Maximise your results with the 80/20 rule

I realised that most of my time is spent on driving; sometimes I would drive for more than 8 hours, and to get the most out of this, I started listening to audio books. Over Heroes holiday, I had a chance to go through the book by Richard Koch on the 80/20 rule.

Everything from the audio book was splendid and resonated with our daily lives. 20% is vital and 80% is trivial; focus on the vital 20% to have results that are 80%. If you do the reverse, you spend your time focusing on the trivial 80% and only achieve results of 20%.

This principle is also known as the Pareto principle, which has an interesting origin from the Italian scientist Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto, who found out that only 20% owned the majority 80% land in Italy. The principle gained adoption in leadership so that it can be applied in any facet of life. An interesting one is that only 20% of your friends are the vital few and 80% of your friends and relationships are just trivial and do not add value to your results. Focusing on cultivating the 20% relationships will push you to achieve 80% results.

Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of those that matter least, and it is important to identify the things that matter most and focus on cultivating them to get maximum results and outcomes.

Steps to apply the 80/20 principle in general

The 80/20 principle can be applied to any situation, below is a general view of its application.

• Define your goals clearly
• Analyze your in-tray and identify the vital few and the trivial many based on the fulfillment of set goals
• Focus on the vital few; redirect your efforts to what gives you fulfillment; that's the few aspects that allow you to achieve your big, hairy, audacious goal!
• Apply simplicity; complex is ugly, and simple is beautiful. The trivial many create unnecessary complexity, and focusing on the vital few reduces complexity. At times, the trivial many come with overheads that are unnecessary, which obscure productivity and achieving the goals.
• Manage your time. Apply techniques such as the Eisenhower matrix to deal with items, this allows you to separate the vital few from the trivial many and avoid wasting of time on activities that do not add value. Practice saying no to some non-value addition requests and use counter structural fixedness techniques such as batch processing.
• Focus - remove things that distract you towards achieving goals, know when to say no to some distracting things.
• Finally, achieve 80% output from 20% focus

Other authors perspectives on 80/20 principle

Matthew Kelly’s book The Four Signs of a Dynamic Catholic points out how the 80/20 principle applies in parishes. His research unearthed that it can be worse to an extent of 90/10, where only 10% of Parishers are the ones who contribute to the events and success of a given parish.

In 1949, George Zipf discovered the "Principle of Least Effort," which was actually a rediscovery and elaboration of Pareto's principle.??Zipf's principle said that resources (people, goods, time, skills, or anything else that is productive) tended to arrange themselves so as to minimize work, so that approximately 20–30 per cent of any resource accounted for 70–80 per cent of the activity related to that resource.

In 1951, Joseph Moses Juran came up with theory of the vital few, which aligns with the 80/20 principle. the idea was to apply the 80/20 Principle, together with other statistical methods, to pluck out faults related to quality and improve the value stream of industrial and consumer goods.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, IBM was one of the global companies that adopted the 80/20 principle. The company discovered that mostly 80% of the time is spent executing only 20% of the code and immediately rewrote its operating software to make the most-used 20 percent very accessible and-user friendly, thus making IBM computers more efficient and faster than competitors' machines for the majority of applications.

Edward Lorenz's Chaos theory may seem parallel to the 80/20 principle, as it sees the world as complex and ever-changing, the whole system is more than the sum of its parts, and relationships between the components are nonlinear. Causes are difficult to pin down; there are complex interdependencies between causes; and causes and effects are blurred. However, in the disorder, there is a self organising logic which may be difficult to detect but is inherent.

Ref

80/20 principle by Richard Koch

IBM implementation of 80/20 principle

George Zipf principle of least effort

The four signs of a dynamic catholic by Mathew Kelly

The vital few theory by Joseph Moses Juran

The Chaos theory by Edward Lorenz