How the 80-20 Rule Can Help You Be More Effective #8020

How the 80-20 Rule Can Help You Be More Effective

In my other article entitled "What is the 80-20 Rule and Why is it so Useful?” I talked about what the 80-20 rule, or Pareto principle is and gave some basic examples of how it can help make you more effective. This article is a continuation of that first article, and is an important concept for maximizing personal effectiveness and getting things done.

Are You "Living 80-20" And Producing Max Output with Minimal Effort (input)?

Like I said before, the 80-20 rule for me is always in the back of my mind when I look at anything and everything I do. What I mean is, I am always asking if there is a way I can do things better, in light of what the 80-20 rule often tells us is sub-optimal. I call this 80-20 living, or 'living 80-20".

Others relate this 80-20 living to GTD - "Getting Things Done" or using "Zen Habits", or maybe even the "4-hour Work Week." All of these are similar in that they utilize the 80-30 principles and concepts to help us be more efficient and effective, and turn the output maximization on its head, so max output with minimal effort can be achieved.

Once you look at things through the lens of 80-20 Living, your life will improve because the 80-20 rule helps you find a major way to improve your life personally and professionally. In fact, 80-20 living is contagious, and soon others around you will use these living 80-20 concepts to increase their output and maximize their personal effectiveness.

In fact, when you start 80-20 living, you'll find the following happen:

• You'll do things smarter and more effectively
• You'll simplify your life
• You'll spend your time on worthwhile and meaningful things
• You'll become more effective
• You'll accomplish more and waste less time
• You'll require less effort to accomplish more output
• You'll spend more time on the most important things
• You'll spend less time on the less-important things

In a time of information overload and social media overload, the 80-20 rule will help us to filter through all of the nose and clutter of this big data and get to the heart of what's most important. If for no other reason, the 80-20 rule must help us focus on the essentials, and discard the non-essentials. So what are some additional example for how we could use the 80-20 rule?

Greater Awareness of our Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats

80-20 thinking can help us re-examine some incorrect assumptions as well as highlight some things we're not aware of, that are nonetheless very important, to make a smarter decision.

By using the 80-20 rule, we should assume that we are not necessarily doing the right things or doing things right. Re-read what I just said. Doing the right things is the first priority. We must identify what those are.

Second, we must then do them right - in the most efficient way. We must be open to what the facts and data tell us, to correct our focus and thinking in many areas. For instance, the 80-20 rule may help us to see some of the following:

20% (or less) of your efforts make you money, 80% (or more) don't!

What does this tell you? For me, it makes me want to find out where I should spend more effort, and where I may just be wasting my time. I would want to flip this equation, where I would ensure 80% (or more) of my efforts are what made me money. I would home in on the specifics that are most important to maximize my output and effectiveness.

20% (or less) of the people in this country have 80% (or more) of the wealth and power

This tells me the other 80% only have 20% and probably much less. This would help to see who our government should focus on helping, versus who is often does focus on instead (i.e. the common ordinary people, the lower and middle class, not just the privileged elite or special interests they seem to give 80% or more of their effort, skill, attention and allegiance to, right?)

20% of the e-mails you get is actually worth your time, the other 80% is just junk or vaguely important information.

This will help you see where you need to focus your energies and where you'd waste most of your time. The key point is that we need to identify wasted effort and then stop doing things that wastes our time and life, our energy, effort or money.

Living 8020 tells us we need to get rid of the junk we don't need, at least 80% of it because we'll never use it, for example. 

These are just a few of the millions of possible examples of how to apply the 80-20 rule, and the trick is to find creative ways to apply it yourself in your life. It really works and is extremely useful, so I hope you will adopt it as a tool for your life's toolbox because 80-20 Rules!

The Possibilities for Using the 80-20 Rule Are Endless

Using the 80-20 rule and seeing its possibilities for use, which only increase over time, will be very exciting. I love to follow it, and know you'll catch the "Living 80-20" fever. If you do, it can and will become an important “rule of life” and “rule of business” for you, so you can focus on what you should and avoid the stuff that is insignificant.

I hope that you will begin to use this rule to help prioritize your life, both personally and professionally, to be more effective.

Other rules of life will be discussed in future articles, but "Living 8020" is so central to happier, more focused and simpler living method, it is one of the first concepts to understand.

There are endless possibilities for how to apply the 80-20 rule, and you must seek to discover those for yourself, now that you have the basic knowledge for how to do that.

The trick is to find creative ways to apply it yourself in your life, both personally and professionally. It really works and is extremely useful, so I hope you will adopt it as a tool for your life's toolbox because 80-20 Rules! 

Let's look next at another valuable concept that ties into this, in my article Understanding the Principles of Cause and Effect In Life.