Welcome back! It's good to see you again. Please note that I am now publishing all new material at my hub site: StephenPSmith.com

Dave Crenshaw has a post on a subject that is near and dear to my heart:

Over a year ago I was working with a business owner who was in severe time debt. He was working in the ballpark of 90 to 100 hours per week, and both his business and family were suffering. We started by calculating his per-hour worth. When doing his most profitable activities, he was worth $500 an hour or more. Yet we found that he was spending approximately half of his time, 45 hours or more per week, performing $25/hour, $10/hr, and even minimum wage type work! Why? A huge factor was that he was surrounded by Time Liabilities.

At one point during our training he needed to punch holes in some paper for a three ring binder. Yet when he went to punch the paper, his paper puncher clearly wasn’t up for the job. He had bought a cheap model that had was basically broken after a month of use. I watched as this business owner kept turning his stack of papers around twice to punch. Most often he kept misaligning the punch and ruining the stack.

This poor fellow was spending lot of time on everything but that “vital 20%” of effort that brings in the 80% of the results (your mileage may vary, I just like the simplicity of the 80/20 “rule”). Do you ever catch yourself doing things like that, at home or at work?

Are your own practices holding you back?

Take a few minutes today to think about your workflow, what your nominal schedule will be when you start working on Monday morning. If you get to the office and you are not looking at a streamlined and productivity-optimized workspace, then get ready to make a change.

Monday’s post will give a step-by-step description of how to get your “stuff” organized, with pictures! Don’t miss it - Subscribe to the feed, get the next post in an e-mail.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/4nd4cd. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen