To help you to learn how to prioritise your time, effort and energy, I’d like to introduce you to Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto was an Italian industrialist, sociologist, economist and philosopher who conducted land surveys for local councils in Italy in the later part of the 1880s.
While surveying land for taxation purposes, he discovered that roughly about 80 percent of the land in any region he visited was owned by about 20 percent of the town or village population. Regardless of the location the ratio was about the same. This is known as the 80/20 Rule.
What use is Pareto’s 80/20 rule?
The 80/20 Rule - “80% of all results come from 20% of the effort”.
So, 20% of what you do each day yields 80% of the results you achieve.
Just think about that. It means that in an average 8 hour work day, 1.6 hours of your work could produce about 80% of your results.
IF …
...you knew which 20% of your activities was giving you the 80% of your results. To figure this out, you need to begin tracking how you’re currently investing your time and your activities.
For one week, keep a notebook and pen beside your desk and track everything you do and note how long it takes for you to do it. You’ll quickly discover, like Vilfredo that only a small number of your daily and weekly activities produces your biggest results.
These things are your 20%. In other words, the vital few versus the trivial many.
Once you have determined which tasks and activities produce your greatest results, create a plan for the following week in which you intentionally focus your time and efforts on these things for as long as possible. Everything else should be delegated, dropped (until the end of the day or the week) or left until it becomes a higher priority (see the chapter on Triage).
Try this for just one week - and see the difference it makes to your time, your stress levels and to your overall feeling of control.
You might not always be able to get away with not going to a meeting or sending or receiving emails. However if you realise that certain meetings, phone calls, tasks or activities aren’t producing a result for you, there’s a good chance they’re not producing a result for anyone else either.
The bottom line is to remember that 20 percent of almost everything you do will create 80 percent of your results. When it comes to getting things done, remember that it’s the vital few tasks, versus the trivial many.
Always do what matters most… first!
To learn more about managing your time and priorities, visit or go to
