Instead of improving everything (urgh, much effort), try to improve the tiny things that have a disproportionate impact.

How many shoes do you have? 20% of your pairs will be worn 80% of the time. Want to work more efficiently? 20% of your time at work generates 80% of the value. Want more claps? 20% of your articles attract 80% of total claps.

My mind was blown when I first learned of 80/20 law (aka the Pareto principle).

Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian genius who was an engineer, a sociologist, an economist, a political scientist, and a philosopher. While he was busy doing all these jobs, he managed to discover something interesting.

Income wasn’t distributed evenly. Instead of following the normal law of distribution, with a majority of people having an average income, it was heavily skewed towards the rich.

In fact, 20% of people held an entire 80% of total wealth.

What is remarkable with Pareto’s principle is how widely it applies to anything.

Think about it.

20% of your time at work accounts for 80% of your output.

For example: 20% of my training gives me 80% of the return. So this tells me I should focus on the 20% that is giving me a huge return. So that I could give it more time and effort.

The 80/20 law is everywhere. The more you look, the more you will find examples of it staring right back at you.

Which is pretty cool.

Because you can apply it to your work to be more productive.

Ask yourself,

“What is the 20% of your work that gets you 80% of the credit and recognition from your work?”

Work on identifying that 20% of your super productive time to make it even more productive.

I was doing my own research before writing this article. I looked at all my blog posts I published so far. Of the 300 blog posts, the ones who have the largest views and read-ratios are less than 20.

These 20 articles have a thousand views and more each, while the rest have 100 and even less than that number.

When I looked at these articles, I was able to see which topics were getting me more views. Of the 20 articles, 18 of them were on self-improvement.

This tells me I should focus on articles related to self-improvement. My articles on communication have only a few views. This tells me I am not getting the result I need from writing about communication. I should abandon them.

Because by spending more time and effort on what is bringing us a huge result, we become more productive.

Strategy to increase production:

·Find out your 20%. What activity or task from your day is bringing you more results? Which types of your articles are giving you more claps?

·Spend 80% of your time and effort with the above 20%.

To your inspirations,

Banchi