These days I realized how much time we spend doing things that might not bring so much value in our lire, but we still need to do them. I remembered there is a dude that actually did some math (or maybe meth? Who knows!?) and he figured out that 80% of our actions bring 20% of the results and 20% of our actions bring 80% of the results.
Actually, there is some sense in this as I wrote a while back about this topic (the original post can be found here). I think we need to remember that not everything is equally important and we can make some changes in our life based on that.
Do you ever wonder how much our actions really matter? Well, in 1895 Vilfredo Pareto wrote about this. According to him, 80% of what we’re doing brings us 20% of the results we have, and 20% of what we’re doing brings us 80% of the results we have.
WTF, right? I think that there is some logic behind this. On a daily basis, there are things more important than others. Why are they more important? Because the outcome from doing those things is more important. But how many important things we do on a daily basis? For me, it’s somewhere around 20% and the rest of 80% of the things I do are not as important. In the same time, I noticed that those 20% bring 80% of the results of that day. Of course, it can be just a matter of perception so think about your day. How much time you use making the most important things and how much time you spend doing “ordinary” things?
The goal is to identify those 20% of things that bring 80% of the outcome and do more of that. The more we do, the more results we’ll have with minimum effort. This can apply to everything, so 20% of the effort brings 80% of the outcome and 80% of the effort brings 20% of the outcome. If we can identify what actions we do to bring 80% of the results, we only need to do a little more of that and the outcome will exponentially increase.
What do you think about this 80/20 rule? What examples can you find in your lives?