Do More with Less
Imagine you were grocery shopping and there was an incredible deal available on bags of potatoes:
1 bag for $3.00 each
2 bags for $1.49 each
3 Bags for .99c each
At first glance this looks like it is an attempt to encourage you to buy more of a certain product in order for the store to take more money off you. But when you analyze the offering, you can see that for LESS then the price of one bag, you can buy two or three bags – so no matter how many potatoes you need, it’s literally cheaper to buy more.
A similar event occurred during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic when oil prices dropped so low the suppliers would have actually paid you to take it off their hands (it was crude oil, so you would have needed to own your own refinery to be able to do something with it).
The same can often happen with time. We make an assessment of the work we have to achieve over a period of time (a day or a week) and often feel overwhelmed at the enormity of the task(s) ahead, which in turn puts us off getting started or even becoming productive, after which our attention span gets shorter as we allow distractions to remove us from the focus of our work.
What’s the lesson here? Instead of looking at how LONG it will take to do tasks, consider how SHORT it will take. In other words, and without relinquishing quality of work, consider this question:
‘If I really focus and crack on with this task, what is the shortest amount of time it will take to complete?’
You may be surprised at how quickly you will get things done, because you will then be effectively Doing More (tasks) With Less (time)!