80/20 Your Life: Get More Done With Less Effort, Time, and Action

What’s important to learn is how to determine exactly which 20% needs the most attention, as well as how you can make any effort or input beyond that more efficient.

could waste time and energy on things in life that make no material difference to our success or happiness, all the while ignoring those aspects that have the real impact.

Let that sink in: most of the clothing in your wardrobe, the apps on your phone and the plans you spend your time daydreaming about don’t actually end up being all that important. Rather, it’s only the tiniest fraction of your ideas, items, actions, etc. that really matter.

What’s important to learn is how to determine exactly which 20% needs the most attention, as well as how you can make any effort or input beyond that more efficient.

There is some truth to this claim, especially when it comes to acquiring new skills. Eighty percent of your proficiency in most things can be acquired by focusing on the most important 20%, but to be among the best, you’ll need to go beyond that and master your art.

Taking care of just a small, but the most important, part of an issue can produce returns that are worth many times the effort you put in.

A caveat is that these bugs, though small in number, were actually among the most complex, and fixing them may well trigger new problems.

Our successes, failures, problems, and their solutions all seem to be in some way determined by how we use (or fail to use) the 80/20 principle.

Briefly, according to the 80/20 principle, 20% of causes or inputs into any sort of endeavor result in 80% of the outcomes and results.

He also used this principle to explain why so many of us have messy desks. It’s because the objects cluttering it are the ones we use frequently, and refraining from organizing the desk makes access to these items easier. This allows us to apply the least effort.