Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 41 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Extreme Pareto
— From The ONE Thing: The surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan (watch the book trailer)
The to-do list is a magnificent tool and companion to our busy lives. Yet since the list can also serve as a catchall for minor, unimportant things, we feel the urge to get them done and cross them off—just because they were on our list. This leads to us being busy, but not necessarily productive: “busyness rarely takes care of business.”
But if we all have the same 24 hours in a day, how is it that some people seem to achieve much and get a lot of things done? What do they do differently? What do they know that we don’t? “Achievers always work from a clear sense of priority.”
Enter the Pareto Principle. You may be familiar with this already: it’s the 80/20 rule. It states that, “a minority of causes, inputs, or effort [the 20 percent] usually lead to a majority of the results, outputs or rewards [the 80 percent].”
What this means is that 80 percent of our results will come from 20 percent of our focused efforts. Thus, “a to-do list becomes a success list when you apply Pareto’s Principle to it.” The idea is simple, take your to-do list and cull it down to the 20 percent of things that will yield the biggest results.
But why stop there? Gary Keller, author of The ONE Thing, encourages us to practice “Extreme Pareto” to get down to the one item on our to-do list that is the absolutely most essential to our success. He says, “Keep going. You can actually take 20 percent of the 20 percent of the 20 percent and continue until you get to the single most important thing! No matter the task, mission or goal. Big or small. Start with as large a list as you want, but develop the mindset that you will whittle your way from there to the critical few and not stop until you end with the essential ONE. The imperative ONE. The ONE Thing.”
“Sometimes it’s the first thing you do. Sometimes it’s the only thing you do. Regardless, doing the most important thing is always the most important thing.”
ACTION
TODAY: Take a look at your to-do list. Apply the Pareto Principle and focus on narrowing it down to the 20 percent of items that you need to get done. Then go extreme, keep applying the Pareto Principle to narrow it down, 20-percent-at-a-time, until you reach your ONE thing. Get that done before anything else, even if it’s the only thing you do all day.
FUTURE: Make a habit of applying Extreme Pareto when planning the week ahead of you by asking: “What’s the ONE Thing you can do this week such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?” Do that ONE Thing, and once you are done, ask again… and repeat. You’ll see that by focusing on the vital few you’ll be able to move forward more rapidly than if you spend your time and attention in the trivial many.
Know someone who’s spread too thin and could benefit from Extreme Pareto? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!