Do you know the Pareto law?
Also called the 80/20 principle. You may have heard something about it, or even apply it day by day without concisely knowing it is happening. However today we will see a good way to apply the Pareto Principle in our personal lives to maximize our productivity and improve our results.
The Pareto law says that 20% of the effort generates 80% of the results.
Pareto (which is the name of the person who applied for this law) discovered with experiments that this law applies to lots of situations in real life, and that in many cases it may not be 20% or 80% accurate (it could be 23% and 79%) that usually these values are around 20 and 80.
The most interesting of all is the number of situations in which it applies, as we will see below. Learning how to take advantage of this law can bring us great benefits and reduce our effort.
The Pareto principle
A more general form of the Pareto law could be the following: 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes.
Pareto realized that 80% of the patrimonies(inherited property) of his country were owned by 20% of the population. Over the years he also observed this interesting effect in different aspects such as:
20% of the people you know provide you with 80% support and satisfaction (friendship, love ... Etc)
20% of customers generate 80% of the income of a business
80% of your success depends on 20% of your effort
20% of the exercises you perform will mean an 80% benefit to your body
The Pareto law then gives us a good starting point and the best advice we can apply from that law is the following:
20% of our thoughts create 80% of the manifestations we make, so if you control your way of thinking optimizing at least 20%, you already have 80% of your success assured, at least stating what you want.
If you detect exactly the aspects of life that make up your 20%, do more of that that work, without any doubt it will bring you many benefits.
Suppose that in your company 20% of your customers are ideal and that they generate 80% of your income. If you could get more clients like that and get rid of the others (after serving them well, of course), the Pareto rule would still apply the same, a new 20% of your customers would generate 80% of your income, but this 80% would be much larger because customers are already made up in quality and not in quantity.
How to know if we are working in that 20%?
The most important thing about the Pareto law and the best way to take advantage of it is to focus efforts and concentration on 20% of the activities and situations of life.
However, it is often not so easy to know if we are really focusing on said 20%, for which here are some tips to take into account.
If you are working on your 20% then:
You feel good because you are doing what you like (or what you have always wanted to do) or you just know that it contributes to the achievement of your purposes.
You are doing tasks in which you know you would procrastinate but being so essential this does not happen.
Delegates tasks that are not really that important.
In the same way, if you are not taking advantage of your 20% then the following will happen:
You will be doing what other people want you to do.
You will be doing things you are not good at.
You will be doing things that you do not like to do (like going to work, which on the other hand does not contribute to your purposes and life goals)
You will be doing things that will normally take a lot of effort and energy on your part.
With a little effort and application of the Pareto law, we can save a lot of physical and emotional energy to focus on important issues that really enrich our lives.
Something important to keep in mind is that the Pareto law also works the other way around, in reverse. Just as 20% of your customers generate 80% of your income, the remaining 80% of your customers will only account for 20% of your income.
20% of your income will be the result of 80% of your effort, so it is important that you rethink the way you optimize these issues so that your efforts decrease.
80% of people report you 20% of benefits, so be careful who you surround yourself with, and spend more time with the truly important 20%.
80% of the books you read will only serve you 20%, so take the opportunity to read better books and increase the scope of your 80% of results.
Advantages and benefits of applying the Pareto principle in life
This rule may sound very technical or complicated, right?
Actually, it is not. It means simply that between everything we do there is a small group of activities that bring us many results, while the others add very little (or nothing), despite consuming a lot of time and effort.
Many times the relationship is not even 80% results / 20% time. The central point is that the Pareto principle consists of many results / few factors. The distributions can vary from moderate cases 70/30 to extremes like 95/5.
That is why the principle initiated by Pareto is also called as "the rule of the few vital and many trivial."
To discover which are the few critical factors has many advantages:
It allows us to do more in less time. Learning to let go of trivial activities frees time and energy.
Applying the principle makes it possible to continue growing. The time released by letting go of the non-essential can be applied to activities that bring us many results.
We can apply it in any area of life, and improve not only as entrepreneurs, but also as people. It applies not only to our customers, for example, but also to how to be in better physical condition.
Knowing how the 80/20 is distributed upon your life helps you to be more relaxed. Instead of worrying about everything, all the time, we can focus on a small group of things and solve them.
It gives us autonomy. Applying the pareto principle implies to stop reacting or doing in automatic and to begin to see the end or result that we are looking for and what makes sense for our objectives. So we do not do something "because it's supposed to be done", but we have personal and concrete reasons.
Optimize all resources. The applied 80/20 rule not only impacts on the use of time, but also better our use of money, human resources, technology, etc.
A good summary: when we apply the 80/20 rule we can spend less time in the office and more on the beach :)