Pareto Principle Time Management

Are you living up to your productivity potential? Most people don’t even know what they need to get done today, let alone have a list of those tasks.  Knowing the things that you need to accomplish is your first step to being productive.  If you haven’t heard of it, Pareto principle time management is a tool that many high producers use to focus on the things in life that give them the biggest benefit for their work.  It is also known by other names like the 80/20 rule or the Pareto Law.

Knowing what Vilfredo Pareto did will help you understand where this principle came from. Vilfredo, an Italian economist, noticed that all of the wealth in his country was not distributed equally among the people.  He began to notice that only 20% of the people owned a whopping 80% of the wealth.  That left the remaining 80% of the poorer population owning only 20% of the wealth.  Pareto, who was really into gardening, also analyzed that that 20% of his peapods yielded 80% of the harvest.

This 80/20 rule of distribution of wealth has since been identified as a natural distribution of nearly everything.  In business, for example, if you owned or operated a store, 20% of the items that you sell should, in theory, generate for 80% of your sales.  Those items would pay the bulk of your bills, overhead and wages.  20% of the customers provide 80% of our income.  20% of the customers ALSO make 80% of the customer service complaints.  20% of the people who are insured file 80% of the insurance claims.   This universally uneven distribution is known as Pareto Distribution.  It’s not always 80/20, sometimes it’s 75/25 or 90/10, but the concepts

Pareto Principle Time Management

20% of the tasks we perform take up 80% of our time.  20% of the tasks we perform give us 80% of the value of our time.  The basics of the Pareto Principle Time Management are that you should find and focus on the smaller percentage of projects that yield the highest results for your life.  Focus harder and longer on these tasks and your productivity will flourish.  You will get of you want done and accomplish your goals faster.

I think the 80/20 rule is the best kept and must underutilized secret to success.  Richard Koch in his time management book, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less, describes the Pareto Principle as “the principle of greatest outcome for time and effort expended.”  It’s a popular notion that, hard work is what accomplishes results. However, when we focus our actions on the 20% that matters most, we get the results we’re looking for.  Doing a lot of work is not really a suitable substitute for doing the right things.  Application of the Pareto Law when managing your time, allows you to work smarter, rather than harder. Spending your time and effort on the 20% that is the most valuable delivers 80% of the results.

Applying the Pareto Law through Pareto Analysis

By taking a look at all of your outstanding tasks and figuring out which ones give you the biggest bang for the buck, you can weed out those which give the least value for the amount of time they take.  This process is called Pareto Analysis.

Oddly enough, the tasks that you will notice give you the best results, are often the ones which are the shortest to complete and the easiest. This is because you can perform them with minimal effort or thinking. Those tasks which require you to concentrate or focus intently are often the ones that take the longest and result in the lowest productivity level.  The prioritization results from this Pareto analysis can be used as the prioritization step for the POSEC method of time management.

This principle is very simple and yet there is much more to it that can’t be explained here in such a short piece. Many people, especially successful ones, use these principles and chart out their their daily lives. They use them for personal applications as well as business and financial ones. There will always be times that a person needs to buckle down and do the hard work of a long and tedious task, but making sure that you generally focus on the ones that get you’re the best result for your effort, will, in the long run, be the most productive.