How I’m Becoming More Productive: Stop Working 9-5
2nd in my productivity series.
I’m not productive yet, but everyday I’m becoming more productive. It’s something I’ve been working on for weeks with the help of different books, websites, and other simple experimentations.
I based my productivity on Pareto’s 80-20 Principle which was first brought to my attention by Tim Ferris in his book “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join The New Rich.” Unfortunately applying many of Ferris’ ideas are impossible for a political operative, but I’ve taken his basic premises, experimented, and found a few things that’s worked for me. The result has been more productivity, more free time, and a happier me.
Tim Ferris talks about total lifestyle redesign. I haven’t reached that point yet, only made my daily life a little more productive. I plan on taking bigger steps over the next few weeks in both my personal and professional lives, which for a political operative, is so intertwined that there’s really no difference at all.
Why I’m Becoming More Productive At Work
Believe it or not, it’s because of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.
It all started at this year’s State of the State when Governor Mark Sanford once again continuously quoted Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat.” After years of hearing Governor Sanford recite Friedman during speech after speech I finally decided to read the book. After all, how can I as a political operative understand South Carolina politics if I have no clue what our Governor is talking about?
It turns out that the book is more about outsourcing than anything else and much of the book concentrates on the use of Virtual Assistants and both the professional and personal outsourcing of our lives. Friedman tells the stories of multibillion-dollar companies outsourcing everything from software development to everyone’s personal favorite – customer service calls. Most intriguing is that Friedman explains that outsourcing isn’t just for the rich. Many small business people are outsourcing parts of their business. For example, a chain of McDonalds is outsourcing their drive through order taking. No, seriously. The customer orders through the normal speaker that we are all used to, but instead of talking to a person at the McDonald’s, they talk to a call center operator on the other side of the country. The operator plugs their order into a computer which is read directly by the McDonald’s cooks. According to Friedman’s research, McDonald’s is saving seconds per customer and although that may not seem like a lot, those seconds are adding up. They are servicing more customers each day and paying the call center operators far less than they would have to pay an employee at the McDonald’s location.
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