Flip The 90/10 Ratio To Improve Your Inefficient Workflow

Flip The 90/10 Ratio To Improve Your Inefficient Workflow

The 90/10 ratio, as described by product designer Bryan Le, says you’re probably spending 90% of your workday on inefficient tasks you shouldn’t be doing. Focus on flipping that ratio to get more done.

Photo by Joel Dueck.

Le works with real estate agents who have to deal with a high volume of mundane, inefficient tasks on an everyday basis. His job is to make those tasks quicker so that agents can get meaningful work done, instead of toiling through tedious spreadsheets. His goal is to flip the 90/10 ratio. Instead of agents spending 90 per cent of their time on grunt work and 10 per cent of their time on something meaningful, he wants to make the cumbersome tasks quick so that 90 per cent of the agents time can be spent on something worthwhile:

My goal is to flip that 90/10 ratio for a real estate agent where now they are spending 90 per cent of the time doing things that are productive instead of the current 10 per cent. If I can do that I get a 900 per cent increase in terms of how much money they can make. I say it all the time here, paying off that 90/10! The more we can shift that scale, the more money our agents are making and the more money our company is making. I need to make sure the tools we make are making the lives of our agents easier so they can make more money.

The rest of us can apply this same principle. How much time do you spend meticulously copying data from one spreadsheet to another, or copying down long strings of data? If you can improve that process, then you can improve your productivity much more than if you simply work faster using the same inefficient techniques.

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