For today, my 20% tasks were to write one article each to help spread the word about two of my books and to prepare my novel proposal to send to two publishers.
I’ve done all of those, but I confess that the accountability part of the 80 20 strategy really helped. I left the preparation of the novel proposal until very late in the day. If it weren’t for the embarrassment of having to admit on this blog that I’d already failed on Day Two, I might well have rationalized leaving this until tomorrow.
I think that brings up a useful point: when you decide who to be accountable to, be sure it’s someone to whom you’d hate to admit failure–not somebody who is likely to say, “Oh well, it doesn’t really matter, you can always do it tomorrow.”
If you’re joining me in this experiment, how did your day two go?
I’ve heard from another person who is joining in, and his main 20% activity is writing articles to go on his web site, to build up the amount of good content on it (which helps with search engine rankings).
My weight-loss participant reports that she has chosen walking as her exercise of choice and immediately was confronted with a rainy day on which it would have been easy to stay indoors. However, if you live in the UK, it’s best not to choose any activity that you can’t do in the rain! However, she persisted and took her walk and got “only mildly soaked.” Well done!
My three 20% tasks for tomorrow are all in the category of finishing things that are almost done so they can get out into the world:
- finish the copy for the sales page for the sitcom workshop I’m teaching in Las Vegas in November
- finish the editing of a video that will promote the screenwriting workshop I’m teaching in Las Vegas in November
- finish the editing of the next Screenwriting Success podcast
Hmm, this delaying the final 20% of a task appears to be something of bad habit with me. Another 80 /20 pattern! Of course the 80% that’s done is useless until the final 20% is done as well.
If that resonates with you, perhaps you can identify three things on which you’ve made a good start and that you now will finish. Or you may want to focus on something else (go back to the first 80 20 post a couple of days ago to review the likely arenas in which you'll find your top 20% activities).
If you care to, please share your experience in the comments section here or directly to me at [email protected]
