Have you ever thought about breaking down your day into what are the most valuable tasks that you do and the least valuable ones. If you're like most people, you've probably break down your annual salary into an hourly rate. Or if you're a business owner or freelancer, perhaps you've divided annual revenue into the number of hours that you
work to get a similar calculation. Perry Marshall, one of the most expensive business strategists in the world, has spent a lot of time thinking about this because for him, there is a completely different way of looking at this equation. My name is doctor Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show about how to help
you do your best work. On today's My Favorite Tip episode, we go back to an interview from the past and I pick out my face for a tip from that interview. In today's show, I speak with Perry about identifying ten dollar, one hundred dollars and ten thousand dollars per hour tasks, and we chat about how we can do less of the ten dollar per hour tasks and more of the ten thousand dollars per hour tasks.
If you talk to Helen, who works as a receptionist at a dentist office for fifteen dollars an hour, probably if you asked Helen, what parts of your job make more money and what parts make less money? Like, Helen, if we paid you for the tasks you perform instead of paying you by the hour, then how do you think we should grade those tasks? She would probably say, well, okay, I suppose these jobs are these little things are worth five dollars an hour, and probably these other things are
worth fifty dollars an hour. What she doesn't realize is that's actually wrong. The truth is probably most of what she does is worth almost zero. Some of what she does is worth negative money, and a few things she does are literally one hundred dollars an hour, one thousand dollars an hour, even ten thousand dollars an hour. And you go, how does a fifteen dollars an hour secretary make ten thousand dollars an hour? Well, i'll tell you. So you got somebody they need five thousand dollars of
crowns and dental work. And they looked at all the websites and clicked on all the Google ads and they think wood Dale Dentel looks pretty good, and so they call wood Dell Dental and Helen goes with dal Dental, can you hold please? And then she puts them on hold for two minutes and then she picks up two minutes later, she goes, Hi, can I help you? And they're gone. So they were We're going to spend five thousand dollars in two minutes to hold music scared them
off and they're not coming back. It took two minutes to lose five thousand dollars. So how many dollars per hour is that?
That's a lot.
It's one hundred and fifty thousand dollars an hour that she lost. Okay, so a secretary lost ten thousand times her hourly wage in two minutes.
And so how then do we get better at identifying what are those thousand or ten thousand dollars an hour tasks when we're thinking about our own work life.
So first you have to be aware of it. So it literally is true that at least for a few minutes or seconds a day, certain things that you do are incredibly valuable. Like let's say that you're buying a car and you spend an extra five minutes getting the price done by one thousand dollars. Well, you just made twelve thousand dollars an hour for five minutes, right. And our days, in our schedules and our lives are full of these little high leverage things, and so first you
just have to be aware of it. And so I have a chart on page twenty three of Detox Declutter, Dominate, and it's got a column of ten dollars an hour tasks like renting errands and cold calling people or talking to unqualified prospects or doing your expense reports. And then there's a column of one hundred dollars an hour tasks like talking to a qualified prospect or helping an actual customer solve a problem, or outsourcing a really simple task.
And then there's thousand dollars an hour work like planning and prioritizing your day, or negotiating with a qualified prospect or building out your sales funnel. And then there's ten thousand dollars stuff like what I was talking about with Helen. As an owner of a dental practice, you realize maybe you do some mystery shopping and you're like oh my word, a third of these people are getting put on hold for a minute or more or five minutes or whatever,
which is disastrous. Well, whatever you and your staff do, whatever time it takes to figure out how to never put anybody on hold like that again, how to always make sure the call gets routed to the right place. Whatever time you spend solving that problem is easily thousand dollars an hour work because it controls a major lever
in your business. Because if twenty percent of your time produces eighty percent of the productivity, and twenty percent of the twenty percent makes eighty percent of the eighty percent, and so on, that means one percent of your time generates fifty percent of your income. And this is true for almost everybody. It's just masked by the way we put people in salary hourly wages. It makes the accounting easy, but it doesn't tell you anything about what you're actually getting from the work.
And so, once we've identified these ten dollars an hour tasks, and I would say the average listener probably doesn't have an assistant that they could delegate to, for example, what do we do with those ten dollar tasks? How do we do less of them.
Well, so I want you to reconsider whether or not you should have an assistant. First of all, a lot of us have children, and you know, even maybe simple things like cooking dinner or doing the wash or shoveling or you know, mowing the lawn. Okay, there's things like that. Let's talk about assistance for a while. So if you want to go on the really cheap end, for probably seven or ten dollars an hour, you can hire a virtual assistant from the Philippines. They'll do all kinds of stuff for you.
How would listeners go about doing that? So I've had an awesome virtual assistant, Elaine, who we've had an inventium for many years. But for those that have no idea how they would even start with hiring a virtual assistant, what would they do?
The Deep Talks book has an online bonus. It's free. It comes with the book where we actually spend about forty five minutes ro an hour with a guy who runs a company that just hires virtual assistance, and he walks through the process and he talks about how you match an assistant to an entrepreneur. It really is a very important thing. Now you could go on a site like upwork dot com and you could try people out
literally for two hours at a time. Now, what I want you to consider is, let's say you have a virtual assistant for ten dollars an hour, and you're only going to hire them for four hours a week. That's forty dollars a week, and it's going to give you four hours of time. In the four hours of time that you gained, can you find a way to make one hundred dollars an hour for a half an hour
or one thousand dollars an hour for five minutes. You don't have to pay for the assistant for a couple of weeks, and so this really is feasible, it's not unrealistic. I think anybody whose time is worth more than thirty dollars an hour should get themselves an assistant. It will completely change your life.
That is it for today's show. If you found this episode useful, why not share it with someone else that you think could also benefit and thank you in advance if you plan to do that. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Nimba who did the audio mix and makes everything that you listen to sound much better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.