There are three principles that I use every day to make the most of my time including Parkinson’s law, the 80/20 principle, and One Percent Improvement. My goal daily is to complete no more than three priority items per day and to improve my life by one percent every day.

Parkinson’s Law

The first one is Parkinson’s law. That principle says that a task will fill up the time you allot for it. Because of this, I have determined that I do certain things only at certain times of the day. I give myself a schedule and I try to stick to it. By sticking to it, I find that I can be more productive because I’m allotting only a certain amount of time to finish that task that day.

I’ve divided my day into Home and Personal Care Time and Work Time

I do personal care and housework until 8 a.m. Then from 8 a.m. to 12 noon I work.

I have lunch between 12 noon and 1 p.m. If I am not running errands during this time, I do housework during this time as well.

I then work from 1 p.m. to 5 p. m. and I am off work and doing housework or personal care or relaxing for the rest of the day. I go to bed at 9 p.m.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have been organizing my schedule. Here’s how my mornings have been going lately.

The first thing that I do in the morning is my morning routine. I get up, brush my teeth, do a quick clean of the sink, mirror, and toilet and then go into the living room where I have my office. There I put in a few minutes on Duolingo where I am learning Spanish and Swedish (was doing French and Russian too, but that got rather confusing) while the coffee is brewing. I then have breakfast and do the breakfast dishes.

At 8 a.m. is when I plan to start my business day. At present, I am working on my book The Seasonal Garden. (You can read about that on my other blog The Perpetual Homesteader {Resource}. After forty-five minutes or so I take a break. During that break, I get up and do a few tasks on my to-do list. After that, I work on preparing blog posts or writing online articles, and then at about 11 am I take an hour lunch break where I do a few more household chores

In the afternoon I either work on the garden, or I work on improving my book and article marketing. (That depends upon the weather.) It is during the afternoon that I also read and answer emails which I consider part of my marketing process.

At the end of the workday somewhere between 4 and 5 pm. I look back on my day and celebrate my accomplishments of the day, (no matter how small). Next, I determine what didn’t go well and what I need to do to fix it. Finally, I determine the most important work that I want to do the following day and then I quit writing for the day. I close-up shop and that’s the end of my workday.

Evenings are often spent catching up on housework and perhaps enjoying a movie with my husband.

My goal is not to do much work on the weekends but to spend more time relaxing and enjoying the weekend rather than using it to catch up on the week. It is also on the weekends that I will likely have events that I will attend.

The 80/20 rule

Next, there’s the 80/20 Rule. in the late 1800s, Vilfredo Pareto discovered that a small number of peas produced most of the peas.  He found that 20 percent of the peas produced 80 percent of the peas. Because he had an analytical mind, he decided to see if this principle holds for other things. It did although sometimes the percentages were closer to 70/30 and other times, they were closer to 90/10 but always a large discrepancy when comparisons were made. This became known as the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule.

It isn’t in everything that we do every day that helps us grow, but it is in a few select things that contribute to great improvement. It is in those things that we do that become steppingstones to our greatest goals. We, of course, need to first know what that goal is before we can know what that 20 percent is that will help us obtain our highest goals.  That is where the one percent comes into play.

The One Percent Improvement Rule

The last principle that I am utilizing is the one percent improvement rule. this rule is closely related to the 80/20 rule. I make it a point to improve something in my life by one percent every day and work toward doing more of the 20 percent that makes me 80 percent of the gains I am looking to make.

Every day I am moving forward in my goals at least one percent. Recently my daily one percent per day has been involved in organizing my living space and my time. This will save me time in that I don’t have to hunt for things. Everything has a place and everything is in its place. More recently I have been writing my book and marketing as well as getting ready for the gardening season all by making one percent improvements every day in those areas. The more I do now, the less I will have to do later. This may not seem like much, but one percent improvement equals more than one hundred percent in one hundred days. The compound effects make the efforts even more valuable than that!

I see this working out in real-time. At first, I couldn’t believe that one percent would matter, but once I began improving one percent per day, I began to see more and more ways to improve one percent per day. It hasn’t been very long since I started making these one percent improvements and I am already seeing great improvement in these areas.

How about you? Have you used any of these three principles in your life? I would love to hear how you’ve applied them. Let me know down in the comments.

Also if you want to know more about my gardening experiences, check out my other blog The Perpetual Homesteader!