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You will never have time to do everything you need to or want to. It has been shown in numerous areas that solving 20% of problems provides 80% of solutions. This is why we ought to choose our most important problems and tasks on daily basis, and focus most of our energy on those. We should deal first with these big and important problems, and only at the end of the day try to complete as many small tasks as we have the time for. This rule states that you should spend 80% of your time on the 20% of tasks - those which important things to you, and spend the remaining 20% of time on remaining 80% of tasks. [1] Also, note that wealth only refers to economic aspects, not to happiness, love, joy, etc. Is 20% striving for wealth also able to achieve 80% of happiness, or is it that among the 'boring' 80% some strive for these other "wealths" and with 20% effort achieve 80% of happiness? Lets analyze one example -- wealth distribution. 20% would definitely not have 80% of wealth without the 80% of population they made the wealth of. If they (top 20%) were alone on Earth, they would have less wealth even though they would have less competition! Paradox, isn't it? So I’d like to throw a provocation: what if that small 20 meaningful percentage was in desperate need of the boring 80 to be so important? What if we’re over-estimating that 20 percentage’s importance? Looking forward for your comments… But I do start asking myself: isn’t the 20% of the world producing the 80% of the results also because the remaining are in a poorer condition, also because part of that richness grows on that poverty?And isn’t the 20% of bugs producing the 80% of crashes also because our computers have been stressed against the remaining 80% and proved to somehow cope with them?And again, haven’t your most important moments in life been reached also undergoing through all the most insignificant, borin? Scenario 2:If we completely ignore the 80% of the actions and only perform the 20% that we have proved to produce the 80% of the previous results we will still achieve the same results, that is to say, 80% of the initial work saving 80% of the time. And iterating it, still the same…leading sooner or later to the fact that with few few actions, a lot less than the initial 20%, we do still achieve the same 80% initial result. Paradox? For me, it comes down to the following two scenarios.Scenario 1:If we completely ignore the 80% of the actions and only perform the 20% that we have proved to produce the 80% of the previous results, then among the 20% remaining actions the results will again distribute (if we do have a huge number of actions still) in the pattern, and we’ll be likely to get 80% of 80% : 64% of the primary results. That’s a 16% loss…quite a huge loss, imagine doing this iteratively!
if the first results was “a posteriori” (in retrospect) , I’ve seen leaders and managers turning it upside down derivating a working “a priori” principle, that can be summarized as follows:“ focus on the 20 top things and you’ll get 80% of your results”.However, has it been proved to work yet?Oh yes, afterwards, we measure results and confirm that 80% of them comes from 20% of efforts, customers ,etc. That’s a statistics. I’ve been thinking for a while about the 80/20 rule. It all gets roots into Pareto statistics information, and from that point of view it is clearly uncontestable.We can see it in many different areas: wealth distribution in the world, land distribution in Italy, our customer installed base business, computer science bugs and crashes, our personal life’s important moments probably.This has been taken in the business environment from a totally different point of view How do I do that?80/20 Rule for Time Management - Achieve more with less