How To Boost Your Productivity Overnight

There are a lot of people out there who work hard. Really hard. They work 8, 10, 12 hour days, sometimes even pulling all-nighters. But despite all their hard work, these same people often struggle with the feeling that they are not getting it all done. These people who come home at night after a grueling workday only to feel like there’s a still-endless list of todos waiting for them tomorrow.

Then there are the other people. People who seem to spend most of their time screwing around, hanging out in hammocks at the local park, going out to the bars with friends, and going on amazing fun vacations, but still have successful careers and plenty more money than they need.

What secret do these people know that everyone else doesn’t?

The Pareto Principle

The Pareto principle is a mathematical concept you were probably taught in your high school biology class and then promptly forgot about. If you remember learning that a small number of pea plants make a ton of peas, but most pea plants, do not, that’s the Pareto Principle.

The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Pareto Principle, Wikipedia

What they don’t teach you in school is that the Pareto principle is true for a lot more than just pea plants. It is consistent across economics, mathematics, computing, sports, biology, and pretty much every other field of science. The universality of the Pareto principle is astonishing. For instance, the Wikipedia page for the Pareto principle reports:

• “Microsoft noted that by fixing the top 20% of the most-reported bugs, 80% of the related errors and crashes in a given system would be eliminated.”
• “In health care in the United States, in one instance 20% of patients have been found to use 80% of health care resources.”
• “The Dunedin Study has found 80% of crimes are committed by 20% of criminals.[29] This statistic has been used to support both stop-and-frisk policies and broken windows policing, as catching those criminals committing minor crimes will supposedly net many criminals wanted for (or who would normally commit) larger ones.”
• “Some cases of super-spreading conform to the 20/80 rule,[27] where approximately 20% of infected individuals are responsible for 80% of transmissions… In epidemics with super-spreading, the majority of individuals infect relatively few secondary contacts.”

Given the universality of the Pareto principle, it likely applies to our own productivity. 80% of our meaningful productive output comes from a mere 20% of what we do.

This makes sense. For example, consider the act of checking your email. This task only really needs to be done once to twice a day, much like checking your physical mail. Yet most people stop several dozen times a day to check their email, only to find it clogged with newsletters, missives, and spam mail they don’t need. Processing these pointless emails routinely eats up hours of many people’s day, and yet they continue to do so. If they simply unsubscribed from all the newsletters and stopped replying to the emails that don’t matter, they’d free up hours of their own time.

Another great example is the example of the round tuit. Anything sitting around your house, in your email inbox, in your garage, or floating in your life to which you say I will “get around to it” is a round tuit. But the round tuit is not in the 20% of activities that are high impact. Far from it; a round tuit is in the 80% of activities that have little to no impact.

What this means is that we need to be mindful of how we spend our own time. We need to track which activities are in the 20% of activities that are high impact, and which are in the low-impact 80%, and then cut out the 80%, either by outsourcing it or doing away with it entirely.

Much traditional productivity advice is built upon this basic foundation. Minimalism is an argument that the time and energy spent acquiring and dealing with material possessions is an activity in the 80%. Prioritizing your todos and not doing the low-priority ones is an argument that most of the small little todos you assign yourself are in the 80%. Giving up toxic relationships and saying no to meetings are an argument that spending your time in those ways falls in the 80% of your time use.

Take a look at your own life. How do you spend your time? Do you spend several hours a day watching Netflix? Do you like to lay around in bed and scroll through social media? Identify your own 80% behaviors and get rid of them. You’ll see your productivity skyrocket as a result.

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