The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More With Less (24 page)

For happiness, identify your
happiness islands:
the small amounts of time, or the few years, that have contributed a quite disproportionate amount of your happiness. Take a clean sheet of paper, write “Happiness Islands” at the top and list as many of them as you can remember. Then try to deduce what is common between all or some of the happiness islands.

Repeat the procedures for your
unhappiness islands.
These will not generally comprise the other 80 percent of your time, since (for most people) there is a large no-man’s-land of moderate happiness between the happiness and unhappiness islands. Yet it is important to identify the most significant causes of unhappiness and any common denominators between them.

Repeat this whole procedure for achievement. Identify your
achievement islands:
the short periods when you have achieved a much higher ratio of value to time than during the rest of your week, month, year, or life. Head a clean sheet of paper with “Achievement Islands” and list as many as you can, if possible taken over the whole of your life.

Try to identify the achievement islands’ common characteristics. Before leaving your analysis, you might want to glance at the list of the Top 10 highest-value uses of time on chapter 10: Time Revolution. This is a general list compiled from many people’s experience and may nudge your memory.

List separately your
achievement desert islands.
These are the periods of greatest sterility and lowest productivity. The list of the Top 10 low-value uses of time on Chapter 10: Time Revolution may help you. Again, what do they tend to have in common?

Now act accordingly.

Multiply the 20 percent of your time that gives you 80 percent

When you have identified your happiness and achievement islands, you are likely to want to spend more time on these and similar activities.

When I explain this idea some people say there is a flaw in my logic, because spending more time on the top 20 percent may lead to diminishing returns setting in. Twice as much time on the top 20 percent may not lead to another 80 percent of output, perhaps only to another 40, 50, 60, or 70 percent.

I have two replies to this point. First, since it is impossible (at the moment) to measure happiness or effectiveness with anything approaching precision, the critics may well be right in some cases. But who cares? There will still be a marked increase in the supply of what is best.

But my second answer is that I don’t think the critics are generally right. My recommendation is not that you duplicate
exactly
what it is that you are doing today that is in the 20 percent yielding 80 percent. The point of examining the common characteristics of your happiness and achievement islands is to isolate something far more basic than what has happened: to isolate what you are uniquely programmed to do best.

It may well be that there are things you should be doing (to realize your full potential achievement or happiness) that you have only started doing imperfectly, to some degree, or even that you have not started to do at all. For example, Dick Francis was a superb National Hunt jockey, but did not publish his first racing mystery until he was nearly 40. Now his success, money earned, and possibly personal satisfaction from the latter activity far exceed those from the former. Richard Adams was an unfulfilled, middle-aged, middle-level civil servant before he wrote the bestseller
Watership Down.

It is not at all uncommon for analysis of happiness or achievement islands to yield insight into what individuals are best at, and what is best for them, which then enables them to spend time on totally new activities that have a higher ratio of reward to time than anything they were doing before. There can, therefore, be increasing returns as well as the possibility of diminishing returns. In fact, one thing you should specifically consider is a change of career and/or lifestyle.

Your basic objective, when you have identified both the specific activities and the general type of activity that take 20 percent of your time but yield 80 percent of happiness or achievement, should be to increase the 20 percent of time spent on those and similar activities by as much as possible.

A short-term objective, usually feasible, is to decide to take the 20 percent of time spent on the high-value activities up to 40 percent within a year. This one act will tend to raise your “productivity” by between 60 and 80 percent. (You will now have two lots of 80 percent of output, from two lots of 20 percent of time, so your total output would go from 100 to 160 even if you forfeited all the previous 20 from low-value activities in reallocating some of the time to the high-value activities!)

The ideal position is to move the time spent on high-value activities up from 20 to 100 percent. This may only be possible by changing career and lifestyle. If so, make a plan, with deadlines, for how you are going to make these changes.

Eliminate or reduce the low-value activities

For the 80 percent of activities that give you only 20 percent of results, the ideal is to eliminate them. You may need to do this before allocating more time to the high-value activities (although people often find that firing themselves up to spend more time on the high-value activities is a more efficient way of forcing them to set aside the low-value time sinks).

First reactions are often that there is little scope for escaping from low-value activities. They are said to be inevitable parts of family, social, or work obligations. If you find yourself thinking this, think again.

There is normally great scope to do things differently within your existing circumstances. Remember the advice above: be unconventional and eccentric in how you use your time. Do not follow the herd.

Try your new policy and see what happens. Since there is little value in the activities you want to displace, people may not actually notice if you stop doing them. Even if they do notice, they may not care enough to force you to do them if they can see that this would take major effort on their part.

But even if dropping the low-value activities does require a radical change in circumstances—a new job, a new career, new friends, even a new lifestyle or partner—form a plan to make the desired changes. The alternative is that your potential for achievement and happiness will never be attained.

FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS OF ECCENTRIC AND EFFECTIVE TIME USE

My first illustration is William Ewart Gladstone, the dominant liberal statesman of Victorian England who was elected prime minister four times. Gladstone was eccentric in many ways, not least his spectacularly unsuccessful attempts to rescue “fallen women” from prostitution and his not totally unrelated bouts of self-flagellation; but his use of time is the eccentricity on which we shall focus here.
⁵

Gladstone was not constrained by his political duties, or, rather, was effective at them because he spent his time pretty much as he pleased in an amazing variety of ways. He was an inveterate tourist, both in the British Isles and overseas, often slipping over to France, Italy, or Germany on private business while prime minister.

He loved the theater, pursued several (almost certainly nonphysical) affairs with women, read avidly (20,000 books in his lifetime), made incredibly long speeches in the House of Commons (which despite their length were apparently compulsive listening), and virtually invented the sport of modern electioneering, which he pursued with enormous gusto and enjoyment. Whenever he felt even slightly ill, he would go to bed for at least a whole day, where he would read and think. His enormous political energy and effectiveness derived from his eccentric use of time.

Of subsequent British prime ministers, only Lloyd George, Churchill, and Thatcher came anywhere near to rivalling Gladstone’s eccentric use of time; and all three were unusually effective.

Three highly eccentric management consultants

The other examples of unconventional time management come from the staid world of management consulting. Consultants are notorious for long hours and frenetic activity. My three characters, all of whom I knew quite well, broke all the conventions. They were also all spectacularly successful.

The first, whom I will call Fred, made tens of millions of dollars from being a consultant. He never bothered to go to business school, but managed to set up a very large and successful firm of consultants where almost everyone else worked 70 or more hours a week. Fred visited the office occasionally and chaired partners’ meetings once a month, which partners from all over the globe were compelled to attend, but preferred to spend his time playing tennis and thinking. He ruled the firm with an iron fist but never raised his voice. Fred controlled everything through an alliance with his five main subordinates.

The second, alias Randy, was one of these lieutenants. Apart from its founder, he was virtually the only exception to the workaholic culture of the firm. He had himself posted to a far-distant country, where he ran a thriving and rapidly growing office, also staffed by people working unbelievably hard, largely from his home. Nobody knew how Randy spent his time or how few hours he worked, but he was incredibly laid back. Randy would only attend the most important client meetings, delegating everything else to junior partners and if necessary inventing the most bizarre reasons why he could not be there.

Although head of the office, Randy paid zero attention to any administrative matters. His whole energy was spent working out how to increase revenues with the most important clients and then putting mechanisms in place to do this with the least personal effort. Randy never had more than three priorities and often only one; everything else went by the board. Randy was impossibly frustrating to work for, but wonderfully effective.

My third and final eccentric time user was a friend and partner: let’s call him Jim. My abiding memory of Jim is of when we shared a small office, together with a handful of other colleagues. It was cramped and full of wild activity: people talking on the phone, rushing round to get presentations done, shouting from one end of the office to the other.

But there was Jim, an oasis of calm inactivity, staring thoughtfully at his calendar, working out what to do. Occasionally, he would take a few colleagues aside to the one quiet room and explain what he wanted everyone to do: not once, not twice, but three times, in life-threateningly tedious detail. Jim would then make everyone repeat back to him what they were going to do. Jim was slow, languid, and half-deaf. But he was a terrific leader. He spent all his time working out which tasks were high value and who should do them and then ensuring that they got done.

THE TOP 10 LOW-VALUE USES OF TIME

You can only spend time on high-value activities (whether for achievement or enjoyment) if you have abandoned low-value activities. I invited you above to identify your low-value time sinks. To check that you have not missed some, a list below gives the 10 that are most common.

Be ruthless in cutting out these activities. Under no circumstances give everyone a fair share of your time. Above all, don’t do something just because people ask, or because you receive a phone call or a fax. Follow Nancy Reagan’s advice (in another context) and Just Say No!—or treat the matter with what Lord George Brown called “a complete ignoral.”

The Top 10 low-value uses of time

1. Things other people want you to do

2. Things that have always been done this way

3. Things you’re not unusually good at doing

4. Things you don’t enjoy doing

5. Things that are always interrupted

6. Things few other people are interested in

7. Things that have already taken twice as long as you originally expected

8. Things where your collaborators are unreliable or low quality

9. Things that have a predictable cycle 10 Answering the telephone

THE TOP 10 HIGHEST-VALUE USES OF TIME

A second list gives the other side of the coin.

The Top 10 highest-value uses of time

1. Things that advance your overall purpose in life

2. Things you have always wanted to do

3. Things already in the 20/80 relationship of time to results

4. Innovative ways of doing things that promise to slash the time required and/or multiply the quality of results

5. Things other people tell you can’t be done

6. Things other people have done successfully in a different arena

7. Things that use your own creativity

8. Things that you can get other people to do for you with relatively little effort on your part

9. Anything with high-quality collaborators who have already transcended the 80/20 rule of time, who use time eccentrically and effectively

10. Things for which it is now or never

When thinking about any potential use of time, ask two questions:

• Is it unconventional?

• Does it promise to multiply effectiveness?

It is unlikely to be a good use of time unless the answer to both questions is yes.