The Weird Way Selling A Mattress Can Help You Focus

There are two types of people who buy mattresses in the world.

One kind of person hates buying a mattress and thinks they should never have to buy one.The other kind of person thinks that buying a mattress is an important decision because you spend 30% of your life asleep and getting the right mattress really will make a difference.

Most mattress salespeople don’t realize this but they actually get to choose who they sell to.

How much time and money you spend acquiring those customers is completely up to you.

This logic works outside of the sales world, too.

If you’re going to invest your time an energy on something, it’s worth figuring out how to best get your return on investment.Focusing on what’s working and dropping methods that aren’t efficient will make a huge difference in your output.

2 Minute Action

If you only have 20 minutes to exercise, it’s better to do compound movements that work large muscle groups at once instead of isolating muscles.If you buy the same kind of soap, it’s better to buy a bunch of it when it goes on sale because you will immediately make a guaranteed ROI.If you’re going to write a book, it’s better to write about what you know on a blog for 4 years while you build an audience. When you’ve written a thousand blog posts, you’ll have written your first book and you’ll already have a group of people ready to buy it.Its hard enough to do important work, you need to make sure that when you do anything you have some advantages from the start.

How To See Into The Future And Reduce Work Waste

New York City has 3 days of food supplied.Outside of that, there's little food storage in the Big Apple.Toyota, Dell, and McDonald's use a similar system to get their products to consumers.This is called Just In Time inventory and it's saving a lot of time, dollars, and headache.The caveat is that you do have to know a bit about the demands that may or may not hit--but it's a very effective way to reduce waste.So New York City has enough "user data" to know that 3 days supply of food is a pretty good operating budget. It knows that it can ship food just as it's consumed and if they have 3 days of food in storage, they can also accommodate the fluctuations of the market demand.So what does this mean for your task load?

2 Minute Action

You probably need to know a little bit about what tasks are pending or incoming--but you probably don't need to see as far as you think into the future.The more you can honor a culture of "adapting to reality" instead of "sticking to the plan," the more likely you'll be resilient in uncertain environments.Of course, if you're working on a fixed scope project, this isn't as useful, but it does help protect against unforeseen events or abrupt crises.Take 2 minutes right now to plan out your 3 day supply of food for your team.The point isn't to get it perfect, it's just to get started. You don't need more than 2 minutes to get a rough draft.

Your Meeting Is Starting . . .

Apparently, meetings take up about 15% of a typical organization’s time  (citation)Also, iturns out that 91% of meeting-goers day-dream, 39% of people fall asleep in meetings, 73% of people do other work while in meetings, 41% of people complain that meetings are a waste of time, and 96% of people skip meetings altogether.In total, the current estimate is about $37 Billion (with a “B”) of salary expenses are wasted on meetings in the U.S.

2 Minute Action:

The next time you have a meeting and aren’t sure if it wilL be useful, run through these questions real  quick. This is your litmus test for productive meetings:What would happen if you didn’t have the meeting? Would it impede progress?Could the meeting really be an email or a Skype meeting instead?If you have to have a meeting, can you do it in a room with no chairs?What’s the purpose of the meeting?Pick one of the following, and you can only pick one. If it’s more than one, skip the meeting.• Inform people about the project• Learn opinions or facts that will help you achieve a success• Discuss the project and gain input from interested parties• Pitch or approve the idea for the projectAfter the meeting, how will you know it was a success?