80% of your success comes from 20% ofyour effort
In today’s hyper-active world,running an online business requires a lot of time and effort. Sincetime is a premium, you should focus your efforts on the tasks thatbring in the majority of revenue for your business.
That’s why you should implement thePareto principle in your life and organization.
The Pareto principle, also known as the80/20 rule, is a theory maintaining that 80 percent of the outputfrom a given situation or system is determined by 20 percent of theinput.
The principle is named after VilfredoPareto, an Italian economist. In 1895, Pareto noted that 20 percentof the population in Italy owned 80 percent of the property. Heproposed that this ratio could be found in many places in thephysical world and theorized it might indicate a natural law.
Here are a few examples of the Paretoprinciple in action:
20 percent of employees produce 80percent of a company’s results.
20 percentof a given employee’s time yields 80 percent of their output.
20 percent of software bugs cause80 percent of the software’s failures.
20 percent of a company’sinvestments produce 80 percent of its investment profits.
How touse the Pareto principle to set and achieve any goal for yourself
Pareto’s principle can benefit yourpersonal as well as professional life positively. According to thisprinciple: 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percentof your results. It can change the way you set goals forever.
If you have a list of ten items toaccomplish, two of those items will turn out to be worth more thanthe other eight items put together.
The sad fact is that most peopleprocrastinate on the top 10 or 20 percent of items that are the mostvaluable and important, the “vital few,” and busy themselvesinstead with the least important 80 percent, the “trivial many,”that contribute very little to their success.
Here’s what you should do in order toeffectively apply the 80/20 rule to goal setting and to your overallproductivity.
First, take a piece of paper and writedown ten goals. Then ask yourself. If you could only accomplish oneof the goals on that list today, which one goal would have thegreatest positive impact on your life?
Then pick the second most importantgoal. What you’ll find is, after you complete this exercise, youwill have determined the most important 20 percent of your goals thatwill help you more than anything else.
You should continue to work at thosegoals that you’ve chosen as the most valuable all the time.
Eat The Biggest Frog First
You often see people who appear to bebusy all day long but seem to accomplish very little. This is becausethey are busy working on tasks that are of low value while they areprocrastinating on the one or two activities that could make a realdifference to their companies and to their careers.
The most valuable tasks you can do eachday are often the most complex, but the payoff and rewards forcompleting them can be tremendous.
Before you begin work, always askyourself, “Is this task in the top 20 percent of my activities orin the bottom 80 percent?”
The rule for this is: resist thetemptation to clear up small things first.
If you choose to start your day workingon low-value tasks, you will soon develop the habit of alwaysstarting and working on low-value tasks.
Work Towards Your Main Goal, All TheTime
What is it that separates thesuccessful ones from the others?
A statistic suggested that 85% ofsuccessful people have one big goal that they work on all the time.
So, if you want to be successful, dowhat successful people did. Pick one big goal and work on it all thetime, and if you do, it will change your life.
Downsides to the Pareto Principle
Although the Pareto principle offersgreat advantages. But there are also some downsides of using theprinciple.
The Pareto charts are very easy to make to show the twentypercent of issues causing the major problems but they don’t showany insight into the causes. Other quality assurance methods areneeded to address these areas in a more detailed manner, which mayburn a hole in your company’s pocket rather than the issue in thefirst place.
Pareto charts can only show qualitativedata. It just shows how often a problem happens. Because thevariability of the chart changes so much it cannot be used tocalculate an average or a mean or any other necessary data tocalculate statistics. The lack of quantitative data means it’simpossible to check the values shown by the chart.
