Improve Your Productivity With the 80/20 Rule
Improve Your Productivity With the 80/20 Rule. one sweet thing about being an entrepreneur is that you get to make some of the rules which you work with.
However, with productivity, there are certain rules that you can benefit from. The 80/20 productivity rule is one such rule. This rule states that 80% of your results come from just 20% of your efforts. Developed by Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, and sociologist, the rule was first observed when analyzing wealth and income distribution trends in Europe.
Vilfredo Pareto found that 80% of the wealth was owned by 20% of the population. This rule can be applied to various different situations but for more efficiency, small business owners can use the 80/20 productivity rule. keep reading if you want to learn how to use this rule to your advantage.
Carefully Look At Where You’re Spending Your Time
Our time and productivity are distributed throughout the day. If your small business is really important to you, make sure you determine what you spend every single work hour doing.
look at your calendar and be completely honest about what you’re doing with all your business time. Try grouping your task according to your type of work.
You can then know which of your task generates less income and try to limit the time you spend on them.
Take Care of Your 20% First
It is very important that you put the 20% first. By the 20%, we mean, the little sets of efforts that actually bring results. You can put tasks that produce more results on the first part of your daily schedule( the tasks you achieve first). This may be attending to your paying customers first, before checking email, replying to social media messages, and others.
Don’t Waste Too Much Time on the Other 80%
Just as we have said, the 20% brings 80% of the results, therefore, your time should be focused first on the 20% that yields higher results. The 80% may yield minimal results, this means that you should put less time into such activities. The question here is, should we become less productive in the 80% because we don‘t expect much results from them yet?
We need to focus on distributing our time properly. From the rule, we are made to know that, the first 20% of your time and effort brings in 80% of the results. The second 20% brings in another 10% of the results for the day and the third brings 20% (now we’re at 60% so far) typically brings in 3%. The results get lower and lower as the distribution increases.
Therefore, know when exactly to call it to quit or wrap up a project if you have contributed a significant amount of time to it.
Get Feedback and Make Swift Changes
If you have done all you can do on a particular project or task, ask your team members for feedback, advice, or correction and when you get stuck in any aspect of the project, you can outsource it to preserve more time and productivity for another task.
Getting feedback helps you work more efficiently and can guide you in terms of changing your strategy.
Conclusively, success comes from smart work and not just hard work. Priority brings productivity. You must learn how to focus your time on things that really produce more results.
