Ruthlessly Pareto

Pareto’s law states that, in many contexts, 80% of the impact is produced by 20% of the items. Some examples: 20% of your customers might be responsible for 80% of your profits; 20% of the lectures you attended contained 80% of the know-how you later put into practice.

If the rewards (outputs) of a given activity is nonlinear, than the inputs shouldn’t be either.

Some examples:

• If you’re reading the same percentage of pages for each book, you’re doing it wrong (given that time is a finite resource). Some books are worth skipping after having read a few pages, whereas other books are worth reading many times.
• If you are attending all classes or all meetings, you’re doing it wrong. Some are worth not attending, and some are worth preparing for before and reflecting upon later.
• If you are spending the same amount of attention on each customer of yours, you’re doing it wrong. Some customers are worth following with double the attention, some are worth the minimum, and some are worth firing (you might discover that 20% of your customer generate 80% of your customer service costs).
• If you are spending the same amount of hours at work every day, your’re doing it wrong. Unless you are the lowest employee at your level in a super-optimized operation, chances are that some days you there will be opportunities worth spending more time on, and other days could be finished much earlier.

And so on…

Ruthlessly Pareto your activities.