The BIGG Successs Show
Is the Way You're Spending Your Time Costing You Money?
How a concept often used in business improves your personal productivity. Read our show summary at BIGGSUCCESS.COM.
Welcome to The Big Success Show. Today we ask, is the way you're spending your time costing you money? The Big Success Show with George and Mary Lynn. There's a concept that's really thought of as being for business, and it's described in the book Living on the Fault Line by Jeffrey Moore, and it's the core versus context model. And the core activities there are described as what we often call your core competencies. They're for companies trying to define exactly what are our strengths, what gives us a competitive advantage. What makes us stand out from the rest? Exactly. And then context is everything else, anything that's not our core activity. Like payroll and things like that. Yeah, for a lot of people in business, it would be those kind of financial things, marketing, activities, that sort of thing. And when we were talking about this, George, wait a minute, this works for our personal lives as well. Absolutely. You want to be working on your strengths and doing less of everything else. Well, because those things that are our strengths, right, typically, first of all, those are the things we most enjoy doing. And so we tend to be better at them. And if we focus on those things, it will help us advance in our careers. Like for us, George, I mean, our strength is working on content for Big Success. Well, we'd like to think so. We hope everybody listening thinks so. We've got a good quality product, but the contextual would be everything else like our yard work, our house cleaning, things like that. And that's why we do outsource those things so that instead of spending an hour mowing the lawn, we're working on Big Success. And we're showing when we talk about it like this, man, then we really are showing how integrated our lives are because we often work from home. And so all of these decisions are kind of floating in there together. But a lot of people I think today are living exactly that way. But when you think about it, George, it actually, not only does it save us time when we outsource some of these other things, but it also helps us make money because we're concentrating on our business. Well, and it really comes back to that whole time versus money thing, exactly right, Marylin, because if I don't have a lot of money, I probably have to spend more time, right? If I start a business, for instance, if I've got the capital I need to really get it rolling, I probably can spend my time differently than if I don't. I may have to do the janitorial services, for instance, a lot of entrepreneurs do. I've done it. You do the janitorial services because you just can't afford at that point to contract that out. But as soon as you can, you want to do it because that's definitely a contextual activity. Contextual. It sounds so dirty. Doesn't it though? But what's really cool about thinking about this is that I think it helps you focus where you want to spend your time and where you want to spend your money. And it will help you think twice maybe about making a particular purchase, because you know, wait a minute, I want to spend this money on X. Right. And what it may do is you may find yourself spending more money on things that help you save time rather than things that may cost you time, kind of like that big screen TV, Marylin. I know. I want it. But we have something better that we'd rather spend that money on. We'll tell you about that coming up. Today we're talking about spending your time the way that you want to spend your time and focusing in on those things that you're best at to give you a competitive advantage. What we'd like to share with you now is just some things that we are working towards to be able to outsource. Some things that we think are contextual activities for us. Yes. We don't go buy the big screen TV because we would rather use that money on a web person. You know, because right now I pretty much so handle the website. And so when there's changes that need to be made, whatever, I've got to pull out my books and, you know, and fiddle around, but my time could be better served in other areas. So someday we're going to have a web guy or gal who will just take care of that stuff. Because we know that's not part of our core and we're, you know, we're getting big success started here. It's definitely in its early stages, but that's definitely something we want to look at getting in someone else's hands. Another one would be publicity, right? Right now we do all of that work ourselves where we're responsible for getting our name out there. And that's something that we can just contract to somebody who's first of all better at it than we are, but also who can help us accomplish more than what we can probably accomplish on our own. So although we don't have HD view with our TV, we do have goals for that money. That's exactly right. Really comes down to just thinking about how much is your time worth? Because what you may find is that when you're contracting out certain things that it's actually costing you less than what you can make if you spend your time working with your core. You can get a written summary of today's show on our site at Big Success. That's big with 2gsuccess.com. We also have a link to the book we mentioned earlier. Next time we'll talk about a study that shows that dual income couples are bucking traditional roles. And that includes us. That's right. Until then, here's to your big success. The Big Success Show at B-I-G-G Success.com. [MUSIC] [MUSIC PLAYING]