Something Adam Smith Taught Me

I’m embarrassed to say that I never finished Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. I did make it much of the way through, however, and Mr. Smith taught me an important lesson about efficiency. Making a wagon, for example, is far less efficient if you construct it from start to finish in the traditional craftsman style. It’s better to make nothing but wagon wheels on Monday, nothing but wagon seats on Tuesday, only wagon beds on Wednesday, etc. By specializing on one task at a time, you can make ten times the wagons in the same amount of time.

This is a basic business lesson that most of us know but fail to practice. It’s not that we don’t know how to be successful — it’s that we don’t do what we know. Our tendency is to place our concentration on whatever task is put in front of us, until another grabs our attention. We jump from email to voice mail to cell phone to MS Word to talking to someone who pokes their head in our office. At the end of the week, we’ve made only one wagon instead of ten.

It is important to bundle tasks together, controlling your attention on tasks instead of the tasks controlling you. Rather than jumping from this to that, I try to focus on one thing at a time. I devote a segment of time each week to sending out thank you notes and postcards as part of my regular follow-up campaign, for example. The other way to do follow-up is to tackle it whenever that particular person crosses your mind — which is far less efficient because it requires you to drop something, do the follow-up and then resume the original task.

The time you waste each day is time that could be spent prospecting for new business. I challenge you to find ways to make ten wagons in the same time another person can only make one.

Wade Young is a Denver mortgage broker.

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