The 80/20 rule and the 20/80 principle – sustainable success through careful planning and explosive execution

Hi there,

Are you still searching for how to get more organized? Or maybe you think of how to get more done with less effort?

A simple rule in organizations on how to get things done in less time is optimization. It has become modern for everyone to optimize something. Companies started with bureaucratic processes, then moved to equipment, people, and space, and today, we even optimize our eating plans to fit our daily agenda and generate more positive results for us. With all these actions, people have turned from balanced living creatures into optimizing machines.

A simple search on the internet shows that in 2023, more than fifteen thousand systems aim to help people do more with less effort. Different systems present magnificent approaches and ways of shaping your thinking and moving forward with a longer list than the day before. All the time, in another form, creators of these systems present a simple rule created many years ago and expressed with the equation 80/20. According to this rule, eighty percent of the results we achieve are generated from twenty percent of our work. Here is where the calculation and the search expand. Systems around the world teach people how to identify these twenty percent of the work that is so impactful that it can change an individual’s contribution positioning in the labor and society.

The 80/20 rule

The 80/20 rule brings some organization to our agenda daily and weekly. It is a prerequisite for building a better understanding of our priorities and working toward bringing out the best of our schedule to help us maximize impact without wasting all our energy. With that thought in mind, our thinking is often reshaped from just doing things to doing them with a specific purpose and toward a winning agenda. The best way to reach those twenty percent of all the tasks with the highest impact is to analyze and consider the specific situation. After the analysis, we started planning around the results, excluding charges and projects from the agenda or moving them down or up in a priority matrix. And this endless process continues as a circled activity, week after week.

However, doing all this does not change the number of tasks assigned to the individual. The 80/20 rule demonstrates how eighty percent of the results are achieved in the first twenty percent of the assigned tasks. While that is a vast discrepancy, identifying those twenty percent of the functions is crucial for everyone who wants higher achievements.

After all, people strive to get more with less effort. And this is not surprising. Time is limited, and using it wisely can boost results enormously.

In addition to the 80/20 rule, individuals put effort into maximizing results with less energy. And this is where another tool is crucial to be used. This tool is explained through the 20/80 principle.

The 20/80 principle

This tool focuses on the most productive content to be done. It is a simple way of analyzing the impact of the time invested and how this investment creates results. Taking on a list of essential tasks is a good start, but in most cases, people lose themselves between the functions in the importance list they create. Maybe task 1 can take the person twenty minutes, but task 2 makes the individual invest more than forty-five minutes of their time, etc. Every job has its specifics, and the weight of each task depends on several other factors. But if wanting to be more productive, an individual may use the 20/80 principle to speed up execution. His principle says that eighty percent of the task is completed during the first twenty percent of the time invested. The other eighty percent of the time, with the task, the individual is working on details that may not be so important as the core results gained during the first twenty percent of the time.

With that principle in mind, flexible and productive people reorganize their schedules to get control over the details of the tasks and manage them more effectively and efficiently.

The 20/80 principle is a tool for focusing. The more it is used in practice, the more precise task execution becomes and the higher the results generated are. 

IN CONCLUSION:

There is no one instrument with magical powers to help people be more productive and work with less effort in their development area. Tasks, projects, and priorities are “raining” above every one of us. Learning and implementing ways to manage all these priorities and time eaters is a personal decision that predefines our ability to deal with the flow of tasks from everywhere among us. The better the individual understands how to deal with that task flow, the more productive and efficient they can become. So, where are you now – fighting with the task flow or managing it for higher results?