Quit your day job. Go on. I dare you.

You know when your alarm goes off in the morning and you have no choice but to haul yourself out of bed? Well, you could hit snooze a couple of times, but really you just have to get on with things. Get up, get dressed and make your way to your job and start the day. It’s your routine. Every day you have to get there roughly on time because if you don’t you’ll be fired sooner or later. In return though, you don’t need to worry too much about money. Oh sure you’ll feel like you don’t have enough of it from time to time, we all do.. but in return for being disciplined about your routine and turning up at your job every day you get paid every month, you know how much you’ll be paid and you don’t need to worry.

Working as a freelancer from home like I’m doing, you don’t have that. When my alarm goes off, I COULD stay in bed. If I get bored during the day I can just wander off and no one will care. On the other hand, no one is obliged to pay me and every month there are still bills to pay. Work is still work. It’s when you have to do something that if you were really free to choose, you wouldn’t do it. You must do it to get paid. That needs discipline and routine.

Imposing discipline and routine on my life is difficult but important. I have a pathological fear of routine and I try to break it every chance I get. I wrongly think routine will depress me, but the truth is that the lack of it is even more dangerous. Discipline I struggle with too. I still have remnants of that dumb teenage attitude ‘No one tells me what to do’. Including myself it seems.

I’m getting better at it. Slowly. And although it’s a difficult part of one’s personality to address, discipline and routine are definitely useful things to be good at.

Also known as the Pareto principle, the 80-20 rule is a common rule of thumb which states that 80% of the returns on any given project come from only 20% of the effort applied.

I happen to believe very strongly in this principle, and I try to put it into practice in my own life.

Lets examine the principle mathematically. Lets say that my effort is measured in E’s, and I have 100 E’s to spend. There are various projects I could spend my energy on and the return I get on them is measured in R’s. If I put 100 E’s into a project, I can expect to get 200 R’s back. But!…. The 80-20 rule says that for the first 20 E’s I put in, I’ll get 80 R’s back out. After that I have to put in 80 more E’s to get just 20 R’s back out.

So…. instead of spending my effort on just 1 project, I’ll put 20 E’s into 5 different projects. That means that I would get a total return of 400 R’s. That’s twice as much return, using the same amount of effort in the same amount of time. For me, the benefits are obvious and manyfold.

The drawbacks of applying the 80-20 rule to your life? Firstly you’ll rarely finish any project thoroughly and properly, and that’s something that most other people tend to see as a bad thing. “It’s all about the details, Chris” is something I hear a lot, I believe that to be wrong. That’s just an excuse for small minded pedantry. It’s all about making the most of your resources & getting as many R’s for your E’s as you can.