting what they want, but by getting better at using these strategies you end up creating less work for yourself down the road by finding the most effective and efficient ways to do the stuff that’s important while everyone else keeps toiling away because “that’s the way it’s always been done.”

And that is how you beat your friends at life.*

*Of course, if you’re a half decent person, you might consider teaching them rather than rubbing it in their face.

Tyler Tervooren tests the boundaries of reality and writes for a team of highly skilled risk takers at Advanced Riskology. You can follow him on twitter at @tylertervooren.

I’m fascinated by people at the top levels of every field. Whether it’s CEOs, best-selling authors, presidents, or even Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity, I love learning the techniques and mindsets that pros use to become the best.

At these rarefied levels, top performers use different techniques than average people.

Today, a guest post that will challenge your notions of success and of finding an idea to pursue.

How do the world’s most successful academics get published into toughest academic journals…multiple times each year?

How does a PhD student at MIT get a book published while studying an insanely challenging area, including…

“…distributed algorithms and lower bounds for wireless networks, with a particular focus on the intersection between theory and practice. A major direction in my theory work is the introduction of an abstract interference adversary that incarnates the diversity of unpredictable interference encountered in real wireless networks; e.g., as caused by unrelated devices on the same band, multipath effects, or electromagnetic inteference…”

Here’s one piece of the puzzle: They don’t “just get started” like so many of us have been taught to do.

The fallacy of “just get started”
How many times have you heard someone say, “You just need to get started”?

I’ve even said it myself — that the hardest part of nearly anything meaningful (health & fitness, managing your money, etc) is getting started.

But Cal Newport, a published author and PhD in computer science at MIT, disagrees.

Getting a chance to hear someone disagree with you and back it up beautifully with logic and examples is a rare thing. So today, I’ve invited Cal to write a detailed guest post about the importance of ideas — and the fallacies of thinking “just getting started” is the right answer.

He’ll show you why it’s important to look beyond quick tactical wins and instead focus on the strength of your idea, which takes painstaking practice and ongoing iteration.

In my Earn1k course — where I help people focus on earning money on the side — we blend quick-win tactics with ongoing attitudinal and behavioral change. For example, you can quickly learn which of your ideas will never make you any money. But to find an idea that will be highly profitable, and to construct a referral and lead-generation strategy that will have you drowning in new business…and to price your services so you’re making rich profits…that is not a 1-page worksheet. It takes work. And yet, it’s important to blend the two to capitalize on getting started and dominating over the long term.

Honestly, this is not the kind of stuff most blog readers want to hear. They want “tactics” and “tips” about how to “hack” their lives. But it’s important to blend quick wins with deep theory and rigor. The most successful people know this — and maintain a balance of quick wins and long-term strategy.

Take it away, Cal…

* * *

The Idea Virtuosos: Why the common advice of “You just need to get started” is bad advice”

By Cal Newport

Imagine that you’re a computer scientist submitting a paper to SIGCOMM, an elite academic conference focused on computer networks. Your task is daunting: Of the nearly 300 research papers submitted to this year’s conference, only 30 were accepted. Each of these accepted papers survived detailed reviews from at least five different experts and were then subject to an intense debate of their merits at the conference’s 2-day program committee meeting.

Not surprisingly, the papers that make it through this gauntlet are spectacular: they each present an original idea which is then examined, evaluated, justified, and discussed in painstaking detail.

Here’s a typical table; it’s taken from the winner of the best paper award at this year’s conference:

Multiply this level of detail to fill ten double-columned, small-fonted pages, and you’ve got yourself a reasonable submission.

At SIGCOMM there’s no wiggle room: to get a paper accepted your idea must be a blockbuster, otherwise it will crumble under the intense scrutiny it faces both from your own analysis and the many experts who will tear down your claims of importance, piece by piece.

What fascinates me about this feat is that the world’s top computer science professors replicate it many times each year. The professor I work with at MIT, for example, last year published two papers at SIGCOMM, not to mention two papers at equivalently elite networking conferences, and two more at a pair of elite conferences in related fields.

