Business Without the Bullsh*t: 49 Secrets and Shortcuts You Need to Know (18 page)

In a world of globalization and outsourcing, nobody can achieve
job
security. However, it is possible to put yourself in a position where (1) your employer will be reluctant to fire you and (2) you can easily find another job. I call this
career security
, and here’s how to achieve it:

If you’re barely keeping the proverbial wolf from the door, you’ll feel trapped in your current job, because losing it would create instant hardship.

Because of this, career security means being in a financial position where you can be totally unemployed for at least six months without having to greatly change your living arrangements.

I fully realize that this is difficult for some people to achieve, especially if they’re already loaded down with student loan debt, mortgages, and so forth. Even so, it’s essential because you want to accept the best possible job (rather than the first job that comes along), and you don’t want to be distracted by moving, bankruptcy, etc. while job hunting.

It may take some time to get yourself into this position, but it’s
definitely worth it, even if it means living with a roommate or at your parents’, never eating out, shopping at thrift stores, etc.

No company employs people at a financial loss. Chances are that you’re producing far more value for your company than it’s spending on your compensation (salary, bonuses, commissions, perks, etc.).

In a financial sense, you can best calculate your value to your firm by looking at how expensive it would be replace you. (I discuss how to do this in “Secret 5. How to Ask for a Raise.”) It’s very much in your interest to increase your replacement cost.

You accomplish this by achieving unusual expertise in some area of the company’s operations. The more you can contribute regularly to the success of the company, the less likely you are to be replaced.

Companies value three types of expertise:

Suppose you’re a new hire in a marketing group that’s doing corporate branding. To make yourself less replaceable you might have three choices:

Similarly, suppose you’re a manufacturing engineer with twenty-five years of experience. To make yourself less replaceable you might have three choices:

In addition to making yourself less replaceable, spend at least two hours every week (schedule them!) finding new business contacts, developing those relationships, and keeping abreast of opportunities in your field.

Your goal is to constantly have multiple job opportunities in various stages of development. Having such alternatives lined up provides four advantages:

As you develop these contacts and opportunities, put them in the form of an escape plan, detailing what you’d do and whom you’d call if you suddenly lost your job. There are three advantages to having a written escape plan:

Ideally you want to be developing
at least three
of these opportunities at every point in your career. In other words, while you’ve got job A, you should simultaneously be developing job opportunities B, C, and D.

Even though most people complain that they haven’t enough time, it’s actually easy to have enough time to get all your work done, and still have time left over for a personal life. The secret is as follows:

You get the same amount of time every day as everyone else. You may feel you’re short on time and that you desperately need more, but when the day started, you got your fair share: twenty-four hours.

Nobody got any more than you did, so stop complaining. More important, the time you’re wasting by complaining could be spent doing something productive.

Contrary to popular belief, the most difficult part of time management isn’t changing the things you do… it’s having the courage and discipline to track what you’re actually doing. It’s a perfect case of “knowledge is power.”

Here’s the thing: once you realize where you’re spending your time, it becomes absurdly easy to determine where you’re wasting it.
Simple awareness helps you decide what’s a priority and what can be eliminated or delegated to somebody else.

The Pareto principle is a mathematical law that applies in most situations. The law is as follows: 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your actions. Commit this rule to memory, because it’s the key to time management.

The most famous example of the Pareto principle is the oft-repeated fact that in sales groups, 80 percent of the revenue comes from 20 percent of the team. There are dozens of other examples, ranging from wealth distribution to damage from natural disasters.

The flip side of this principle is that 80 percent of your actions are producing only 20 percent of your results. Translation: most (i.e., 80 percent) of what you’re actually doing is pretty much a waste of time.

The reason most time-management systems don’t work is that they tend to treat the 20 percent of your actions that really matter as equivalent to the 80 percent of your actions that aren’t actually all that important.

Instead, whenever you make a to-do list, prioritize each item by the amount of effort required, numbering them from 1 to 10, with 1 being the least amount of effort and 10 the most. Then estimate the potential positive results, again from 1 to 10.

Divide the effort by the potential. The result is the “priority ranking.” Now do the items with the
lowest
priority number first. For example:

In order to take advantage of the Pareto principle, you’d do the above tasks in the following order:

Guess what? If you never get to the priority 5 item, it’s no big deal. It’s probably part of the 80 percent that doesn’t really matter.

I know this all sounds pretty simple, even simplistic. However, I can tell you from my personal experience that there has been nothing—and I mean nothing—that has added to my personal productivity more than this kind of prioritization.

Hint: laying out your activities over the next two weeks helps you to finalize and reorganize the plan for the current week. That way you can decide what to pull into this week and what you can push out until next week, or even later.

An easy way to do only what’s important is to cut out activities that consume large amounts of time but very seldom pay off big. Here are the four most common: