After spending a week cleaning my house, another normal week at work and finally a weekend living in the “clean” house – I’ve realized I’ve run into another example of the 80/20 rule.

“The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes.”

Wikipedia – Pareto principle

The house is much cleaner than it was, but yet I still have a little notebook that I carry around with me, and am filling up my list of chores and tasks much faster than I can complete them. Our house is much much better than it was. It was at 0%, now it is at 80%. It took me 6 days to get it there. To get the other 20% done, I think I’ll need another 24 days. I’m not planning on taking any more vacation time, and it would be a serious bummer to dedicate my next 12 weekends to doing 20% of my house work.

So, my version of the 80/20 rule is this, 20% of the work results in 80% of the results. The remaining 80% of the work can be safely ignored.

A more detailed description of this can be seen on the Notes to Self blog posting, “Applying the 80-20 Rule to Daily Activities.”

• Don’t try to do more. Just do more of the right things.
• If you have a lot of work to do, break it down to specific activities and figure out what twenty percent of the tasks listed contributes to eighty percent of the results you seek. Second, give your maximum concentration to those 20 percent tasks.
• With a little effort, and the application of the 80-20 rule, we can save a lot of our emotional and physical energy to concentrate on stuffs that really matter and enrich our life.
• So how do you know if you’re working on the twenty percent that really matters?
  1. It makes you feel good because you are doing what you always wanted or you know it’ll help with your goals.
  2. You are doing the tasks that you’d like to procrastinate, but know that it is essential.
  3. You delegate tasks to others that you aren’t good at.
  4. You are doing something that uses your creativity
• Hints that you aren’t utilising your time effectively:
  1. You are doing things that other people want you to do.
  2. You are doing things that you aren’t good at.
  3. You are doing things you don’t enjoy doing (provided that it doesn’t also contribute to your goals).
  4. You are doing things that always take you a lot of time and energy.