TIME MANAGEMENT 101 - The Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle is named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto who in 1906 discovered that 80% of the land in Italy is owned by only 20% of the population. He then found that the same principle more or less applied in other countries as well. Later observations proved that this principle tends to apply to almost any other area under study as well.

In sales, research shows that usually 20% of the customers generate 80% of the revenue for a business. Therefore, it is critical for the sales force to quickly identity who these 20% are as they should focus most if not all of their energy on only these customers because they deliver the highest value to the business.

In economics, 20% of the investors earn 80% of the profits generated in financial markets.

In the software sector, Microsoft found that by fixing 20% of the most reported issues the company will actually address 80% of the crashes.

So how do we utilize this knowledge to improve our time management?

Our starting point is our daily to do list. This to do list itemizes the tasks that are pending and we need to make progress on. The first thing that we need to do is to assign priorities to each task. Then we apply the Pareto Principle and completely focus on the tasks that are of critical importance and add the highest value. Identify these high value tasks, start them first thing in the morning and stay with them until they are complete.

Try to work on a task from start to finish. Research shows that when there are no interruptions or distractions, when our minds are 100% focused on one thing at a time, our productivity goes up and we are able to complete the task at hand in the shortest amount of time. Also, we all know that when we complete an important task we are full of excitement and we get this powerful flow of energy that allows us to keep going, to keep solving more and more difficult problems, to keep achieving more and more ambitious goals.

The fact of the matter is that we will most probably never be able to do all the things that are on our list because we are overloaded. Accepting this fact allows us to keep asking ourselves “Is what I do now what I really should be doing?” We always know whether we are procrastinating and whether we are engaged in pleasant activities in order to delay these sometimes painful tasks which however have the potential to truly change our life.

Learn to focus on the important not on the urgent. Develop the habit to eliminate noise. We are constantly bombarded with information. Whether this is social media, the constant flow of email, instant messaging, phone calls, or text messages, this information overload tends to distract our focus, to decrease our productivity, and leads to errors because of the constant interruptions. By getting caught in constantly responding to this stream of information from outside we not only waste time (which is probably the most precious asset we have), but also fail to generate the feeling of self-fulfilment that the completion of a high value task will provide.