Time Management

"The secret of business, especially these days, is to focus relentlessly on your unfair advantage - the thing you do that others don't." -- John Rollwagen, executive

This "unfair advantage" is another term for "competitive advantage."

A competitive advantage is something that you and your business excels in. It is not easily copied by competitors and the profit margin is very high.

Examples of a competitive advantage are Microsoft's operating systems, Apple's iPhone, & Google's search engine. Other companies compete, but are light years behind in function and marketing.

Ways to Determine You Unfair Advantage:

1. Ask yourself... [*]

What are my highest value activities?
What can my company do and only my company do if done well will make a real difference?
What is the most valuable use of my company's time?

2. Apply the 80/20 rule:

What are the 20% of activities that provide my company 80% of its results?

Once you locate your competitive advantage, you need to consistently exploit it! Talk about it, have your staff promote it, put it on all your marketing materials, and advertise.

It is fairly obvious that some marketing activities produce more than others.  Some of your staff or sales members produce much more than others.  

Don't you wish you could emulate certain activities or people?  Well, you can!  It takes four steps: (1) identify those people or activities that are most profitable, (2) focus and develop them with most of your time & energy, (3) figure out how to emulate them, and (4) test, test, test.

Here is a follow up email to An Email Trick That Will Clear Your Mind.

Merlin Mann, a well known productivity guru and creator of the popular 43 folders website will talk about Getting Things Done, the importance of getting your inbox to zero, and strategies for dealing with high volume email The first 32 minutes is lecture. The rest is Q/A.

Probably the single most cluttered thing we have now is our email box. The amount of mail that can accumulate in our Inbox can easily accumulated to over 1,000 and that does not include spam! The physical clutter is just part of it. Trying to find a particular email is a nightmare. In addition, there is an immense psychic drain when one looks at pages upon pages of emails. So, how can one alleviate this?

One way is to just categorize your email into different topic areas.  This addresses the psychic energy drain, but it can be difficult to enforce. I see people that have 20-30 categories. Here is the solution: