Eighty twenty-ing

It’s called “eighty-twenty” or the Pareto Principle: you get 80% of the bang from 20% of the buck. That’s one way to think of it. Here are some others:

  • the top 20% of your customers provide 80% of your orders
  • the worst 20% of your clients provide 80% of you headaches (OK, that might be an understatement!)
  • the last 20% of “getting the job done” takes 80% of the time (whether or not you’ve budgeted that much time)

It gets steeper at the endPhoto: Denzil~

Eighty-twenty is a rule of thumb, not a rule of law (or even of mathematics), so instead of feeling sentenced to the consequences, you can use it as a starting point to reflect on what you’re doing and not doing.

Sometimes, it’s worth doing all 100%. Other times, it’s worth stopping after you’ve done the big-payoff 20%, using elsewhere the resources you’ve freed up by not continuing into the diminishing-returns region of the remaining 80%. Using eighty-twenty as one of your reflective tools, a tool to help to decide what to do and what not to do, can give you back the feeling that you have a choice.

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