An interesting example comes from Paul Krugman in The New York Times ( Graduates vs. It works sometimes, but sometimes it does not work (and can fail miserably). In addition to this bad application scenario, the Pareto principle is just a rule of thumb. More on this later, in the practical part of this post. Always keep some buffer time to relax, take it easy and disconnect from stress. If you apply the 80/20 rule to your life, be sure to first make clear what are you giving up, and don’t mix leisure with work, or even different projects at work. You have fallen to the productivity trap. Your relationships degrade, your home turns to a mess and you become just a workaholic (NY Times). And then, relaxing with friends, mowing the lawn or playing with your kids is delayed or canceled to just work a little more in Quadrant 2. And productivity geeks are usually ripe for fluking at this: they treat leisure time as non-urgent-non-important. You can’t mix apples and oranges as much as you can’t mix work and leisure. Â Thus, you start discarding all other things and work happily in Quadrant 2. In this splitting, Quadrant 2 activities, corresponding to non-urgent-important tasks is where 20% tasks are assumed to be, and the tasks every life coach urges you to work on. When taught, it comes combined with Stephen Covey’s idea of life quadrants, where you split your tasks in 4 categories according to whether they are important and urgent (important-urgent, important-non-urgent, non-important-urgent, non-important-non-urgent). The problem with the Pareto principle is complex. From his book it spread to almost all time management and productivity advice out there, where it is usually stated as I wrote above. This principle was observed by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto in the beginning of the 20th century and was put into fame by The 4 Hour Work Week, by Tim Ferriss. If you are running a company, 20% of your clients buy 80% of your production, to be clearer. In case you have not, the Pareto rule states that 20% of your inputs lead to 80% of your outputs. If you are anything into increasing your productivity, I am sure you have heard of the 80/20 rule, or Pareto principle. ![]() ![]() Read on, enjoy and share your view in the comments section! This is a guest post by Ruben Berenguel, this post I’ll explore some of the fallacies tied with the 80/20 rule applied to enhancing your productivity, as well as giving some possible solutions to its shortcomings.
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