Time Management For Dummies - How to Apply the 80/20 Rule
Using the 80/20 rule or Pareto’s Principle will make you more effective in your time management. But what is the 80/20 rule?
In the early 1900’s, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto reported on his findings of the unequal distribution of wealth. That is, twenty percent of people owned eighty percent of the wealth! This phenomenon can be seen in other areas of work. Dr Joseph Juran called the principle the ‘vital few and trivial many’. By this he meant that twenty percent of something is always responsible for eighty percent of the results.
But what does that mean for you? How can you apply this 80/20 rule to time management ? What we do can appear as this ratio: twenty percent of work will take up eighty percent of our time. That seems like a lot of wasted energy doesn’t it? But it can work the other way too. Twenty percent of tasks can give you eighty percent of the results. And that’s how you need to apply to 80/20 principle. You need to focus on the twenty percent that really matters. The trick is to learn which twenty percent to concentrate on, to help make your time management effective.
To implement the 80/20 you need to prioritize. Once you’ve figured out which tasks are going to give you the best returns, concentrate on them. They are the tasks that you want to carry out first. To determine which tasks aren’t in that twenty percent, you may need to ask yourself a few questions.
Do you frequently work on urgent tasks?
Do you work on tasks for other people, but they don’t have any priority for you?
Are tasks taking longer than you expected?
Are you complaining all the time about your work?
Are you doing tasks you’re not good at and are they taking up a lot of your time?
If you answer yes to these questions you may be in the category of eighty percent of your tasks only giving 20 percent reward. If so, you need to reverse things!
What about these questions:
Are you working on tasks that you’ve always wanted to do?
Will your current activities keep you pointed towards your major goals?
Are you happy with what you are doing?
Have you delegated the tasks you don’t like or aren’t proficient in to other people?
If you are working on activities you don’t like, can you see how they relate to your long-term goals?
If you can answer yes to those questions you are making the 80/20 rule work for you.
To help make the 80/20 rule work, remember to prioritize. Projects that are valuable and will lead to your ultimate goal, or have approaching deadlines should be in the twenty percent you want to work on - especially if they make you smile! Tasks that do not lead to your overall goal, ones that you are not competent in, ones that make your grimace, especially if they don’t have a deadline, might be worth moving out of the twenty percent of tasks you want to be working on.
Remember - the twenty percent of tasks that give you the greatest gains for the effort you put in, are the ones to be working on!
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