The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

According to the author, you only need to read about 20 percent of this review to get 80 percent of the value! Over 100 years ago, Vilfredo Pareto “noted the consistently lopsided relationship between inputs and outputs” and ever since we’ve called it the 80/20 Principle. This statistical pattern that 20 percent of your effort produces 80 percent of the results is universal.

This year, Richard Koch wrote a new and updated edition of his 10-year-old business classic, The 80/20 Principle. It’s worth reading–or delegating to a team member to read and summarize at a staff meeting. The 80/20 principle is all around us:
* 20 percent of your donors give 80 percent of the budget
* 80 percent of your sales come from 20 percent of your customers
* One-fifth of your time (equivalent to one day a week) produces 80 percent of your important work
* 80 percent of your people problems come from 20 percent of your staff
* 20 percent of your volunteers do 80 percent of the work
* And how about your wardrobe–you likely wear 20 percent of your clothes about 80 percent of the time, right?

If you care about results (corporate and personal) and you’re not leveraging the 80/20 rule, you’re wasting a lot of time. For example, read Koch’s “Top-10 Low-Value Uses of Time” and pick two (20 percent) that tempt you often:
1) Things other people want you to do
2) Things that have always been done this way
3) Things you’re not unusually good at doing
4) Things you don’t enjoy doing
5) Things that are always interrupted
6) Things few other people are interested in
7) Things that have already taken twice as long as you originally expected
8) Things where your collaborators are unreliable or low quality
9) Things that have a predictable cycle
10) Answering the telephone

Two of his “Top 10 Highest-Value Uses of Time” include “things that you can get other people to do for you with relatively little effort on your part,” and “things for which it is now or never.” Can you relate?

Koch includes the science behind the concept and plenty of practical examples, including the top-10 business uses of the 80/20 Principle, such as how to negotiate. He also recommends imposing an impossible deadline to a project so the team will only do the highest value things.

The book is an excellent companion to the Results Bucket, one of 20 buckets in my book, 

Mastering The Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Non-profit

. For example, at your next staff meeting discuss these two items: 1) Describe one of your annual goals and how it might reflect the 80/20 Principle; and 2) So now the obvious question is—how do we abandon those things in the 80 percent arena that contribute only 20 percent of our results?

Why You Should Read It: The principles in this book can literally add hours to your days and compound your happiness. It’s worth a look. What’s more important than having time?

Average Read Time: 4.5 Minutes

We’ve all surely heard of the 80/20 Principle, or Pareto’s Law as it’s more formally known. It goes something like this:

80% of the results come from 20% of the effort.
It’s often thrown around in business as nothing more than a buzzword. Few actually do a full 80/20 analysis of their business and almost no one I’ve come across has applied the same to their life as a whole. Other than two people that is: Richard Kock and Tim Ferriss-and the people who have since followed in their footsteps (me included). The 80/20 Principle is the source material for what Tim wrote in The 4-Hour Work Week. It took me reading it a couple times to grasp the simplicity and life-altering implications of the principle. The time saved and gained will blow your mind.

The amazing thing is that the studies in this book show the principle working in just about every possible scenario. Of course it’s not always 80/20. Sometimes 90/10 or 95/5 or even 70/30. But the point is it works-without fail.

Richard’s purpose was to explain this ancient principle in a way that would inspire action and application to every part of life. When applied to work, productivity will go through the roof, but when applied to your life outside of work, happiness and fulfillment do just the same. All it takes is a shift in thinking. Try the following for a few weeks and the time in your life will never be the same.

5 ways to apply the 80/20 Principle to enhance your life:

1. Do the 20% of your work that leads to 80% of your results: Track all the time you spend on projects each hour of each day for a week. How many of these things were necessary? How many got you closer to your goals? How many were a waste of time? How many could someone else have done? Pick the 20% of your tasks that yield 80% of the results and outsource or simply discontinue the rest. Wondering what to do with your remaining time? Enjoy life. I outsourced a significant portion of my work to two very reliable virtual assistants in India starting in 2006. Ravi and Vikash now do that 70 or 80% for me. At $3-5/hour it is very hard to beat. Check out […] if you’re looking to out source. Search “Virtual Assistant”. Once you start outsourcing, you’ll never go back.

2. Locate the 20% of your customers who drive 80% of your profits: Find your top 20% customers (by profit, not revenue) and fire the rest. Yes, fire them. The goal is not to work your life away. It is to make a good living to enjoy your life. If you must work more, then list out the characteristics of your 20% customers and go out and find more of them. You will not believe how liberating it can be to fire a customer who’s been a real pain in the ass.

3. Prioritize the 20% of your friends who provide 80% of your support and enjoyment: If you apply 80/20 to your relationships you will surely find that a few people in your life provide the majority of your support, excitement, laughter and feelings of connection. On the other side, there is likely another 20% group of people who account for most your sleepless nights, tears, anger and frustration. If you don’t want to feel this way, stop spending time around your bottom 20. Fire them and work on duplicating your top 20. This may sound a little calous, but it’s not. It’s practical. The quality of our life comes down to the quality of the people and experiences that fill it.

4. Fill your life with the 20% of your experiences that provide 80% of your happiness: As humans, our two biggest priorities are to move towards pleasure and away from pain. As mentioned above, find the few people, things, places and experiences that provide 80% of your happiness, fulfillment, pleasure and excitement. Also find the things that cause you to feel the majority of your negative emotions. Focus your time on the top 20% and avoid the bottom 20% like the plague.

5. Do the 20% of your workouts that lead to 80% of your physical gains: The majority of fitness results come from a small portion of most workouts. 80% of the muscle is built in the last 20% of the reps. Crossfit is a great example. The workouts are 7-14 minutes long on average but they provide more physical benefit than most hour-long workouts. Spending more time on something is not always a good thing. If you believe your workouts must take an hour then you’ll likely miss a lot more of them. What if they only took 7 minutes, but that seven minutes really tested your limits? You’re likely to show up a lot more often.

I know this sounds simple. But few people stop to actually do it. It is truly possible to spend the majority of your time doing the things that you love. The only way to get there is taking Pareto’s 80/20 principle seriously. It will make all the difference.

Do not let more than 3 months go by without performing a full 80/20 breakdown of all areas of your life (especially your personal life). It will only take a couple hours and those hours will likely save days before you know it… 80/20 in action yet again.

Somewhere along the path of life, most of us were taught to associate fulfillment and worth with the number of hours spent-thinking the more the better. This has lead many of us to working aimlessly just to say we filled the day. This IS NOT the goal. The goal is be fulfilled, happy, efficient, effective and more than anything else, to enjoy life. Happiness is a daily right. It is not something we need to work our ass off for years to finally achieve. That is what Pareto stumbled on all these years ago. I encourage you to do the same.

Uno de los libros más útiles que he leído en mucho tiempo. Lo recomiendo ampliamente

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