Pauline E. Ranger The 80/20 principle or Pareto Principle is well-known and widely accepted in business. This principle states that a small number of causes or efforts lead to a large majority of results.
It is easy to see in business:
80% of the profits of a company come from only 20% of customers
80% of the sales of a company come from only 20% of its products
20% of customers are responsible for 80% of all customer complaints
The 80/20 rule is not a formula but a principle based on the fact that it is not the distribution. The 80/20 code is about recognizing that there’s a mismatch between effort and results. It will only sometimes be 80/20. For example, the split could be 90/10 or 99/1. However, it won’t be 50/50.
Understanding the 80/20 rule and how it applies to blogging will increase your productivity and your success.
How do you spend your time
Many tools are available to help you do this, but I use Rescue Time. You can use many tools to do this, but I prefer Rescue Time.
RescueTime is a computer app that you can install. It measures active computer time. It has a free and a paid version, but the free one is perfect for my needs. It only measures the “on top” application or in focus. RescueTime stops calculating a time for an application when it detects your computer as idle.
Then, you can either log in to your dashboard and analyze how much time you’ve spent or wait until the weekly email arrives to see your productivity. Rescue Time will classify websites and applications and create a weekly productivity score with your help.
It doesn’t matter what tool you use as long as you can get reliable information on your time usage. A recent study revealed that humans need to improve at estimating their time usage and how long they spend doing things.
A typical person who reports having worked 40 hours worked closer to 37. The report concluded that “the greater the estimate, the greater overestimate.” People who claimed to have worked 75 hours worked closer to 50 hours. This is an overestimation of 25 hours or 50%! People who work relatively few hours (under 25) tend to underestimate their work hours. source
Rescue Time is a tool that takes out the guesswork and leaves you with only the statistics to analyze.
Bloggers work in a world full of distractions. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have vast teams of paid professionals working solely on how to get and keep our attention. We can easily let a five-minute check on our Facebook page turn into 35 minutes as we get sucked in by the latest viral meme. We need to be honest about how much time we spend on these platforms and what value they provide.
Your time analysis will help you determine where you spend the most time and get the best return on your efforts.
No matter how efficiently you manage your time, you will only achieve the desired productivity if you spend your time on the right things. The trivial majority of tasks are often called the trivial few, while the vital few are the ones that produce accurate results.
Make Changes
Once you have your data, now is the time to start making changes. It would help if you asked yourself these questions:
What are the most effective tasks?
What should I spend more time doing?
Do I spend time on tasks that help me achieve my goals?
What can I do to eliminate specific tasks?
What lessons can I automate for myself?
What batch functions can I perform?
Once you have the answers, now comes the hard part. You cannot increase productivity by changing your working style. Instead, it would help if you changed what you do.
It is often easier to complete trivial tasks than important ones. These vital tasks, such as creating killer content, creating ebooks, and creating courses, are cognitively demanding and require your brain to be at its best. Hard work is complex and requires concentration. This can be achieved through one tasking. It also takes practice.
This practice will not only increase your productivity, but you’ll also feel a sense of accomplishment when you complete a difficult task.
