The only non-renewable resource

Time! This is arguably our most valuable commodity, whether we are pedorthists, business people, fathers, mothers, or athletes. I recently read that time is not real; it is nothing. As humans, we have taken the duration of the earth’s travel around the sun – or spin on its axis – broken it into smaller chunks and called these hours, minutes and seconds. Regardless of how you look at it, time is our only non-renewable resource and the older we get, the more valuable it becomes.

As pedorthists and business people, we can put a definitive value on time. For every hour it takes someone in our organization to do a task, it costs money (yes, this includes you as well – you pay yourself, right?). If an activity brings in more money than it costs, that’s great – let’s do a whole lot more of it. If an activity brings in less money than it costs we need to either automate, delegate, or stop doing it entirely.

This is where optimizing your time becomes important. It’s far too easy to fall into the trap of doing ‘busy-work’ tasks which need to get done but only earn you back $10/hour. In a typical day, you will perform a variety of tasks which you can reconcile as earning you $10, $20, $50, $100, or even $1,000/hour when considering the business revenue generated from them. This is where knowledge of the 80/20 Pareto Principle can help you earn up to $1,000/hour more often!

Using the 80/20 principle

The strategic business person uses the 80/20 principle to analyze their day and identify which 20% of their tasks will result in 80% of their income. All of the ‘busy-work’ tasks that bring in less money than they require to perform are then either automated, delegated, or stopped.

It’s a hard shift for many to make because we find comfort in the familiarity of ‘busy-work’ tasks, but freeing up space in your schedule is the only way to focus on $100+/hour tasks – like creating new partnerships, strategically growing your business, and serving more people.

Use automation to create more time in your day

Pedorthics is a business and the more efficient and profitable that business is, the more patients will benefit from our services. As business leaders, we alone are responsible for monitoring the efficiency of our practices – to ensure that we are making the most of our time.

To learn more, and discover how digital tools can be used to automate your ‘busy-work’ and create more TIME in your day, register for our free seminar on Thursday, April 20 in London, Ontario – the day before the PAC conference.

Graham Archer

President, 
Kiwi Orthotic Services