20/80 Pareto Principle

by Daryl

Spend 80% of your time on the 20% of most important things and you're set for life.

Kell's reply:Thanks Daryl for your time management tip.

What you are referring to is the Pareto principle which was named after an Italian economist who observed that 20% of landowners owned 80% of the land.

However, the Pareto principle applies to many other areas of life. If you look across industry, business, wealth distribution and many other areas, you will see that this will hold to be generally true.

For example, 20% of customers generate 80% of complaints, 20% of IT faults take 80% of the IT department's time, 20% of clients generate 80% of revenue and so forth.

The Pareto principle also holds for time management. So if you have a to do list with 10 things on it, it is likely that the top 2 tasks will generate 80% of the your results.

The take-home message for time management is to identify what your key tasks are that generate the big results.

Once you identify them, protect your time on them as this put you on the right side of the 80/20 equation.


To do this, block time out on a weekly basis in your time management planner.

This is an easy and effective way to boost your personal time management.

By using the Pareto principle you improve your time management skills and ensure that your big rocks get done.