Keep adjusting your strategy to make improvements. It may be difficult to know what makes up the 20 percent of your most valuable tasks when you start out with the Pareto principle.įiguring this out is an ongoing process: you’ll need to monitor how much time you spend on different types of tasks and what results they bring. Identifying the 20 percent of leads that are likely to become valuable customers is a far better use of your time than trying to convert everyone who meets the bare minimum qualification criteria. Plus, there’s no need to wait for a user to convert into a client before you apply this rule - it is equally relevant to leads. Dedicating 80 percent of your time and attention to 20 percent of your clients will increase sales, improve retention rates, and ultimately grow your business. Focus Your Efforts on 20 Percent of Your Clients In fact, it is especially important to put those easy items lower down your to-do list, as it can be tempting to check off as many items as possible to feel like you’re making progress - in reality, though, you’ll be achieving little.Ĥ. Put everything that has only a low impact at the bottom of your list, even if you could complete many of these items quickly and easily. Think about how every item relates to your SMART goals and how much impact these individual tasks will have. Scrap the to-do lists you currently have and create a new one with the 80/20 rule in mind. Focus your efforts on mitigating just these. You’ll likely find that around 20 percent of all your distractions lead to 80 percent of your wasted time. A time-tracking tool is ideal for this purpose. An easy way to figure out your main sources of distraction is to take detailed notes of how exactly you spend your time over the course of one week. Of course, you may be unsure what is distracting you the most, which will make it difficult to take the right course of action. Whatever the reason for your distractions, there’s a way to work around it. If you find that you cannot help looking at your phone when you receive a notification, turn off notifications for all but the essential apps. You may need to employ some strategies to ensure you do this.įor instance, if something pops into your head and you’re worried you’ll forget about it, write it down and continue working. If you know a distraction is less important than whatever you’re working on, leave it until later. You can even justify that whatever is distracting you matters as well - or at least you could if you weren’t following the 80/20 rule. When a task is difficult or unappealing, it’s extra easy to give in to distractions. Whereas it’s impossible to prevent distractions entirely, it’s up to you whether you succumb to them. Prevent DistractionsĪnother way you can unintentionally waste your time if you give into distractions. However, taking the leap to put one of those ideas into action will mean you finish sooner and start seeing results that push your business forward. Think of it like this: it’s more challenging to start a project than to brainstorm ideas with your team. When your focus is just on that 20 percent of critical tasks, you should find that you have much more free time. In fact, if you’re always busy, this could be a sign that you’re not managing your time in accordance with the 80/20 rule. It’s important to remember that just staying busy is not enough. It’s true that you do need to complete these tasks eventually, but pushing back your higher-priority work will ultimately mean it takes longer to see results and you’ll likely need to work longer hours just to meet your deadlines. When you sit down to work at the start of the day, where do you begin? The majority of people start with the tasks that are the most appealing. Once you have these defined, you can start improving your time management. The best kinds of goals to set are SMART goals. Applying the 80/20 Ruleīefore you start applying the 80/20 rule to your own life, you need to have clear goals for what you want to achieve. The key point here is that a minority of tasks matter most in terms of helping you reach your goals. There’s no need to go to the effort to calculate exactly 20 percent of your tasks. The 80/20 rule states that two of those items will account for 80 percent of the total value of the results. Imagine you have 10 items on your to-do list. How Does the 80/20 Rule Relate to Time Management? One useful way to apply the 80/20 rule is time management. The 80/20 rule states that, in many circumstances, 20 percent of the causes lead to 80 percent of the results. The phenomenon is named after the Italian economist who discovered it. Most people are familiar with the 80/20 concept, although you may know it by its official name: the Pareto principle.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |