Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Percentages
One day, when I was discussing the concept of just being organized enough to a mom in my home away from home, our local city playground, she said, “Oh, yeah, the 80 percent rule.”
The what? She explained a theory used in business management that said 80 percent of profits come from 20 percent of the work. Thus, one shouldn’t try to give 100 percent to everything, instead concentrating on the 20 percent that really matters. Cue my mind exploding. People said this? In public?
Coming from a world where everyone was encouraged to give 110 percent, one hundred percent of the time, this was a revelation to me. With further research, I found that this same principle, the Pareto Principle, is the basis for the blockbuster time-management book The 4-Hour Workweekby Tim Ferriss. It got me thinking, what I am really teaching with my über-organizational sessions? Am I wasting clients’ time – the eighth deadly sin on the island of Manhattan!?
Of course not. I might urge you to be fully present when setting up a dresser, to give a seemingly mundane task your best effort. What I am really after is for you to create a good structure so that then you can only use say, ten percent of your brain when you put your clothes away. This is what Ferriss terms “automation.”
The message is really the same: work smart. You can’t put 110 percent into every little thing (trust me, I’ve tried). But, if you give time and real focus into putting good systems into place, then with 20 percent of your brain, you can quickly accomplish 80 percent of the tasks that life is made up of, leaving you the other 80 percent of your brain for the 20 percent of life that is really important. It’s all about priorities.
I am forever after my clients to do the important thing first. I have seen how certain urgent, to-do items never get done on some of my client’s to-do lists. Myself, being somewhat of a masochist and The Perfect Daughter, I tend to do the most arduous, important, stress-inducing tasks first. That way, if I don’t get to the end of my list on any given day, at least I did the important thing. Moreover, from the Pareto/Ferriss perspective, the rest of the list may not be worth doing anyway.
It is easy to get caught in a treadmill of minutiae (instead of an actual treadmill), but so much of that stuff – the emails, invitations, things we want to buy, things we want to read — so much of it could get pitched and we would never miss it.
So what is the 20 percent that really matters? What do you want? Once you start answering those deeper questions and decide what three items go at the top of your to-do list, life gets a lot easier. And here is the challenge: Can you do those top three items and throw the rest of the list out?