Pareto principle – 1 great rule for productivity and effectiveness.

The Pareto principle is a well-known rule that is used across many sectors of business. The right time management is crucial for everyday work. To increase your productivity you have to set the priorities and the sequence of your tasks. The rule is useful for business and personal, everyday activities. Read more to find out how to plan your activity more effectively.

Pareto principle – table of contents:

1. Pareto principle – main assumptions
2. Pareto principle – the meaning
3. Your goal
4. Pareto principle – try it
5. Implementation of Pareto rule
6. Summary

Pareto principle – main assumptions

The Pareto principle is named by the Italian economist and researcher Vilfredo Pareto. But not many people know that the principle was created by Joseph Juran, who researched and published the study about the rule. This was in 1951 when Juran led the research on the allocation of resources and based on his observations formulated the rule of “the vital few and the trivial many”.

The rule, its original assumption, claims that 80% of results are achieved by 20% of the effort. Initially, the observations of Pareto dealt with the national wealth in Italy. Pareto has discovered that 20% of Italian families possess 80% of the assets. The rule has since been established in the economy, but it is used in many other fields.

Pareto principle – the meaning

The Pareto principle should help you with prioritization, which means that one should concentrate on the most important task, that has the key meaning for our business. While applying the rule one has to assume that usually only 20% of tasks are really important and have an impact on 80% of your success.

The rule helps to prioritize efficiently. The Pareto rule may be helpful in scheduling and planning. It has sense only if the person that makes plans can define his goals clearly as well as distinguish between important and trivial matters. It means that the rule can be implemented only when you know well the business and its operations.

Your goal

Many individuals state that they work hard and they are constantly busy, but they do not see the effects. But it seems that it is the problem with setting priorities.

Insignificant issues frequently disturb the realization of those more important. Why do we concentrate on those less important tasks? One of the reasons is that those tasks are usually easy to perform. In other cases, it is incompetent prioritizing. In most situations, we are not even aware that our attention is being focused on insignificant matters that don’t generate real development or progress.

Here the Pareto principle can be used successfully. It is not about the strict elimination of all insignificant tasks. The main aim of the rule is to show the real importance of our daily duties. The elements that are not on the list of priorities cannot be seen as meaningless and irrelevant.

Many business specialists and coaches quote an example: 80% of your income comes from 20% of your clients. It does not mean that we should ignore all 80% of our clients. The rule shows the reasons for such an outcome. Define the group of your most loyal, influential clients and aim at them with your marketing activities.

Pareto principle – try it

Effective time management allows you to work less instead to work more. One should work more efficiently and his effort should bring more tangible results. The Pareto principle helps to eliminate all unnecessary distractions and use the time more effectively.

The main aim of the Pareto rule is not to minimize effort or shorten the working time, the rule helps to concentrate on the most important tasks. The first stage of implementation of the rule should be the analysis of the time spent on particular tasks. Any measurement tool should help you with this activity. The result may surprise you.

Implementation of Pareto rule

The Pareto rule cannot be implemented once, the change is an ongoing process. It is not enough to set priorities. If you want to use the Pareto principle in your life, you have to create a list of tasks and review and modify it regularly. How to start? Choose the key areas of your activity first. No matter if you wish to want to revolutionize your private life or business life, prioritizing is the first step of Pareto rule implementation.

When you have the key elements of your activity identified, choose those which should be on your list of tasks. Then you have to decide what to do with the rest – are they important enough to be done, or should you delegate them to someone else?

Each specified task should be planned in time. It is worth taking into account your daily schedule and habits here. There are many time management techniques. Some of the techniques require starting each day with the most important task. Researchers claim that the efficiency of the mind is the greatest in the morning.

Personalization – is the trend that is present in the e-commerce industry for a while. Clients like to be treated exceptionally and love to have an opportunity to choose. This is why some of them decide to solve the problem by telephone, some may use a chatbot, and others will contact the customer service team with the help of Messenger.

There are suggestions that tasks should be divided into smaller parts to avoid the feeling of being overwhelmed. It is up to you which method to choose. The most important is to adjust the technique to your habits and schedule of the day. Crucial is to concentrate only on tasks that are on the list.

It is beneficial to avoid being distracted which can stop you from achieving your important goals. Today, this seems to be difficult because we are constantly bombarded with junk emails or unwanted phone calls. Disturbances make us lose a lot of our precious time.

Summary

The biggest advantage of using the Pareto rule is the ability to select the key fields of our business that need to be developed. Thanks to the principle you can effectively determine your priorities. The Pareto principle used for task management can increase your productivity – all you have to remember is to eliminate all unimportant tasks and concentrate on vital ones. All activities that have only a small impact on your business should be delegated.

Read also: Global leadership trends in business for 2022 and 2023

If you like our content, join our busy bees community on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest.