How to Coach Yourself and Others Happiness Is No Accident | Page 22

TWENTY UNIQUE WAYS TO USE THE 80/20 RULE
I’m sure most people are familiar with Pareto’s principle, developed by an Italian economist and
most commonly known as the 80/20 Rule. While Pareto originally used the rule noticing that 80%
of the wealth was owned by 20% of the population, the rule has applications in almost every area
of life.
There are many ways you can use this rule. Here’s twenty:
1. Work Tasks - Write down all the broad categories of tasks you do at your job. You can make
a little table that shows the amount of hours spent at each category (say, 1 hr for E-mail, 1 hr for
contacting clients, etc.) and on another column write down a value estimate for what percentage
you believe it contributes to your productivity. Eliminate, simplify or delegate low %’s and focus
on high %’s.
2. Food - Record your eating habits for a week. Calculate up the calories of the different items of
food. I’ve done this before and I’ve found it surprising how some treats contribute a high
percentage of your calorie pie for no nutritional value, when other vices consumed in smaller
portions take up only a sliver but still offer a tasty treat.
3. Daily Time Log - Do a time log on your activities for an entire day. Record the stop and start
point for any activity. Then broadly shuffle the different activities into categories. Figure out what
parts of your day aren’t contributing to either productivity, entertainment or personal happiness
and cut them out.
4. Reading - Look at the last few dozen books you’ve read. Rate them according to the amount of
useful info or entertainment value. Look for trends and use that info to skim or skip future books to
save time.
5. Relationships - Look at your social circle and friends. Do a rough estimate of the amount of
time and energy you invest in each relationship. Compare that to the amount of stress or
satisfaction. You might find that certain relationships are toxic and others are valuable and should
be invested in more.
6. RSS Feeds - Look through your feed list. Write down the percentage of articles you enjoyed
out of the last ten in the feed. Eliminate the lowest %’s. You may want to take into account article
length or posting rate, but quality is probably the best measurement of all.
7. E-Mail - Group the types of e-mails you answer into basic categories. Consider developing a
template for the most common e-mail responses that contribute the least potential value for
answering personally.
8. Magazine Subscriptions - Same as RSS feeds. Go through all your subscriptions and give a
percentage scale of what you perceive to be the value of the last several editions. Cancel
subscriptions to the bottom and leave the top.
9. Television Shows - Record your television watching habits for a week or two. After watching
give a subjective rating of the television show. Afte r your done, total up the amount spent on
different shows or channels. If you have a special subscription service, cancel the channels that
you don’t watch or have little value. Otherwise, consider eliminating live television entirely and
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