It follows: if you’re interested in the process of finding standout ideas — be it for a start-up, work project, blog topic, or book proposal — there’s perhaps no better experts to learn from than the idea virtuosos running top academic research labs. These professors face an impossibly high quality threshold for their work, and yet manage to match it with a half-dozen or more brilliant ideas each year. Once you dive inside their world, however, an unsettling reality becomes clear: it’s possible that the conventional wisdom about big accomplishment, which says getting started is the key to success, might be dead wrong.

It’s towards this unsettling notion that I turn your attention in this post.

My Scheduled Life

I’ve been at MIT for six years — the first five spent earning my PhD in computer science, and the last spent as a postdoctoral associate. Of the many things that surprised me about the Institute — a list which includes the alarming quantity of yelling and the inexpressible value of white boards — one that stands out is its dedication to meetings.

Here, for example, is a screen shot of my calendar from a typical week earlier this summer:

The events highlighted in red are regularly scheduled meetings associated with my research group, while the events highlighted in yellow are one-on-one research meetings I happened to schedule that week. They all involve the same activities: discussing research papers and debating — often vigorously — the ideas they spawn.

This calendar highlights a reality of life at MIT: discussion and brainstorming are a core component of our research process. It’s understood that only the best ideas can survive the submission process of top conferences like SIGCOMM, therefore a huge effort is invested in identifying the best possible projects before getting started. As seen on my calendar above, it’s not unusual to dedicate 6 or more hours a week in formal brainstorming meetings, with at least another 6 – 12 spent exploring on your own time.

At MIT, the quality of the idea is everything.

Ideas vs. Progress

Notice that MIT’s idea-centric process (e.g., finding the right ideas is key) contrasts with the progress-centric process (e.g., getting started is key) that dominates popular discussion on getting things done.

For example:

• Proponents of the progress-centric process says “getting started” is the most important step. To paraphrase a commentator on a past article I wrote on this subject: “You will fail at 100% of the opportunities you never try!”
• Proponents of the idea-centric process, by contrast, note that the vast majority of ideas are mediocre. If you jump at every concept that seems viable, you’ll probably end up accomplishing little of consequence.
• Proponents of the progress-centric process fear that they must tell people to get started right away, or these (hypothetical) others will remain mired in a procrastinatory sea of fear and comfort with conformity. To paraphrase another commenter: “Most folks just sit around waffling on everything and thus don’t do anything except complain about the status quo.”
• Proponents of the idea-centric process aren’t interested in the psychological issues of other people; they want the unvarnished truth on what will maximize their chances of success.
• Proponents of the progress-centric process believe that the only way to test out an idea is to try it. To quote Scott Young (an insightful observer on these topics): “While you can learn something about a field by sitting on the sidelines, you won’t truly know about it until you dive right in.”
• Proponents of the idea-centric process believe that in many fields, deep knowledge and expert feedback can differentiate between mediocre and great ideas. This requires a time-consuming commitment to learning about a field and a thick skin for harsh feedback, but you’d be hard pressed, for example, to find a successful serial entrepreneur, writer, or researcher who would start a project before feeling strongly about its chances for success.

In practice, this leads to the following types of difference:

• A progress-centric person who has an interesting idea for a book jumps right into writing it, while an idea-centric person runs the idea through a wringer — talking to agents and writers, looking for similar works that have sold recently, etc. — before deciding to invest the years required to write and market it.
• A progress-centric person quits his job to start his on blog-based online business, assuming he’ll figure out the details as he goes along, while an idea-centric person invests the months — maybe years — of hard work necessary to find a business idea with a real chance of supporting him, understanding that the right answer might be for him to build a valuable skill before going freelance.
• A progress-centric person spends a month getting the small business she works for a strong Twitter presence, because that’s the thing to do, while an idea-centric person spends the same month studying more successful firms in their space, trying to identify what they’re doing better that could be efficiently replicated.
• And so on…

Hypothetical situations, of course, can only take us so far. Let’s continue with two real world examples of idea-centric thinking in action…

The Difficulty of Finding Good Ideas: From Admissions to Animation

Earlier this summer I published a book on the college admission process. Its premise is simple: most people believe that getting accepted at a top college requires a stressful high school life; to counter this dangerous myth, I tell the stories of students who did well in the process while leading a low-stress and interesting life.

To the outside observer, the idea seems clear and obvious, therefore they likely assume the difficult part of this project was forcing myself to actually write. Reality, however, defies this assumption.

To see why, consider this screen shot from my e-mail archive:

Shown above are two crucial e-mails relating to my book. The earlier message, titled “one more…,” is from a conversation with my agent about potential book ideas. It contains my first reference to the idea of tackling college admissions as a book subject. (In the e-mail, I say: “One of the hottest issues right now is that of overachieving students burning out in their…quest to get into the right college…[but] many of the top students I interview…to put it simply, [are] relaxed.”)

The later e-mail, titled “Broadway Deal,” marks the Broadway Books imprint of Random House buying my book proposal. (Remember, for non-fiction, you sell the idea before you write the book; this e-mail timestamps me selling the idea, with all of the writing coming later.)

Notice the gap between the two dates. I started investigating the topic of college admissions in April of 2007 and didn’t complete and sell my final book proposal until October of 2008 — a span of 18 months!

(I’m not alone in this dedication to getting a book idea right; Ramit told me, for example, that it took him nine months to get from the general idea of writing his personal finance book to a specific 10-page outline.)

This same lesson keeps turning up the more you seek it. Consider, to name another example, the creative process behind the spectacular success of Pixar Animation Studios, which has an outrageously high average international gross of $550 million. In a Wired Magazine cover article, penned by Jonah Lehrer, it’s revealed that the Pixar team is obsessed with getting their movie just right before diving into the business of actually making it.

They start, for example, with a series of intense story discussions in a Pixar-owned cabin, located 50 miles north of San Francisco. For Toy Story 3, it took 123 days between the start of this process and the completion of their first story board. This story board was then turned into a story reel (an animated flip book version of the movie where employees provide the voice acting). Using the reel, the team brutally dissects and improves the script, remaking the reel with each tweak, until the movie flows smoothly — every joke hitting, every plot point unfolding logically.

Up to this point, very little money has been invested. Only once the reel is perfect do they actual start the long and expensive process of animating frames and recording professional voices.

Your Personal R&D Lab

What’s the right way to integrate the idea-centric process into your own work flow? I want to conclude with a few practical guidelines for moving away from The Cult of the Start and embracing the importance of finding the right idea.

• Learn the Field
  The ability to distinguish between mediocre and good ideas requires that you understand your field. In some fields this might require diving into a series of (probably) mediocre starter projects to get a feel for how things work. In many fields, however, talking to insiders and finding examples of both good and bad projects (and understanding the difference), can take you surprisingly far.
• Seek Feedback
  Find people who know what they are talking about and ask for their unvarnished opinion on your idea. Assume most of your ideas will get shot down. (At MIT, for example, I assume a ratio of 1 paper for every 6 – 10 ideas that I give serious thought towards.) This is okay; even top idea generators expect a low hit rate.
• Be Specific
  Establish a specific routine for systematically sorting through and exploring potential ideas. If you don’t have a routine, it’s easy to default to doing nothing at all. This routine should include regular exposure to material related to your field (for a writer, for example, this might mean subscribing to Publisher’s Lunch and keeping tabs on what’s selling and who’s writing it). Have a separate routine to follow after an idea passes a viability threshold. This routine should involve both harsh expert feedback and a thorough search for people who have done something similar (and their fate).
• Seek Compulsion, Not (Internal) Consistency
  Your threshold for acting on idea should be an indefatigable compulsion to get started. That is, after looking at the idea from many different angles, comparing it to similar works, and seeking expert feedback, if it still seems strong: get started. Most people, by contrast, act on any idea that seems internally consistent. That should be your criteria for starting to investigate an idea, not your threshold for action. (Notice, defining this threshold is one of the hardest challenges of the idea-centric approach, and is something that requires practice and experience. If you want to see a well-defined threshold in action, talk to a venture capitalist — they are among the world’s experts on sorting the potentially big — no one, of course, can predict certain success — from the probably small.)

