Overwhelmed to Organized
Embracing Pareto’s 80-20 Rule
I learned about the Pareto Principle in college. I clearly see my 19-year-old self, squeezed in one of those right-handed desks in my Microeconomics class. I picture the hunched professor and hear his gravelly voice. He mentioned the Pareto principle with respect to Microeconomics, stating that 80% of results come from 20% of causes.
But then he went on to relate the principle to our personal lives and getting assignments done. He commented that 20% of our effort with school work and studying will account for about 80% of our grade. If you know which 20% to focus on, you can study for much less time. This is the part that stuck with me. So this week, coming from a vacation and a full in-box, I decided to pay more attention to the Pareto principle, hoping to catch up with my work in fewer hours.
The Pareto principle or 80-20 rule was derived from an observation by economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). He noted that 80% of the wealth in Italy belonged to 20% of the population. Since then, the Pareto principle has been applied to many fields, including project management, scientific impact, and creative work.
Understanding the 80-20 rule, especially as it relates to your work, can help you streamline your efforts and focus on the work that creates the most impact. Here are a few examples:
80% of your writing income comes from 20% of your body of work.
80% of your customers come from 20% of your advertising.
80% of your impact results from 20% of your publications.
80% of failures originate from 20% of the tasks.
80% of your output comes from 20% of your collaborations.
80% of your grants come from 20% of funding agencies.
80% of problems come from 20% of coworkers.
An Extended Example…
So, taking one example a little further (or maybe completely down a rabbit hole), I decided to ignore my inbox and look at the impact of my scientific publications. I based impact on the number of citations each article received according to Google Scholar. As of today, I have 843 citations on about 60 publications. But the citations are not spread evenly across my publications. The top publication has 107 citations and the bottom publications have 0 citations.
Now applying the Pareto principle, 80% of my 843 citations is about 168 citations. Those 168 citations come from ONLY THE TOP TWO PUBLICATIONS! Understand, there are flaws in this analysis and numerous errors on Google Scholar, but let’s just go with it for a second.
For efficiency, I just looked at the top and bottom. At the bottom of the list are publications from extended abstracts from conference proceedings (for those of you not in the research arena, these are shorter articles or abstracts submitted when you attend certain conferences and published along with the rest of the articles/abstracts after the conference). Which might tell me that I should not be spending a lot of time writing extended abstracts. It is a little harder to find similarities with the highest impact publications. They are not published in the same journal. They are not on the same subject. They were written 20 years apart. I did not know before I wrote them whether or not they would create significant impact, but I probably could have guessed.
Now, I started thinking about this principle because I had an overflowing inbox. Which is still overflowing. But is spending my time on those emails the most effective use of my time? Will it result in any impact on my career, coworkers, or job satisfaction?
I think one of the best applications of the Pareto principle is to time management. The suggestion is that 80% of results achieved will come from only 20% of the time spent working. This makes it crucial to identify the tasks that will drive the most impact and prioritize them accordingly. So, instead of addressing each email by responding or deleting, I scanned them quickly and made a list of the things that were really important to get done this week.
It can be easy to get bogged down in details or minor elements that don't add much to the overall impact of a task or piece of work. This is not only true of work, but can be said of other parts of your life. Like health, money, stress, joy:
80% of your health results come from 20% of exercises/nutritional habits
80% of returns come from 20% of investments
80% of stress comes from 20% of people/situations
80% of joy comes from 20% of friends/activities
So, you might want to identify the 20% of your input that is creating 80% of your outcome and focus your efforts there rather than spreading yourself thin. I am going to be thinking about this a lot more in the coming days as I try and catch up, but at the same time strive to live with more joy and less stress by focusing on what really matters. Perhaps that is what my old Microeconomics professor was trying to get across all along.