The quality of our life depends on how we prioritize time. Those who want to achieve everything often attend to the secondary while leaving aside the essential.

To avoid this danger, at the beginning of the last century an Italian economist established a rule to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Who was Pareto?

Son of a Genoese voluntarily exiled to France, Vilfredo Pareto He was born in Paris in the mid-19th century, but returned to Italy to study for a doctorate in Engineering in Turin.

For twenty years he served as administrator of a railway company and then assumed the position of superintendent in some iron mines. All of this gave him a lot of experience in the field of productivitywriting different works on economics. In 1906, he published the famous observation that 20% of the population owned 80% of the property in Italy.

Pareto’s rule

What we know today as the Pareto rule It was generalized four decades later by the Romanian consultant Joseph Moses Juran. This «evangelist of quality», as he was known, emigrated to the United States, where he carried out his profession and his life with great success, since he died at the age of 103. In 1941, Juran was reading works by Vilfredo Pareto when he came across his rule and decided to test it in productivity processes. He found that, in fact, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

This applies in multiple areas, as scholars of this principle assure. For example:

• Pareto himself observed that 80% of political power was in the hands of 20% of the population of the country, and the same distribution was observed in the distribution of wealth.
• Applied to agriculture, this principle ensures that a 20% of the pods produce 80% of the peas of an orchard.
• To increase the profitability of a warehouse, following this rule, efforts must be concentrated on 20% of the merchandisethose most in demand and that They represent 80% of the commercial value of the company. Therefore, that 20% that generates 80% of movements must be placed close to where orders are prepared for greater efficiency.

The Pareto rule is applied in many more areas, to the point that it is considered a universal law of productivity.

JM Juran called this proportion «the law of the vital few and the trivial many» to point out that a small part of the causes originate the majority of relevant results, both positive and negative. Therefore, if we achieve identify those causes and focus on themanything we do in life will experience a leap in quality.

How to apply Pareto’s law to life

What Pareto stated in 1906 and that Juran applied to the industry from 1941 onwards has come to us in 2007 from the consultant Timothy Ferriss. Your manual The 4 hour work daywhich in its original version had the subtitle: «Escape the 9 to 5, live wherever you want and join the nouveau riche», brought Pareto’s law to the management of any profession and life itself. In fact, the part of the book – very extensive, by the way – that deals with this law begins with this quote from Bruce Lee: «You do not have to accumulate, but eliminate. It is not about increasing every day, but about decreasing every day. Cultivating oneself always culminates in simplicity».

The Pareto rule invites us to focus on 20% quality, both in the profession and in personal relationships. If we identify the 20% of friendships that bring us true well-being and happiness, we should give up – or at least reduce our treatment – ​​of the remaining 80% so that we can dedicate more time to that core of great value.

Optimize time and life

The same applies to any free time activity and we can also take it to social networks. Tim Ferriss explains in his book how The 20-80 rule allowed him to clean up his client portfolio when he was a consultant: «When I discovered Pareto’s work one night, I had been slaving away for years 15 hours a day, seven days a week, feeling completely overwhelmed and usually helpless. I would get up before dawn to call the UK, deal with the US during the normal 9-5, and then stay up until almost midnight to phone Japan and New Zealand. I was trapped on a runaway freight train with no brakes, shoveling coal into the boiler for lack of anything better to do.».

We all feel like this sometimes, overwhelmed by obligations in an automatic routine that hides a lack of judgment. If you don’t apply any rules, The demands of others will take away your time and energy.until in the end you will say to yourself: «It doesn’t give me life».

What did Tim Ferriss do when he discovered Pareto’s law? After assuming that 20% of the causes were responsible for 80% of their problems, as well as 20% of the causes produced 80% of their happiness and fulfilled desires, He began to dissect his personal and professional life. Let him tell us himself: «In the next 24 hours, I made several simple but emotionally difficult decisions that changed my life forever and made possible the way of life I now enjoy (…): I no longer contacted 95% of my clients and fired 2%, which left me with 3% of my income producers to study and find similar ones. Of over 120 wholesalers, only 5 were providing me with 95% of my income. I was spending 98% of my time chasing the rest; In other words, I was working because I felt like I had to.». Thanks to that cleaning, Ferriss made his business more profitable with fewer work hours.

If we start thinking this way, let’s filter our existence with criteria of quality and well-being. What are the 20% of the people who give you 80% of your inspirations and good humor in your life? What is the 20% of leisure activities that produce 80% of your satisfaction? We may not be able to work 4 hours a week, as Ferriss proposes, but we will be closer to live fully each of our hours.

See the bottleneck

In 1984, consultant Eliyahu M. Goldratt published The goalwhich is based on this principle: there is no point in trying to improve all the departments of a company until you detect the place where activity is paralyzed. The same applies to life: What is the bottleneck you need to solve right now?

Goldratt refers to a childhood excursion, in which progress is made slowly. Efforts to straighten the path are of no use until they discover that the first in line, with the least physical conditions, has the heaviest backpack. After removing weight and distributing it among more agile companions, the pace of the entire group accelerates.

Use Pareto for life

The rule that we have seen in this article also applies to the clothes we wear. It is very likely that 80% of the time you wear only 20% of the clothes from your closet, those that you like the most and with which you feel most comfortable. Becoming aware of this will help you give away the clothes you don’t wear and reduce clutter.

By bringing this filter to the screen of your smartphone, it is very possible that only use 20% of the applications that you have installed. The rest just take up space and slow down the device. If you haven’t used them for a year or more, you can eliminate them without any bad conscience. Plus, it will be faster for you to find the ones you do use.