It’s called the Pareto Principle: in its simplest form, it means that 80% of your time is spent doing 20% of your work. It has seemingly become fashionable to apply the Pareto Principle to every conceivable activity and outcome, no matter its suitability. I’ve become convinced that it doesn't work in every situation.

What if we threw out the Pareto Principle? What if we said, it’s not about the 80% or the 20%? What if we set a goal of spending 50% of our time on the truly important things in our personal and work lives?

I bet some of you are thinking, “Why not a goal of 100%? I've read that our goal should be to spend all of our time at work on actual work."

Well, yeah… wouldn’t it be great if we could do that? I simply don't think it's practical.

If you’re like most folks, however, you currently don’t spend anywhere near 50% of your time on the really important stuff. You probably spend a lot of time “putting out fires” because you don’t make time for things before they turn from important to urgent, or you try to exercise control over things that are beyond your control.

When it comes right down to time management and getting things done, your to-do list basically falls into 4 distinct categories:

1. Pressing (demanding your immediate attention) and significant (meaningful to you).
   
2. Significant but not pressing.
   
3. Pressing but not significant.
   
4. Not pressing and not significant.
   

What if we spent 50% of our time working on those things that are significant but not pressing (#2 above). That would mean working on things before there’s a deadline looming, handling things before they become crises, and identifying and focusing on what's truly important to us – those things that will provide the greatest returns in our lives.

But some things are both pressing and significant, so let’s spend 30% of our time in dealing with important crises (#1 above).

That’s 80% of our time. What about the other 20%?

What about things that are pressing but not significant? There will always be “other people’s emergencies,” ringing phones, emails, and the like that will eat up our time. But by limiting how much time we allow them, we drastically alter the balance of our day.

So instead of 80/20, it’s 50/30/20, with the “20” being the exact opposite of what it used to be.

Just take a moment and think about what your life would be like if you were spending, essentially, 80% of your time on important stuff.

• You’d have more time to deal with the work that makes a difference in your job, and you’d have to spend less time fixing things because you would have time to get them done right in the first place.
  


• You would be able to spend more time on the actions and relationships that really matter in your life, because you would not be chasing around after things and people that can’t really make a difference in the long run.
  


• You would be able to do things that make a difference in your own life and others.
  


• You would have time.

Written by David B. Bohl