The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More With Less (22 page)

A much more attractive, and at least equally attainable, combination is that of extreme ambition with confidence, relaxation, and a civilized manner. This is the 80/20 ideal, but it rests on solid empirical foundations. Most great achievements are made through a combination of steady application and sudden insight. Think of Archimedes in his bath or Newton sitting under a tree being struck by an apple. The immensely important insights thus generated would not have happened if Archimedes had not been thinking about displacement or Newton about gravity, but neither would have occurred if Archimedes had been chained to his desk or Newton frenetically directing teams of scientists.

Most of what any of us achieve in life, of any serious degree of value to ourselves and others, occurs in a very small proportion of our working lives. 80/20 Thinking and observation make this perfectly clear. We have more than enough time. We demean ourselves, both by lack of ambition and by assuming that ambition is served by bustle and busyness. Achievement is driven by insight and selective action. The still, small voice of calm has a bigger place in our lives than we acknowledge. Insight comes when we are feeling relaxed and good about ourselves. Insight requires time—and time, despite conventional wisdom, is there in abundance.

80/20 INSIGHTS FOR INDIVIDUALS

The rest of Part Three will explore 80/20 insights for your personal life, some of which can be sampled here as a taster. It only takes action on a few insights to improve greatly the quality of your life.

• 80 percent of achievement and happiness takes place in 20 percent of our time—and these peaks can be expanded greatly.

• Our lives are profoundly affected, for good and ill, by a few events and a few decisions. The few decisions are often taken by default rather than conscious choice: we let life happen to us rather than shaping our own lives. We can improve our lives dramatically by recognizing the turning points and making the decisions that will make us happy and productive.

• There are always a few key inputs to what happens and they are often not the obvious ones. If the key causes can be identified and isolated, we can very often exert more influence on them than we think possible.

• Everyone can achieve something significant. The key is not effort, but finding the right thing to achieve. You are hugely more productive at some things than at others, but dilute the effectiveness of this by doing too many things where your comparative skill is nowhere near as great.

• There are always winners and losers—and always more of the latter. You can be a winner by choosing the right competition, the right team and the right methods to win. You are more likely to win by rigging the odds in your favor (legitimately and fairly) than by striving to improve your performance. You are more likely to win again where you have won before. You are more likely to win when you are selective about the races you enter.

• Most of our failures are in races for which others enter us. Most of our successes come from races we ourselves want to enter. We fail to win most races because we enter too many of the wrong ones: their races, not ours.

• Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.

• Most people spend most of their time on activities that are of low value to themselves and others. The 80/20 thinker escapes this trap and can achieve much more of the few higher-value objectives without noticeably more effort.

• One of the most important decisions someone can make in life is their choice of allies. Almost nothing can be achieved without allies. Most people do not choose their allies carefully or even at all. The allies somehow arrive. This is a serious case of letting life happen to you. Most people have the wrong allies. Most also have too many and do not use them properly. 80/20 thinkers choose a few allies carefully and build the alliances carefully to achieve their specific objectives.

• An extreme case of carelessness with allies is picking the wrong “significant other” or life partner. Most people have too many friends and do not enjoy an appropriately selected and reinforced inner circle. Many people have the wrong life partners—and even more do not nurture the right life partner properly.

• Money used rightly can be a source of opportunity to shift to a better lifestyle. Few people know how to multiply money, but 80/20 thinkers should be able to do so. As long as money is subordinated to lifestyle and happiness, there is no harm in this ability.

• Few people spend enough time and thought cultivating their own happiness. They seek indirect goals, like money and promotion, that may be difficult to attain and will prove when they are attained to be extremely inefficient sources of happiness. Not only is happiness not money, it is not even like money. Money not spent can be saved and invested and, through the magic of compound interest, multiplied. But happiness not spent today does not lead to happiness tomorrow. Happiness, like the mind, will atrophy if not exercised. 80/20 thinkers know what generates their happiness and pursue it consciously, cheerfully, and intelligently, using happiness today to build and multiply happiness tomorrow.

TIME IS WAITING IN THE WINGS

The best place to start 80/20 Thinking about achievement and happiness is the subject of time. Our society’s appreciation of the quality and role of time is very poor. Many people intuitively understand this and several hundred thousand busy executives have sought redemption in the form of time management. But these executives are just tinkering around the edges. Our whole attitude toward time needs to be transformed. We don’t need time management—we need a time revolution.

10

TIME REVOLUTION

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

A
NDREW
M
ARVELL
¹

Almost everyone, whether ultra-busy or ultra-idle, needs a time revolution. It is not that we are short of time or even that we have too much of it. It is the way we treat time, even the way we think about it, that is the problem—and the opportunity. For those who have not experienced a time revolution, it is the fastest way to make a giant leap in both happiness and effectiveness.

THE 80/20 PRINCIPLE AND TIME REVOLUTION

The 80/20 Principle, when applied to our use of time, advances the following hypotheses:

• Most of any individual’s significant achievements—most of the value someone adds in professional, intellectual, artistic, cultural, or athletic terms—is achieved in a minority of their time. There is a profound imbalance between what is created and the time taken to create it, whether the time is measured in days, weeks, months, years, or a lifetime.

• Similarly, most of an individual’s happiness occurs during quite bounded periods of time. If happiness could be accurately measured, a large majority of it would register in a fairly small proportion of the total time and this would apply during most periods, whether the period measured was a day, a week, a month, a year, or a lifetime.

We could rephrase these two ideas with spurious precision, but greater snappiness, using 80/20 shorthand:

• 80 percent of achievement is attained in 20 percent of the time taken; conversely, 80 percent of time spent leads to only 20 percent of output value.

• 80 percent of happiness is experienced in 20 percent of life; and 80 percent of time contributes only 20 percent of happiness.

Remember that these are hypotheses to be tested against your experience, not self-evident truths or the results of exhaustive research.

Where the hypotheses are true (as they are in a majority of cases I have tested), they have four rather startling implications:

• Most of what we do is of low value.

• Some small fragments of our time are much more valuable than all the rest.

• If we can do anything about this, we should do something radical: there is no point tinkering around the edges or making our use of time a little more efficient.

• If we make good use of only 20 percent of our time, there is no shortage of it!

Spend a few minutes or hours reflecting on whether the 80/20 Principle operates for you in each of these spheres. It doesn’t matter what the exact percentages are and in any case it is almost impossible to measure them precisely. The key question is whether there is a major imbalance between the time spent on the one hand and achievement or happiness on the other. Does the most productive fifth of your time lead to four-fifths of valuable results? Are four-fifths of your happiest times concentrated into one-fifth of your life?

These are important questions and should not be answered glibly. It might be an idea to set this book aside and go for a walk. Don’t come back until you have decided whether your use of time is unbalanced.

THE POINT IS
NOT
TO MANAGE YOUR TIME BETTER!

If your use of time is unbalanced, a time revolution is required. You don’t need to organize yourself better or alter your time allocation at the margins; you need to transform how you spend your time. You probably also need to change the way you think about time itself.

What you need should not, however, be confused with time management. Time management originated in Denmark as a training device to help busy executives organize their time more effectively. It has now become a $1 billion industry operating throughout the world.

The key characteristic of the time management industry now is not so much the training, but more the sale of “time managers,” executive personal organizers, both of the traditional paper-based type and now increasingly electronic. Time management also often comes with a strong evangelical pitch: the fastest-growing corporation in the industry, Franklin, has deep Mormon roots.
²

Time management is not a fad, since its users are usually highly appreciative of the systems used, and they generally say that their productivity has risen by 15–25 percent as a result. But time management aims to fit a quart into a pint jar. It is about speeding up. It is specifically aimed at business people pressured by too many demands on their time. The idea is that better planning of each tiny segment of the day will help executives act more efficiently. Time management also advocates the establishment of clear priorities, to escape the tyranny of daily events that, although very urgent, may not be all that important.

Time management implicitly assumes that we know what is and is not a good use of our time. If the 80/20 Principle holds, this is not a safe assumption. In any case, if we knew what was important, we’d be doing it already.

Time management often advises people to categorize their list of “to do” activities into A, B, C, or D priorities. In practice, most people end up classifying 60–70 percent of their activities as A or B priorities. They conclude that what they are really short of is time. This is why they were interested in time management to start with. So they end up with better planning, longer working hours, greater earnestness, and usually greater frustration too. They become addicted to time management, but it doesn’t fundamentally change what they do, or significantly lower their level of guilt that they are not doing enough.

The name time management gives the game away. It implies that time can be managed more efficiently, that it is a valuable and scarce resource and that we must dance to its tune. We must be parsimonious with time. Given half a chance, it will escape from us. Time lost, the time management evangelists say, can never be regained.

We now live in an age of busyness. The long-predicted age of leisure is taking an age to arrive, except for the unemployed. We now have the absurd situation noted by Charles Handy
³
that working hours for executives are growing—60 hours a week are not unusual—at the same time as there is a worsening shortage of work to go round.

Society is divided into those who have money but no time to enjoy it and those who have time but no money. The popularity of time management coexists with unprecedented anxiety about using time properly and having enough time to do one’s job satisfactorily.

80/20 TIME HERESY

The 80/20 Principle overturns conventional wisdom about time. The implications of 80/20 time analysis are quite different and, to those suffering from the conventional view of time, startlingly liberating. The 80/20 Principle asserts the following:

• Our current use of time is not rational. There is therefore no point in seeking marginal improvements in how we spend our time. We need to go back to the drawing board and overturn all our assumptions about time.

• There is no shortage of time. In fact, we are positively awash with it. We only make good use of 20 percent of our time. And for the most talented individuals, it is often tiny amounts of time that make all the difference. The 80/20 Principle says that if we doubled our time on the top 20 percent of activities, we could work a two-day week and achieve 60 percent more than now. This is light years away from the frenetic world of time management.