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Editor’s Note: Jon and Matt are guest writers from The Corporate Hack, a blog for young professionals on navigation tactics for the corporate world.  They just started their blog and they have fantastic tips for more productivity, so make sure to visit and subscribe!

Confession #1: We’re kind of obsessed with the concept of productivity.  Confession #2: At work we play this obsession off as a means to get more things done, but in truth we don’t want more things to do anymore than the next person… we leverage productivity to focus on the things that truly matter, and eliminate the rest.

If you’re a working young professional you can surely relate to the constant pressure to do more. More sales, more reports, more analysis, more leads… always more.  Let’s face it, there will never be an end to the work.  You can come in at 7:00 every morning and leave at 7:00 every night, but it’s not going to put a dent in the amount of stuff your bosses would have you do.  In part we think twenty-setters are taken advantage of by their age - we’re new to the workforce and subconsciously fearful that if we don’t work ourselves to death we’ll lose our jobs.

So how do you deal with it?

Well, maybe that college degree you got a few years ago will come in handy. Remember microeconomics and that handy little concept called the Pareto principle?  You probably better remember it as the 80/20 rule - that 80% of effects come from 20% of the causes.  We’ve found it incredibly useful when dealing with unwieldy management and inane requests to do more work.

We work in sales & marketing and regularly review sales data to provide insightful analysis.  Almost always, the 80/20 rule applies to what we see: 20% of the accounts provide 80% of the incoming business and 20% of the products lead to 80% of the sales. All the while, the low performing 20% of promotions and opportunities cost us 80% of our time to setup and run!!  If we didn’t watch ourselves, we could easily spend the vast majority of our time spinning wheels on things that largely don’t matter.  This leads to long hours, frantic management, last minute emergencies, mistakes, and lost revenue… and all for what?  You get drained, you hate your job, and end up generally bitter about life.

You need to do some firings!

There are truth in the numbers, and it’s up to you to determine how they apply to your job.  Maybe you spend all day on the phone with an account list in front of you, and it’s your job to talk to each customer once a month. Maybe you have a roster of products you need to sell, and you’re supposed to sell “at least x” of each one.  It’s a pretty safe bet that 80% of those accounts, and 80% of those products only bring in 20% of the results.  Stop working on them now.

We want to challenge you to closely evaluate the things you’re doing.  Are there things that really drain you in terms of productivity and appear to be soft in terms of results?  They’re likely candidates for being fired.  Yeah - fire customers, and fire poorly performing products.  They’re not worth your, or your company’s, time and energy.  How do you do it?

• Gather: First you need to figure out what tasks you perform each month that have been assigned to you in the name of growing revenue. We’re not talking things like ‘checking email’ and ‘completing expense reports’, but projects like ‘calling clients on your account list’ and ‘running sale promotions’ and ‘creating new leads’. Jot these major activities down on a piece of paper.
• Calculate: Based on your major activities, pull together data that will show how successful you are at these things.  Hard sales reports related to accounts activity or product-type are best, but if that’s not immediately available you may need to get creative.  For instance if one of your jobs is to ‘create new sales leads’, create a spreadsheet of all the various places you have looked to generate those leads over the past few months, then make a tally of where the most successful leads came from.
• Analyze: Look for trends in the reports and tallies you have created.  Our assumption is that some areas of activity are dramatically more productive than others, and it’s been our experience that 20% of your activities are likely producing 80% of your successful outcomes.
• Slash And Burn: Hone in on your list of the 80% unsuccessful activities - we want to find ways to minimize the amount of energy you have to spend on these time-wasters.  Brainstorm ways you can either cut down or cut out these areas: Can you call on your productive accounts more often and put these less productive ones on autopilot? Can you put these unsuccessful products on the back burner? Are there certain types of promotions you’re running that aren’t working?  Stop doing them now.
• Present Your Case:  Work with your manager and show them this concrete evidence you’ve gathered.  Explain how it would be financially more beneficial for the company to pull back on the low performing areas you have outlined and in turn put more focus on the high performing areas. It can be tough to convince your supervisors of this often offensive data, but the results can be incredibly freeing. 
• Moving Forward: Use your new insight to create bold changes in yourself, your position and your company.  Use your data and knowledge to help increase the sales of your top performers, and make your middle performers act more like your top performers.  You’ll have more free time to plan, analyze and develop, and as a result your sales should actually go up. Instead of blindly pushing awful promotions and stunted products into the market, you can focus on what’s really important: meeting your customer’s needs and providing a quality product/service on a consistent basis. 

There are two great positive outcomes to leveraging the power of the 80/20: First, you’re spending your company’s resources more effectively and increasing bottom line. Second, you live with the knowledge that you are doing things that matter in the context of your job, and that reduces stress and makes working that much more enjoyable.  When corporate success intersects with personal fulfillment, you’ve hit on the sweet spot of career satisfaction. So push yourself to get out of the same-old same-old, fire your ways of thinking and move into a new way of doing business.  The definition of corporate laziness: staying in a routine and working on the same processes just because you always have.  You have to change and you have to think new to hack corporate life.

Editor’s Note: I’m running a contest this week at Twenty Set, and every comment on this post (and all others for this week) counts as an entry.  Please review the prizes here.  Thanks!

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