Conclusion

If your goal is to increase the speed that you churn through your project list, then this advice is not for you — the sooner you get started on optimizing your TweekDeck configuration, or whatever, the better. The same applies for lifestyle changes (be it a new fitness program or learning a new language): these can be important projects in your life, but they’re not the type of accomplishment where the quality of the idea matters — so ignore what I say here.

On the other hand, when you’re talking about lasting accomplishment – the type you’ll be remembered for — it’s hard to avoid the reality that great ideas require a great investment of time to uncover. The sooner you make peace with this mindset — even if it means waiting longer before quitting your job to become an entrepreneur or diving into your brilliant book idea — the sooner you can start making important things happen.

Cal Newport’s latest book, How to Be a High School Superstar is ostensibly about hacking the stress out of the college admissions process, but is secretly a guide for anyone interested in building a more interesting life.

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I’m always on the lookout for “hidden gems,” or people who are doing remarkable work that the whole world hasn’t caught on to, yet.

Today, I asked my friend Cal Newport to illustrate how he completely dominates as a post-doc at MIT, author of multiple books, and popular blogger. How does he do it all?

Cal writes one of the best blogs on the Internet: Study Hacks. His guest post shows how you can take I Will Teach You To Be Rich principles — plus many others — and integrate them into a way to use your time effectively.

Below, you’ll learn:

• How to use fixed-schedule productivity — similar to the Think, Want, Do Technique — to consciously choose what you want to work on and ignore worthless busywork
• When to say no — and how to do it
• How a $60,000-a-speech professional manages his time
• Case study: How to use email for maximum time productivity

Read on.

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From Cal:

I recently conducted a simple experiment: I recorded the timestamps of the last 50 e-mails in my sent messages folder. These timestamps covered one week of my e-mail behavior, starting on Thursday, October 22nd and ending Thursday, October 29th.

My interest was to measure when during the day I spent time on e-mail. Here’s what I found:

Notice that over this week-long period, I didn’t send any e-mail after 7:00 pm, and only one e-mail after 6:00 pm. There’s a good explanation for this discipline: I end all work around 5:30 every day. No Internet. No computer. No to-do lists. Once I shutdown my day, it’s time to relax.

I must emphasize that I’m not some laid-back lifestyle entrepreneur who monitors an automated business from a hammock in Aruba. I have a normal job (I’m a postdoc) and a lot on my plate.

This past summer, for example, I completed my PhD in computer science at MIT. Simultaneous with writing my dissertation I finished the manuscript for my third book, which was handed in a month after my PhD defense and will be published by Random House in the summer of 2010. During this past year, I also managed to maintain my blog, Study Hacks, which enjoys over 50,000 unique visitors a month, and publish over a half-dozen peer-reviewed academic papers.

Put another way: I’m no slacker. But with only a few exceptions, all of this work took place between 8:30 and 5:30, only on weekdays. (My exercise, which I do every day, is also included in this block, as is an hour of dog walking. I really like my post-5:30 free time to be completely free.)

I call this approach fixed-scheduled productivity, and it’s something I’ve been following and preaching since early 2008. The idea is simple:

• Fix your ideal schedule, then work backwards to make everything fit — ruthlessly culling obligations, turning people down, becoming hard to reach, and shedding marginally useful tasks along the way.

The beneficial effects of this strategy on your sense of control, stress levels, and amount of important work accomplished, is profound.

The notion is not new. Tim Ferriss famously recommend strict time constraints in The 4-Hour Work Week. He argued that much of the work we do is of questionable importance and conducted at low efficiency. (He made a popular — if not somewhat dubious — appeal to Parkinson’s Law to support the point that more time does not necessarily lead to more results.) If we instead identify only the most important tasks, he said, and tackle them under severe constraints, we’d be surprised by how little time we actually require.

In this article, I want to tell the stories of real people who successfully implemented this strategy – radically improving the quality of their lives without scuttling their professional success.

Jim Collins’ Whiteboard

 

(photo by Kevin Moloney for The New York Times)Jim Collins has sold over seven million copies of his canonical business guides, Good to Great and Built to Last. He attributes the success of these books to his research discipline. As he revealed in a New York Times profile from last May, he leads teams of up to a dozen undergraduates in the process of information gathering. His books require, on average, a half-decade of time and a half-million dollars of expenses to get from their initial premise to the polished ideas. When he enters his “monk” mode to covert this research into a manuscript, he produces, at best, a page a day.

In other words, Collins is a hardworking guy. You would expect, therefore, that like many hard-charging business-world types he would be a blackberry-by-the-bedside workaholic.

But he’s not.

Scrawled on a whiteboard in the conference room of Collins’ Boulder, Colorado office is a simple formula:

Creative 53%
Teaching 28%
Other 19%

Collins decided years ago that a “big goal” in his life was to spend half of his working time on creative work — thinking, researching, and writing — a third of his time on teaching, and then cram everything else into the last 20%. The numbers on the whiteboard are a snapshot of his current distribution. (He tracks his time with a stop watch and monitors his progress in a spreadsheet.)

Collins is a pristine example of fixed-schedule productivity in action. An author with his level of success could easily fall into an overwork trap: long nights spent updating twitter, signing partnerships, building elaborate web sites and launching product lines, speaking at every possible venue. But he avoids this fate.

Even though Collins demands over $60,000 per speech, for example, he gives fewer than 18 per year, and a third of these are donated for free to non-profit groups. He doesn’t do book tours. His web site is mediocre. He keeps his living expenses in check so that he’s not dependent on drumming up income (he and his wife have lived in the same California bungalow for the past 14 years), and he keeps only a small staff, preferring to bring on volunteers as needed.

“Mr. Collins…is quite practiced at saying ‘no,’” is how The Times described him. (He once wrote an article for USA Today titled: “Best New Years Resolution? A ‘Stop-Doing’ list.”)

His fixed-schedule approach to life comes from his simple conviction “to produce a lasting and distinctive body of work,” and his “willingness…to focus on what not to do as much as what to do” has made that possible.

He’s not alone in reaping the benefits of the fixed-schedule approach…

Elizabeth’s Conversion

When Elizabeth Grace Saunders started her first business, a professional copy-writing service, her schedule has “hazardous.”

“I would answer e-mails after going out with friends,” she told me, “and stay up until 2 a.m. finishing projects.”

At some point, she snapped. “I’m not a secretary,” she declared. “I’m not required to jump to respond to everything that crosses my path.”

Saunders adopted a 40-hour a week schedule. This new structure had two immediate impacts. First, she found herself focusing only on the most important tasks. With only a few hours to spare on business development, for example, she couldn’t justify wasting time with the small, ineffectual website tweaks and exploratory e-mails that used to keep her up late into the night. Instead she focused on the core activities that produced results, such as sales calls or the development of new products. The focus generated by this constraint ended up generating more results than her previous schedule, which was more expansive, but also more scattered.

The second impact was her discovery that she could teach her clients how to treat her.

“I’ll answer your e-mail within 24 hours (not 24 minutes), I need notice before starting a project, I will say ‘no’ if my schedule for the near future is already full, and I might schedule meetings up to a month in advance.”

“Choosing how and when I respond to requests has had a dramatic impact,” Saunders notes.

Friends and clients were impressed enough with Saunders’ lifestyle that she eventually left copywriting to become a “time coach” that works with other women in business to achieve similar results. (Her flagship service is called a Schedule Makeover.)

Here’s a typical day in Saunders’ life:

• She’s up at 6 and by 8:30 she’s at the computer.
• The first 1 – 2 hours of her work day are spent doing what she calls “routine processing,” which includes checking calendars, clearing e-mail inboxes, and cementing a plan to follow for the rest of the day. As Saunders describes it, this morning routine prevents her from wasting time deciding how to start, and it frees her of the “compulsion” to be checking e-mail throughout the day.
• She continues with an hour of sales calls. This is often the most dreaded activity for the solo entrepreneur. But by having a regular place in her constrained schedule, she avoids pushing it aside.
• The rest of the day follows the schedule she fixed in the morning: usually a mix of client assignments and at least one business development activity.
• By 5:30 she’s done.

Most entrepreneurs work well past 5:30 (and claim that this is absolutely unavoidable), but Saunders’ business is thriving. The reason is clear: her fixed schedule forces her to do the work that produces results (sales calls, client assignments, major business development activities) and eliminates the hours of pseudowork that many use to fill their day in an effort to feel “busy” (tweaking websites, compulsive e-mail checking, chasing down small business development opportunities).

Saunders is not the only young entrepreneur I’ve met who was surprised to discover that doing less helped the bottom line…

The Baby Factor

Michael Simmons, a good friend of mine, reported a similar story. His company, the Extreme Entrepreneurship Education Corporation, expanded quickly in the years following college graduation. Around the time I was reading The 4-Hour Work Week, I started to discuss the possibility that Simmons tone down the hours. It was his company, I argued, so why not take advantage of this fact to craft an awesome life.

Among the specific topics we discussed, I remember suggesting that Simmons cut down the time spent on e-mail and social networks.

“This isn’t optional for me,” he explained. “Any of these contacts could turn into a important partner or sale.”

But then Simmons’ daughter, Halle, was born.

Simmons’ work schedule reduced from 10 to 12 hours days to 3 to 5 hour days. He took care of the baby in the morning, then worked in the afternoon while his wife, and company co-founder, took over the childcare responsibilities. Evenings were family together time.

Halle forced Simmons into the type of constrained schedule that he had previously declared impossible. And yet the business didn’t flounder.

“The baby turns ‘shoulds’ into ‘musts’,” Simmons explained to me. “In the past I used to put off key decisions, or saying ‘no’, because I didn’t want to deal with the discomfort. Now I have no choice. I have to make the decisions because my time has been slashed in half.”

“Since out daughter was born about a year ago, our business has more than doubled.”

The Fixed-Schedule Effect

Collins, Saunders, and Simmons all share a similar discovery. When they constrained their schedule to the point where non-essential work was eliminated and colleagues and clients had to retrain their expectations, they discovered two surprising results.

First, the essentials — be it making sales calls, or focusing on the core research behind a book — are what really matter, and the non-essentials — be it random e-mail conversations, or managing an overhaul to your blog template — are more disposable than many believe.

Second, by focusing only the essentials, they’ll receive more attention than when your schedule was unbounded. The paradoxic effect, as with Collins’ bestsellers, or Saunders and Simmons’ fast-growing businesses, you achieve more results.

Living the Fixed-Scheduled Lifestyle

The steps to adopting fixed-schedule productivity are straightforward:

1. Choose a work schedule that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation.
2. Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule.

This sounds simple. But of course it’s not. Satisfying rule 2 is non-trivial. If you took your current projects, obligations, and work habits, you’d probably fall well short of satisfying your ideal schedule.

Here’s a simple truth that you must confront when considering fixed-schedule productivity: sticking to your ideal schedule will require drastic actions. For example, you may have to:

• Dramatically cut back on the number of projects you are working on.
• Ruthlessly cull inefficient habits from your daily schedule.
• Risk mildly annoying or upsetting some people in exchange for large gains in time freedom.
• Stop procrastinating.

In the abstract, these are all hard goals to accomplish. But when you’re focused on a specific goal — “I refuse to work past 5:30 on weekdays!” — you’d be surprised by how much easier it becomes to deploy these strategies in your daily life.

Let’s look at one more example…

Case Study: My Schedule

My schedule from my time as a grad student provides a good case study. To reach my relatively small work hour limit, I had to be careful about how I approached my day. I saw enough bleary-eyed insomniacs around here to know how easy it is to slip into a noon to 3 a.m. routine (the infamous “MIT cycle.”)

Here are some of the techniques I regularly used to remain within the confines of my fixed schedule:

• I’m ruthlessly results oriented. What’s the ultimate goal of a graduate student? To produce good research that answers important questions. Nothing else really matters. For some of my peers, however, their answer to this metaphysical prompt was: “work really long hours to prove that you belong.” It was as if some future arbiter of their future was going to look back at their time clock punch card and declare whether they sufficiently paid their dues. Nonsense! I wanted to produce a few good papers a year. Anything that got in the way of this goal was treated with suspicion. This results-oriented vision made it easy to keep the middling crap from crowding my schedule.
• I’m ultra-clear about when to expect results from me. And it’s not always soon. If someone slips something onto my queue, I make an honest evaluation of when it will percolate to the top. I communicate this date. Then I make it happen when the time comes. You can get away with telling people to expect a result a long time in the future, if — and this is a big if — you actually deliver when promised. Long lead times allow to you to side step the pile-ups (which will bust a fixed-schedule) that accrue when you insist on an immature, “do things only when the deadline looms” attitude.
• I refuse. If my queue is too crowded for a potential project to get done in time, I turn it down.
• I drop projects and quit. If a project gets out of control and starts to sap too much time from my schedule, or strays from my results-oriented vision: I drop it. If something demonstrably more important comes along, and it conflicts with something else in my queue, I drop the less important project. Here’s a secret: no one really cares what you do on the small scale, or what things you quit. In the end you’re judged on your results. If something is hindering your production of the important results in your field, you have to ask why you’re keeping it around.
• I’m not available. I often work in hidden nooks of the various libraries on campus, or from my apartment. I check and respond to work e-mail only a couple times a day, and never at night or on weekends. People have to wait for responses from me. It’s often hard to find me. Sometimes people get upset when they send me something urgent on Friday night that need done by Saturday morning. But eventually they get over it. Just as important, I’m not a jerk about it. I don’t have sanctimonious auto-responders about my e-mail habits. I just do what I do, and people adapt.
• I batch and habitatize. Any regularly occurring work gets turned into a habit — something I do at a fixed time on a fixed date. For example, I work on my blog in the afternoon after lunch. I write first thing in the morning. When I was taking classes, I had reoccuring blocks set aside during the week for tackling their assignments. Habit-based schedules for regular work makes it easier to tackle the non-regular projects. It also prevents schedule-busting pile-ups.
• I start early. Sometimes real early. On certain projects that I know are important, I don’t tolerate procrastination. It doesn’t interest me. If I need to start something 2 or 3 weeks in advance so that my queue proceeds as needed, I do so.
• I don’t ask permission. I think it’s wrong to assume that you automatically have the right to work whatever schedule you want. It’s a valuable prize that most be earned. And results are the currency you must spend to buy it. So long as I’m actually accomplishing the big picture goals I’m paid to accomplish, I feel comfortable to handle my schedule my own way. If I was producing mediocre crap, people would have a right to demand more access.

Conclusion

You could fill any arbitrary number of hours with what feels to be productive work. Between e-mail, and crucial web surfing, and to-do lists that, in the age of David Allen, grow to lengths that rival the bible, there is always something you could be doing. At some point, however, you have to put a stake in the ground and say: I know I have a never-ending stream of work, but this is when I’m going to face it. If you don’t, you’ll let this work push you around like a bully. It will force you into tiring, inefficient schedules, and you’ll end up more stressed and no more accomplished.

Fix the schedule you want. Then make everything else fit around your needs. Be flexible. Be efficient. If you can’t make it fit: change your work. But in the end, don’t compromise.

Cal Newport is an MIT postdoc, author, and founder of Study Hacks, the Internet’s most popular student advice blog.

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