The 80/20 principle is an incredibly powerful time management tool that will give you the ability to blow up your efficiency in a way like you will not believe. When I first started using this principle, I thought to myself “surely it cannot be this simple?”
But it is.
What is the 80/20 Principle?
The 80/20 principle, or the Pareto Principle, was named for the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto who made observations that 80% of the peas in his garden came from 20% of the plants. He expanded this out to realize that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. He began to think about uneven distributions and soon realized that this principle applied to just about everything.
The principle states that the vast majority of desired outcomes are derived from the minority of the actions. These don’t necessarily add up to 80 and 20; these are just a good baseline. The majority of the personal examples I use don’t add up to these numbers either. The main idea behind the principle is to focus on finding what is causing the results you are looking for and maximizing them. Unfortunately, for most people we are more focused on the 80% of actions that only cause 20% of the results we want.
How can I use the 80/20 Principle?
To apply the 80/20 principle in your life, we start with a hard look at how you spend your day. What do you do from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep? Yes, this includes hitting the snooze button eight times or scrolling on your phone for half an hour.
Make a list of the top ten things you spend your time on in each of these sections and see what you can either reduce, ignore, or focus more time on. The idea is to find the top two or so things you should be doing, and eliminating the bottom things you do not have to do.
Waking up
Let’s start with the easy pickings. How long does it take for you to get up in the morning? I am talking about the time it takes you to get out of bed and ready to take on the day. It takes me roughly 10 to 20 minutes from the moment my alarm goes off to the moment I begin my morning routine. This is not great and I am still working on it, but it used to be worse. I would spend probably another half hour on top of this hitting the snooze button.
Essentially, I was spending 60% of my wake up time hitting the snooze button, producing exactly 0% of the results I want in life. Hitting the snooze button is scientifically proven to give you a worse morning, and over long periods of time it will actually set you up for some major health issues down the road.
I moved my phone across the room so I would have to get out of bed to turn off my alarm. With this one minor change, I have now cut out a half hour of my day that I was wasting doing nothing productive.
If you are like me and wake up significantly earlier than the rest of your family, you can imagine my frustration with fumbling around in the dark looking for my clothes and toiletries. I never timed myself for my own sanity, but I am sure it took upwards of 10 minutes to get ready. Instead of doing this every morning and wasting even more precious time, I started preparing the night before. I moved everything I would need in the mornings to the same place so I would not need to sneak around in the dark tripping over things. Now it takes me maybe 2 minutes to get ready. 20% of the time, 100% of the same result.
- Reduce hitting the snooze button
- Reduce phone time
- Improve getting out of bed
- Improve your wake up routine
Mornings
The majority of the mornings in my house used to consist of getting dressed and then playing with our phones. As it turns out, this is not an option when you have a baby. You would not believe how much more we manage to get done compared to before he was born.
How do we pull this off? The 80/20 principle of course. No surprise there.
Instead of playing on our phones, one of us plays with our son. Because of this, the other can peacefully accomplish the morning chores such as packing him for daycare or unloading the dishwasher. Not only are we spending plenty of time with our son, a task I consider fairly important, but we are also accomplishing all the things we used to push off to “future us.”
When I was younger, I was all too familiar with the process of rushing out the door. Turns out “future me” did not appreciate “past me” giving him all the work and none of the time. If I had used the 80/20 principle in my younger years, who knows how much stress I would have removed from my life? Strangely enough, acting like you are about to rush out the door will tell you exactly what your 20% tasks are.
- Reduce phone and television time
- Improve morning routine
- Focus on tasks that you typically delay to “future you”
- Get the “rush out the door” tasks done first
Daytime
I imagine for most people, the biggest time sink of their day is their work. But does it have to be?
Identify the top ten things you spend your time on at work. Do any of these stand out as something that should not take nearly as long as it does, or is it something that you really should not be dealing with in the first place?
What things actually bring value to you and your workplace? Can you shift your responsibilities so you can focus more on these one or two items while having someone else handle the 80% tasks? Perhaps some of these tasks can be eliminated entirely?
As a CPA, the only thing I can sell is my time. Like all professional services, that’s just the nature of the industry. So does it make sense for me to spend a significant amount of my day planning what the next task to do is, or working on things I cannot bill to someone? No.
We now have a designated individual scheduling out our workload on our calendars so we can focus on completing the tasks that bring value to the firm. By reducing my lowest value 80% task taking significant time, I can focus more on the 20% tasks that make the most value. By using the 80/20 principle, this one small change has saved me hours every week of low value time I can now spend creating value for my firm.
A recent example of how I reduced some of my low value workload is by completely automating the spreadsheets involved in calculating our payroll clients’ paydays. It does not make sense to manually calculate these every year, so why were we? Now instead of cross checking a calendar against a bunch of dates, you click one button and the spreadsheet updates to the next year. It took a few extra minutes to make the formulas robust enough to ignore weekends and holidays, but not having to do this manually year after year will add up significantly.
- Delegate tasks you personally aren’t required to do
- Automate tasks no one should do
- Reduce tasks that bring no value
- Focus on what is driving value
Evening
The night before largely determines how the next day will go in my household, but that has not always been the case. We have slowly begun to pull tasks forward that we can work on now instead of just wait for them to become relevant. Can you do the same?
By using the 80/20 principle, I can give myself a significantly better morning and workday by getting some of the minor morning tasks out of the way. I’ll go ahead and prep the morning coffee, medicines, clothes, and food. I’ll load the dishwasher and run it overnight so we can have clean dishes for the next day and won’t have to listen to it run while we are in the same room. Overall, the goal is to focus on the tasks (pulling work forward) to achieve the results we desire (having a better tomorrow.)
Instead of playing on your phone or watching television, why don’t you go find something that is going to bother you tomorrow and fix it now? Or better yet, accomplish something you have been putting off, but you know it will improve your wellbeing. It won’t be as fun in the moment, but I promise it will be significantly more rewarding knowing you won’t have to deal with these things later.
- Reduce phone and television time
- Focus on long term well being
- Focus on tasks you have to accomplish first
- Focus on pulling forward tasks that will bother you later
Going to Bed
I used to be a huge fan of taking my phone to bed with me. I would probably spend half an hour to a full hour just scrolling mindlessly through things that honestly won’t make a difference in my life. It’s certainly enjoyable in the moment, but then the next morning I would wake up like a zombie and can honestly say none of the things I read the night before were memorable.
I would argue that getting enough sleep should be on everyone’s list of 20% tasks. Not getting enough sleep is shown to have both long and short term effects on your life, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Of course this is easier said that done. You basically have to remove the entirety of your low value 80% tasks in order to ensure you get the sleep you need.
- Spend less time on your phone or watching television an hour before bed (hope you’ve noticed the theme here)
- Go to bed and wake up at the same time everyday, even weekends
- Develop a bed time routine and follow it
- Sleep enough. Not too little, not too much
The 80/20 Principle and You
It really is this simple to drastically improve productivity in your daily life. Even if you do nothing else, by narrowing down the list of things that actually move your life forward rather than just getting by, you can hone in on what really matters. The 80/20 principle has been a powerful principle to implement in my life; what can it do for yours?
