In the 1800’s, an Italian economist named Pareto was known for his famous Law of Income Distribution, which claimed that in all societies, only 20% of the population earns 80% of the income. Today, this 80-20 principle is applied to productivity. According to Pareto’s Law, 80% of the results we produce come from 20% of your effort.
So how do you take this principle and apply it so that you can see the greatest impact on your productivity?
With the 80-20 rule, you want to make sure that you are doing those things that bring the most value. To do that, you need to:
- Do more of certain things
- Do less of certain things
- Start doing something you haven’t been doing
- Stop doing something you are doing now
Using Pareto’s law, it is easy to look at the first two things on this list and determine what you should be doing more of and what you need to do less of. What are your highest value activities? These are the 20% of things that add up to 80% of your work’s value. What are the lowest value activities? They make up the 80% of things you do at work that contribute very little. When you see where each activity falls, start focusing more time on those high value activities and then eliminate or delegate the low value activities where you can.
What is your worth?
How do you determine what your time is worth? Simple. What is your hourly rate right now? $20 an hour? $50 an hour? Now look at the tasks that you consider to be of low value and ask yourself this: Would I be willing to pay someone my same hourly rate to do those tasks? The answer is very likely no.
You wouldn’t pay someone $20 an hour to hand out fliers for your business, so why are you spending your own valuable time doing it? Wouldn’t it be more cost effective to pay someone just $10 an hour to handle the task for you? Then you are free to focus more time on completing tasks that require your skills and expertise, meaning more of those valuable goals are getting accomplished in less time.
Find out how to spend more of your time on the 20% of tasks that do more to contribute to your goals. Don’t let yourself waste too much time on the other 80% when it can be eliminated or handed off to someone else.