Key Takeaways from The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch
80 percent of the results come from 20 percent of the causes. A few things are important; most are not.
Five Key Takeaways From The Book.
- The 80/20 principle (from Pareto’s Law) states that 80% of results come from 20% of causes. A few things are critical, everything else is not.
- At work, this means you try and identify where 20% of effort gives 80% of the returns. What few activities will have maximum impact? What will make your boss sit up and take notice? What will make your most lucrative clients especially happy? Do more of those and less of the ‘busy work’.
- The 80/20 principle can be applied to your life outside of work. Find out which 20% of your recreational activities bring you 80% of your happy vibes. Do more of that and less of the other, more mundane stuff. You probably still have to do the laundry, however.
- 80/20 can be applied to relationships, too. Which key relationships bring you the greatest joy? Focus your energy on those. Block calls from those other joy-kills.
- Most of what we occupy ourselves with is low-value, busy work. Eliminate or reduce low-value activities and you will have more time, and achieve more. Aim for impact over busy. Sounds easy enough… right?
Book Summary.
Richard Koch takes a fairly old concept — Pareto’s Law — and in an act of marketing genius, rebrands it as the 80/20 Principle. Voila! A brand new corporate buzzword.
The concept itself is the counter-intuitive yet inescapable fact that 80% of results flow from 20% of causes. It is a principle employed by many highly effective people and organisations. The first edition of the book was released in 1997 and it has been reprinted, updated, and spun out into multiple variations since then.
Many thousands of people throughout the world have found the 80/20 Principle useful at work, in their careers, and in their personal lives. Koch outlines how with the 80/20 Principle we can achieve much more with much less effort, time and resources simply by concentrating on the all-important 20% thus controlling events instead of being controlled by them, and with several times the results.
“If we did realize the difference between the vital few and the trivial many in all aspects of our lives, and if we did something about it, we could multiply anything that we valued.”
The idea that you can work less, and achieve more, simply by focusing on the few key tasks that make the difference, is incredibly appealing. But does it actually work?
Let’s get real.
Can the 80/20 Principle really make a difference to your schedule and your happiness? Read on for ways to apply the key concepts in your own life.
Apply the 80/20 Principle to your work.
Richard Koch claims that the key to earning more and working less is to pick the right things to do. That is, do only those things that add the highest value. But how do you know what they are?
Try this. For one week, keep a meticulous record of what you spend your time on. Think chartered-accountant-level timesheets. Excel will work fine, but if you want to use a free trial for a more complicated time tracking app, be my guest. This will get super annoying by about Tuesday, but you can do it. Persevere.
At the end of the week, review those gorgeous timesheets and work out where you have spent your time. Analyse the data. Some tasks are routine and mundane, such as checking emails or data entry. Can you batch those tasks or outsource? Some tasks take a lot of time but do not generate great value or results for you. Are they really necessary? How can you reduce the amount of time you spend on these? At the very least, do not make them your top priority each day. Finally, identify those few key activities that made an actual impact. Can you allocate more time each week to those?
If you can bear it, I would recommend repeating this process regularly, to ensure you don’t slip back into the habit of busy-ness over time.
Apply the 80/20 Principle to your recreational time.
Richard Koch claims that The 80/20 Principle also extends to your life satisfaction.
It’s ok, no more timesheets. But do take note of what you do in a usual week outside of work. Are you making conscious use of your free time? Or are you mindlessly repeating the same activities out of habit?
Use the 80/20 Principle to choose the top 20% of things you do in your spare time — the ones that make you truly joyful. Design your down-time to allow more space for the activities that actually generate a positive outcome for you. Love the feeling you get after a yoga session? Make time to do it every day. Don’t love the feeling you get after watching back-to-back episodes of the Kardashians? Eliminate it from your schedule.
“I make it a personal rule never to do anything that I don’t really care about. It is surprising how much this cuts out.”
Identify what is truly important.
The 80/20 Principle claims there are only a few things that are essential to your happiness, career success, health and wealth.
How do you find those critical nuggets of information? Try this. Create a list with four headings — happiness, career, health, and wealth. The first step is to define what success means for you in each of those categories. For example, for wealth, it might be to own a house, or have a certain amount in savings.
Now jot down under each category the top three things you think you need to do in order to achieve success. You now have your guiding compass to determine which activities you should be spending your time on. Everything else is non-essential.
Note: You may need to tweak this list as your definition of success evolves, or your goals change. That’s ok. Just stay focused on the things that matter, and make sure you are spending the majority of your time and effort on those.
“Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.”
Over to you.
While the concept of The 80/20 Principle is great, the hardest part for me was actually identifying the 20 percent of activities that generated the most impact. It takes time to do this, but the pay-off is fantastic. I found it especially useful at work.
In my experience, applying the 80/20 Principle is not something you can do once and check off as done. It’s a mindset that helps prioritise what you do every day. Changing the way I thought about work to value impact rather than being busy gave me more time in my day, made me more productive, and helped me stop wasting time on low-value tasks. That’s a win!
You can purchase The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch on Kindle, Audible and in hard copy on Amazon. This post includes affiliate links.
For more Key Takeaways from leading self-improvement books, check out my blog: www.keytakeaways.org . It’s for clever people short on time.
