Happy New Month!
It’s the last new month of the year! An exciting time. I have a strong NMR this month, based on something that’s been on my mind a lot of the last one.
I have a strong inherent dislike of “para-work.” That’s a term I invented, and it’s a portmanteau of “parasitic work.” Basically, work that only exists to talk about other work.
Once upon a time, I had a job as a medical sales representative and I was over the road most of the day, outside of an office. I had to report my daily activities in a very terrible CRM tool with a spotty 4G iPad. Thus, it took about an hour to do the data entry for each sales call, even ones that lasted ten minutes. The ratio of actual work to “para-work” was terrible.
I hated it. I recognize that some amount of para-work is always necessary. But in my mind, the less of it the better. The more juice you spend on actual productive work and the less you spend on just reporting what you did or explaining what you’re doing or creating a list of things to do, the better.
So my resolution this month is to create an efficient enough system with substantial automation to these processes such that my “para-work” represents 10% or less of my total working hours. I already have a number of systems I’m trying out and a way to record time spent on each of them so I can track progress towards this goal. The more efficient I can get at producing good work, the more I’ll enjoy it, and the more I enjoy it, the better work I’ll produce!
Here’s to reaching your own goals!
The Opportunity Machine 