Understanding and Applying the 80-20 Rule
80% of the results you achieve will be produced by 20% of your efforts.
Understanding the 80-20 Rule
Ah, the famous 80-20 rule.
What does this mean? Well, it is a derivative of an economic principle that basically explains that 80% of the results you achieve will be produced by 20% of your efforts.
This is easily applied to business too. 20% of any of your efforts will contribute to 80% of your results (including marketing efforts to leads, customers to sales, products to revenues, etc.).
Applying Pareto's Law to Time Management
What has all this to do with personal productivity? A great deal. Pareto’s Law is one of the single most powerful principles you can apply to optimize personal productivity. When applied to the practice of time management, Pareto’s Law produces remarkable results.
To be most productive, you can:
Do more of certain things.
Do less of certain things.
Start doing something you are not currently doing.
Stop doing something you are currently doing.
Leveraging Time Tracking
You can figure out what these “things” are through time tracking. Here is where you will understand what your high value activities (the ones that produce 80% of your results) and your lowest value activities (the 80% of your day that contributes to little value) consist of. Once you know this, you can decide to adjust your time towards the high value activities and away from the others.
Another way to differentiate between high and low value activities is to calculate your hourly rate (your income divided by 2000 = your hourly rate) and to ask yourself “would I pay someone my rate to do this task?” I had this conversation with one CEO who was assembling gift boxes for her staff one the evening. A nice gesture, but not something she would pay someone her own hourly rate to complete.
Time tracking is such an effective way to give yourself a wake-up call for ineffective time use. Give it a try and analyze your findings. Start to adjust how you see your activities and watch the changes to your productivity that will result.
Want to learn more? Let’s connect.
Adapted from “Effectiveness 2.3 Focus Your Time Paretos Law” by FocalPoint Coaching and Training Excellence, Copyright 2018, by Brian Tracy and Campbell Fraser. Reprinted with permission.
