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| When
you have identified your happiness and achievement islands,
you are likely to want to spend more time on these and similar
activities. You might think that spending more time on the
top 20 per cent may lead to diminishing returns setting
in. Twice as much time on the top 20 per cent may not lead
to another 80 per cent of output, perhaps only to another
40, 50, 60 or 70 per cent. First, since it is impossible
to measure happiness or effectiveness with anything approaching
precision, the critics may well be right in some cases.
There will still be a marked increase in the supply of what
is best. You should not duplicate exactly what it is that
you are doing today that is in the 20 per cent yielding
80 per cent. The point of examining the common characteristics
of your happiness and achievement islands is to isolate
something far more basic than what has happened: to isolate
what you are uniquely programmed to do best. It may well
be that there are things you should be doing (to realize
your full potential achievement or happiness) that you have
only started doing imperfectly, to some degree, or even
that you have not started to do at all. For example, Dick
Francis was a superb National Hunt jockey, but did not publish
his first racing mystery until he was nearly 40. Now his
success, money earned and possibly personal satisfaction
from the latter activity far exceed those from the former.
It is not at all uncommon for analysis of happiness or achievement
islands to yield insight into what individuals are best
at, and what is best for them, which then enables them to
spend time on totally new activities that have a higher
ratio of reward to time than anything they were doing before.
There can, therefore, be increasing returns as well as the
possibility of diminishing returns. In fact, one thing you
should specifically consider is a change of career and/or
lifestyle. Your basic objective, when you have identified
both the specific activities and the general type of activity
that take 20 per cent of your time but yield 80 per cent
of happiness or achievement, should be to increase the 20
per cent of time spent on those and similar activities by
as much as possible. A short-term objective, usually feasible,
is to decide to take the 20 per cent of time spent on the
high-value activities up to 40 per cent within a year. This
one act will tend to raise your ‘productivity’ by between
60 and 80 per cent. (You will now have two lots of 80 per
cent of output, from two lots of 20 per cent of time, so
your total output would go from 100 to 160 even if you forfeited
all the previous 20 from low-value activities in reallocating
some of the time to the high-value activities!) The ideal
position is to move the time spent on high-value activities
up from 20 to 100 per cent. This may only be possible by
changing career and lifestyle. If so, make a plan, with
deadlines, for how you are going to make these changes.
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