The 80/20 Rule
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I was catching up on my reading after a bit of a holiday and new-job hiatus (more on that later). I ran across an article on Dumb Little Man called ‘Turning the 80/20 Rule on It’s Head’
Since I very much encourage you to visit Dumb Little Man, I wont post the entire article here…just the first couple paragraphs
It’s called the Pareto Principle: in its simplest form, it means that 80% of your time is spent doing 20% of your work. It has seemingly become fashionable to apply the Pareto Principle to every conceivable activity and outcome, no matter its suitability. I’ve become convinced that it doesn’t work in every situation.
What if we threw out the Pareto Principle? What if we said, it’s not about the 80% or the 20%? What if we set a goal of spending 50% of our time on the truly important things in our personal and work lives?
The problem I have with this the author is contributing to the very problem he is bemoaning. He says that the 80/20 rule is misapplied…and then goes on to misapply it. The Pareto Principle DOES NOT mean we spend 80% of our time doing 20% of our work. It is NOT about our actions at all, really.
The Pareto Principle is about our RESULTS. It originally was a simple statement about the wealth distribution in Italy. Pareto observed that 80% of all the income in the country was being paid to 20% of the population. It has also been applied to many other business areas and found to ROUGHLY hold up in many situations. In the case of our activities and actions, it was found that 80% of our success comes from 20% of our actions. If you are in sales, you know this well. You make most of your income off a small number of the people you actually try to sell to.
In my experience, the truly value of the 80/20 rule is that you rarely know which action is part of the 80, and which is part of the 20. So the TRUE secret to success is to keep going and going and going. If you make 100 calls in a week…you’ll have sucess with 20 of them. But if you make 200…you’ll have 40. It’s just a reiteration that you have to work your numbers and never, ever take things too personaly.
I should say that I agree with the author’s conclusion…I just don’t like the route he took to get there. We should all spend more effort on the things we believe are important, the results ratio will stay the same but the successes will be larger.
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