Master Your Time with the 80-20 Rule
By Dr Eugene Sern-Ting Tan
Regardless of age, occupation or wealth, all of us have one definite thing in common – we only have 24 hours a day. Time is a truly precious and finite resource. From my experience in interacting with students, the following are some common problems that they face with managing their time:
“What should I do if I don’t have enough time to sleep?”
“I do not have enough time to relax due to a lot of homework…how do I cope with my work?”
“How can I improve my level of work efficiency?”
“I am involved in a physical sport and it requires intensive training. How do I catch up with my homework when I miss school due to competitions?”
Time management is a perennial challenge faced by all students and working adults. As students, you have to grapple with a heavy workload from a never-ending stream of homework (for some, that may include extra homework from private tuition), preparation for tests and exams, project work, co-curricular activities and more.
Here, I would like to share one of my favourite time management principles that has really helped to turbo-charge my productivity — the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 Rule.
Let’s begin with a quick look at how the Pareto Principle originated. More than a hundred years ago, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. Dr Joseph Juran (a management philosopher) called this concept the Pareto Principle, and the rest is history.
The 80/20 rule holds true in many areas of our life. In business, it is well known that 80% of sales come from 20% of clients. In any company, 20% of its staff may be responsible for 80% of the company’s profits (hence these top achievers and leaders in key positions are paid much higher than everyone else). Interestingly, a lot of people I know tend to wear 20% of their clothes 80% of the time. If you think about it, you may be spending 80% of your social life with 20% of your friends (your closer friends). Even in exams, you may have realized that 80% of the questions will come from 20% of what you study – in other words, it pays to focus on the most important topics if you don’t have enough time to study everything in the syllabus.
I first learnt about this magical 80/20 Rule when I was in junior college, and here’s how I applied it back then:
STEP 1:
First, I analysed how I have been spending my time on various activities each day. These activities include co-curricular activities, going out with friends, phone chatting, watching television, doing homework, reading leisure books/magazines, reading school textbooks, making revision notes and so on. In today’s context, we should include the time we spend on social media, internet surfing, phone messaging and mobile games.
STEP 2:
From the Pareto Principle, I understood that 80% of my success in school will come from 20% of all the activities I do. I identified the most important activities (the top 20%) as making revision notes and practising exam questions to test my understanding of the subject.
STEP 3:
After doing the above analysis, I then made sure that I spent more time on these most important tasks and cut down on other unimportant activities.
All in all, the 80/20 Rule is a powerful concept that can potentially make you a grandmaster of time management. So, start applying this to your life today and let me know if it helps. 🙂