Rick Torrison walks through the 80/20 principle and how to find the few high-impact tasks worth your time. He guides you through a self-assessment of where your hours actually go, then shows how to cut the rest.
Welcome back to this week's Timeout for Leadership. And again, thank you for continuing to invest in yourself and your own personal growth. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever made the statement, there's just not enough hours in the day to get everything done? Have you made that statement two or three times today already? What do we mean when we make that statement? You know, I think what we're saying is, if I had more time, I could get more done. I never seem to be able to get ahead. We think things like, if I could only get rid of all these distractions, I could get more accomplished. There's so much to do in so little time. Do those thoughts sound familiar? Let's do a little self assessment. On a scale of 1 to 10, how efficient do you feel you are with your time and your relationships? You may not like that answer. The Pareto principle, have you heard about it? It states that 80% of the results come from 20% of the work. You might better know it as the 8020 rule. The basic concept behind the 8020 rule is that a majority of results come from a minority of causes. You know those who embrace this concept. They seek to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and profitability of their lives by maximizing the power of the 20% that's providing the greatest return. Makes sense. And they reduce the effort on the 80% by that's slowing them down or keeping them from the greatest results. Now studies show this what you do in the 20% of activities that bring you 80% of your results is 16 times more effective than what you do with the other 80% of your activity. Now our mission is to discover what those few things are and do more of them while doing less of the rest. So let's put this into practice. Do me a favor and think about the rest of your day right now. Maybe make a quick to do list in your head. Think about everything that you can think of from work to relationships to errands and activities that you need to do today. Now look at that list. Think about that list. Tell me what are the top things that if you accomplish them today on that list, will have the greatest impact on your productivity, your profit, your potential, your relationships. From there, you want to build a plan and strategy to spend your time and energy on those things. Sounds easy enough, but why doesn't it ever seem to work out like the way we plan it? We're great at making lists. If you want to move beyond managing your time and lists, join us next week for part two as we look at ways to implement the 8020 rule.
