10 December 2008 4 Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

photo courtesy of vanz

Productivity #6 : 80/20 Rule – The Pareto Principle

Also known as “80/20 Rule“, “Rule of the Vital Few” and “Principle of Factor Sparsity“, Pareto Principle is named after an Italian economist – Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy went to 20% of the population. As he carried out surveys in other countries, he found a similar distribution pattern everywhere.

This pattern can be found in life as well, for instance -
• 80% of your happiness comes from 20% of your activities
• 80% of the time you repeat 20% of your clothing
• 80% of your sales comes from 20% of your customers etc
• You can basically summarize this as 80% of your output is produced by 20% input.

Productivity comes from identifying which 20% gives you 80% of positive results and maximizing on those; similarly, which 20% gives you 80% of negative results and eliminating those. The idea is to put in minimum effort to gain maximum results.

• Use 80/20 Rule To Get Organized

  As we already discussed in the last productivity hack, there should be – a place for everything and everything in it’s place. We can make use of the 80/20 rule to find right place for all items.

  20% of your items are used 80% of the time. These items should be placed in highly accessible places. For the rest 80%, we can again apply the rule to find out the next batch of most used items and place them accordingly. We can keep doing this till we believe we can manage placing the rest of items without using 80/20 rule any further.

• Use 80/20 Rule To Prioritize Your To-Do List

  If the never ending to-do list overwhelms you, 80/20 rule can come to your rescue. Simply pick 20% of items which can give you 80% of result and focus on them. You can pick the next batch when this gets done.

  Using 80/20 rule ensures that we pick things which will give us maximum results – a great way to do things based on priority.

  A not to-do list goes well hand in hand with a to-do list. List out all activities which make you ineffective/unorganized etc. To master the entire list, start with the 20% which produces 80% of undesired results.

• Use 80/20 Rule To Diet

  Andre applied 80/20 rule to her diet and the result -

  Within two days, I noticed that my stomach no longer exerted pressure against my belt, and within two weeks, I noticed that I had to keep pulling my pants up. In six weeks I lost 11 pounds, with nothing to analyze or track.
  

• Use 80/20 Rule To Boost Life

  Donald Latumahina says that there are essentially two things you can do to boost your life by using the 80/20 rule -

  • 1. Identify the causes which are in the top 20%
  • 2. Move resources away from the causes in the bottom 80% to the ones in the top 20%

• How To Become Part Of The 20%

  Brian Lee shares that the 80/20 rule also means that 20% of people produce 80% of the results, 20% of people get 80% of success etc. In his article – Apply The 80/20 Rule with “The Crowbar”, he explains how can we become part of the 20% who are highly productive, successful etc.

• 20 Unique Ways To Use The 80/20 Rule

  Scott H Young shares 20 unique ways to use the 80/20 rule in different life areas – work, diet, relationships, time management, finance, computer, customers etc.

Note: 80 and 20 over here are just numbers. You can easily pick up 90-10 or 70-30 and the theory will still apply. Moreover, 80/20 rule is not applicable all the time.

Where do you see yourself applying the 80/20 rule?

Read Other Hacks:
• Productivity:
  #1
  #2
  #3
  #4
  #5