Right Way to prioritize your daily tasks -the 80/20 rule

7 September 2020 · Cross Skills · 3 min read

You’ve got a ton of work to do each day.Your to-do list is mostly an unstructured mess of action items, and you’ve only got a faint idea how to prioritize tasks. So what’s the solution to this? There are some (almost automatic) ways to quickly get your to-do list prioritized without much input. There have been a number of methods over the years, and all have their own quirks and considerations. The 80/20 rule, sometimes referred to as the Pareto Principle, basically states that 20% of your efforts end up producing 80% of your results. That’s why it’s important to manage your time in a way that focuses your attention on the key efforts that will produce the vast majority of your results.The 80 20 rule is one of the most helpful concepts in time management.

What Is The 80 20 Rule?
As I just mentioned, the 80 20 rule is also called the “Pareto Principle.” It was named after its founder, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, back in 1895. He noticed that people in society seemed to divide naturally or the top 20 percent in terms of money and influence, and the “trivial many,” or the bottom 80 percent. It was discovered later that virtually all economic activity was subject to this principle, for eg- 80 percent of the wealth of Italy during that time was controlled by 20 percent of the population.We can take Pareto’s 80 20 rule and can apply it to almost any situation.Understanding the Principle is necessary to apply it right to your tasks, days, weeks, and months. In business, it’s essential to do strategic planning, which is one of the leadership qualities shared by the world’s most important leaders.

How To Apply The 80 20 Rule To Goal Setting In Real Life?

Here’s what you can do in order to purely apply the 80/20 rule to setting SMART goals which will boost your overall productivity in life.

First, take a piece of paper and write down approximately ten goals on it. Then ask yourself: If you could only accomplish one of the goals on that list today, or certainly you have only one choice, which one goal would have the greatest positive impact on your life?How will you decide?

Then pick the second most important goal. What you’ll get is, after you complete this exercise totally/completely, you will determine the most important 20 percent of your goals that will help you more than anything else and should be kept on priority.

You should continue working on these goals.So that you can achieve what you want to achieve.

Eat The Biggest Frog First
We often see people who appear to be busy all day long but seem to accomplish very little. This is almost always because they are busy working on tasks that are of low value while they are procrastinating on the one or two activities that could make a real difference to their companies and to their careers.The thing is that we have to eat the biggest frog first.

The most valuable tasks you can do each day are often the hardest and are likely not to be picked first, but the payoff and rewards for completing them can be tremendous and amazing.

The rule for this is: resist the temptation to clear up small things first and start with the most important ones.

If you choose to start your day working on low-value tasks, you will soon develop the habit of always starting and working on low-value tasks in your whole life.So be wise and choose the right one.

But the sad fact is that most people procrastinate on the top 10 or 20 percent of items that are the most valuable and important, the “vital few,” and busy themselves instead with the least important 80 percent, the “trivial many,” that contribute very little to their success.The need of the hour is to adapt the 80-20 rule and start working on the things which matters the most to life.

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