To give a brief background, an Italian polymath named Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) believed that a constant of human society is about 80% of all wealth and income is produced and held by about 20% of the people and vice versa. He later found that about 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the population, seemingly providing more evidence for this distribution he found ( as well as further examples such as 20% of his pea plants produced roughly 80% of his pea crop). Since he was around at that time, Pareto also may have influenced the rise of fascism through lectures he gave on elitism that Mussolini attended, but that’s mainly speculation.

The thing is though this rule holds pretty true to a lot of areas of life, not just the original economic application. Once you start to understand this, you will see it everywhere and it is uncanny. Sometimes the ratio is skewed even more and it’s 85/15, 90/10, or even up to 99/1. Think of donations to charities or colleges for instance. Sure, a lot of people will donate money but the main source of outside funding for these charities and colleges are a small group of ultra wealthy people.

This all translates more broadly into realizing that in general 80% of your outputs will come from 20% of your inputs, as I said above in some cases you may have an even more skewed ratio. It follows that:

Obviously you have to gather data in your life to know what the wastes of time are and what the good uses of time are, but once you know enough you can start to cut out the 80% that drives 20% of your outcomes.

Imagine how much extra time you will gain each day if you could forget about doing at least 80% of certain activities. What are the 20% of things you should be focusing on in each of these areas?

I can’t answer those for you, but really think about them and begin the process of cutting out the unnecessary 80% of actions that are causing you to feel stressed and like you have no time. To give you one example from my life, I have cut down my useless time on devices significantly to create more effective leisure time and gain extra time and energy to work on that which is most important to me. Where are you spending unnecessary time in your life on things that are procrastination devices to prevent you from confronting the important tasks you know you ought to be doing?

In other words, the amount of time you give yourself to complete a task is how long it will take you to complete that task. Have you ever either completely forgotten to do an assignment in school until the night before (or, let’s be honest, just procrastinated your way to that point)? It’s amazing how you were still able to get that work done before it was due, even if it was an assignment designed to take a month or more.

As an example from my life, I had the ultimate case of senioritis my final year of high school. Had I known the 80/20 rule then I would have spent my time differently, because I was spending all my effort on my least important classes. I only needed to pass two classes to graduate of the 8 I was taking, U.S. Government and English. I almost didn’t graduate because of how little work I did in each of these classes.

My teachers at least threw me a bone because they didn’t want to prevent me from graduating, but that bone was I had to turn in all of my assignments that I hadn’t turned in by the day before graduation (and they would each give me a D to pass me, assuming I actually attempted each and didn’t half-ass it). I was given this heads up at least 3 weeks before that day, but guess who waited until the day before? I spent a solid 18 hours completing all of this work (including staying up all night and working through the morning of the date these were due) before driving to school around lunch time to deliver my stacks of assignments to each teacher.

Stop creating your own busy work. Obviously if you work a 9-5 rat race job, you will have to scurry around and appear busy all the time or else deal with the wrath of the micromanagers of the world, but outside of that you shouldn’t work like that. That way of work isn’t real. You see how little you actually do each day and how little those around you do (even though some are really great at spinning how important those 30 emails they sent today were in between bullshitting with their coworkers to fill the extra time obligation). Realistically I can do everything important that moves the needle in under 3 hours everyday, but know I am far from optimized so I can probably do it in less time.

It’s going to feel really weird at first since the default state of our working world is you clock in clock out a minimum of 8 hours worked per day, but quit getting hung up on time. Focus on outcomes and what inputs are necessary to achieve those outcomes. In most instances, once you trim the fat of things you do everyday, you will have to give yourself permission to do less than you’ve been doing (and that’s okay, you’re not lazy).

When you have tight deadlines that are realistic, you see how you only focus on the important things. How would you squeeze 8 hours or work into 2 hours each day? What are the most important needle moving tasks you can be focusing on? Cut out all the other bullshit because it’s only slowing you down and making you feel overwhelmed.

How fast would you work if you were paid by the job and not by the hour? Imagine your day job is something you get paid a flat rate per day to do. How quickly can you get all of your stuff done if how long you worked each day was up to you? Obviously, do not advertise that you can get as much work done as your coworkers in ¼th of the time because the conventional backwards thinking of corporate America is “well if you can do a day’s work in 2 hours, why don’t you do 4 days worth of work in 8 hours?” On top of obviously no pay incentive to do so, why would you want to 4x your peers in something you don’t enjoy doing? So you get the privilege of doing even more of it?

I challenge you starting now to fast from useless information for the next 5 days. This means:

After this challenge if you want to go back to how things were before, by all means do it. This is an inherently more productive dopamine fast because you are getting a taste of how life could be like if you only focused on what mattered in your immediate sphere of influence. The amount of time and mental energy you will regain here is what makes this worthwhile to attempt. I’m convinced most of our modern problems come from having far too much access to useless information.

Remember that you are in control of how you live and work. How you choose to act and respond to your daily situations is entirely up to you.

Until next week,

Ian