80% of the smart phone industry is dominated by just 20% of the companies. Similarly, When working on a business, 20% of the tasks would be of so much significance that they would contribute to 80% of the results whereas the remaining 80% tasks will impact only 20% of the business. The 80-20 rule can be significant anywhere and has a great importance in the way this world works.
Today, we want to talk about how to use this principle and make the most from your life, earn more, live better and happier.
What Exactly Is the 80-20 Rule?
Do you know the most important thing required for earning more money from your workplace? Well, it is nothing but performance. Even at work, you would fine 20% of the tasks that would contribute to 80% of your job. Your focus should be on improving upon these tasks and becoming a master at each of them.
The more efficiently you perform, the more effective you would get at your work resulting in superior results.
Step 1 – The 7 Areas of Life
Almost every human life has 6-7 core areas where it revolves around. And, each area has its own 20% of significant tasks to perform and 80% of insignificant tasks to perform. Those 6-7 areas are as follows:
• Personal Life
• Health
• Social Life
• Family Life
• Spiritual
• Professional Life
• Money & Financial Life
So, the first step that you need to take is – write-down each and every task that pertains to these areas of life. Begin with personal life from your personal growth to, to how you aim your life to be and what are the things you would need to do in order to accomplish your personal goals, then move onto the other one.
Ideally, each aspect of life would have around 10-12 goals that people want to accomplish. Of course, these goals can be more or less depending on an individual.
Step 2 – Prioritizing Goals
Once you write down everything that pertains to each task, then what you need to do is – rate each task on a scale of 1-10 to their importance. Remember, out of all those goals in each area of life only a specific few will contribute to maximum results.
So, the key is to figure out those critical goals/tasks that you think would contribute to 80% of the results. That is exactly what you need to focus on. While some people’s goal in health is to be more energetic, other’s aim for weight loss.
Of course, there would be several smaller tasks that you would need to perform for each goal but that comes later. In step 2, your only job is to write down just the goals and prioritize them in terms of the value it would bring to that particular area of your life; and nothing else.
Step 3 – Getting More Specific with Goals
By now, you would have your goals ready and prioritized for implementation. But here’s the thing; these are just raw goals and accomplishing each goal would require you to dig deeper, get specific and break down into a number of steps.
In order to accomplish a goal, you might even require learning things, master new techniques/skills, etc. which you should do as it would bring tremendous benefits to you in the long-run.
For example, the highest priority goal for you in Health aspect of your life is – Cycling every day. Then, in order to perform this effectively, you first need to get a bicycle, a helmet, a nice pair of comfortable shoes, etc. These are the sub-tasks that you need to perform to prepare for the bigger goal (in this case, cycling every day).
You can repeat the exercise with other goals within health sector as well as other areas of life I mentioned above. And, remember, once a particular area is set and prioritized, then just focus on that ONE thing without getting distracted to other things.
So, these are the three major steps that you need to follow in order to come up with great strategies that can help you improve the overall standard of your life. Here is how your goals should generally be:
Step 4 – Prioritize within Different Areas of Life
Analyze different aspects of your life and find out which aspects require maximum attention. Ask questions; do I need to manage my health first? Or do I first need to enhance my financial conditions.
This small exercise would allow you to get clarity on what exactly you would need to begin with and what needs to more attention.
The single most benefit of the 80-20 rule is that, it allows you to chuck every low-value activity from your life and would make you focus more and more on the things that matter the most.
Therefore, start working on identifying, creating, and setting areas that you would like to become good at. In a matter of few days of working within each area, you can find a great change in your life, literally!
Step 5 – Stick to the Plan
Once you clean the initial stages, you don’t need to worry about anything else. The best about this whole exercise, you’re prioritizing your tasks in a way that once those things are worked-up and completed, you would drive 80% of the results for that particular area.
Therefore, it is extremely significant that you stick to the plan, work on it consistently and believe me, you won’t even have to worry about the results. Results would automatically pour-in. Not rocket science!
Few Important Things to Remember…
• The 80-20 plan would bring you absolutely zero results if you spend time on it. The key is to spend good amount of time on the initial prioritizing, goal setting and identifying tasks of higher value. Because it would help you determine which 20% things would bring-in maximum results.
• The principle can be applied for almost everything in life. Whether you need better relationships or better pay or even better lifestyle, you can use this method quite effectively.
• The 80-20 rule would bring immense clarity in how you would like to approach your life; but you cannot leave after one or two exercises. You need to implement it as much as possible; in every aspect of life.
To conclude, out of all the life improvement methods and techniques developed by several motivational speakers and others, the above mentioned principle ranks definitely among the best for me. Try it out and I’m sure you would be surprised with the results you get. Go for it!