80/20 rule

February 18th, 2024 (8 months ago) • 1 minute

When I was talking to my friend about the disparity between effort and outcome, we ended up with the 80/20 rule. It's a simple concept that states that 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort.

Sometimes, I find it hard to prioritize and identify which activity I should invest my time in to lead to the best results. I find myself stuck trying to perfect things and overly-investing in tasks that don't really yield much.

Nowadays, I try to remind myself of this and be extremely conscious of this. Instead of jumping into something rightward from enthusiasm, I will try to take a step back to think about what I want to get out of it a.k.a which point should I determine as 'done' and to scope my time according to that - mostly 2 hours or 4 hours block.

Some other ways to re-prioritize:

  1. Assign a number to effort
  2. Assign a number to impact
  3. Rank and prioritize the first 3 every day