Day 3: 80/20 Rule

There are silent killers among us.

They’re the mortal enemies of everybody running a business, every employer and employee, everyone in school & uni- you get the point.

They’re hunting everybody.

The worst part?

They don’t tell you they’ve got you.

Does this sound familiar?

Spending tons of effort on tasks.. but getting nothing in return.

This indicates something dead simple:

You’re focusing on the wrong tasks.

(Also known as Low ROI (return on investment) tasks)

Makes sense right?

And this inevitably, due to a lack of results, kills effort, motivation and drive.

Which in turn funnels into a cycle of doing the wrong things, at the wrong time with the wrong effort and getting even less results overall.

Pretty shit situation to be in.

(surprise)

I used to be in that cycle myself.

I used to waste hours studying inefficiently in school.

I used to focus on maximizing views and hearts on X compared to actually progressing in business.

What did I get?

Very few views and hearts.

(and no money)

Moving a few months into the future.. and I managed to completely turn my situation around.

Funnily enough, the change I made was fairly simple.

I just focused on the tasks that would get me the results I wanted.

What?

Well yeah, obviously you should do that.

But still the absolute majority of people waste their time on the mortal enemy we got to know a second ago:

The low ROI tasks.

On the other hand..

Everybody seems to know the solution for escaping them (I mean it’s literally everywhere at this point):

The 80/20 Rule

Also called the Pareto Principle.

Essentially it states:

80% of the outcomes you want come from 20% of the tasks that you do.

For example:

A lot of people want to be authors.

Quite a cool job.

But here’s what they focus on:

• obsessing over titles and front pages

• trying to figure out who to mention in the introduction

• overthinking about the margins, the style, format and so on and so forth-

The sheer amount of time and energy people will waste on doing non-essential, low ROI things is ridiculous.

And then they wonder why progress is further behind than I used to be studying for school.

The 80/20 tasks of writing a book?

• research

• write

• edit

That will get you close to 95% of the book done.

By doing 3 things, on repeat.

The core idea of the principle is this:

Do more of the 20% of important, high ROI tasks and less of the useless 80%, low ROI tasks, to make progress faster.

Way faster.

The question now is:

What’s the 20% of tasks in my specific case, for my specific goals and priorities?

Since this series of educational emails are all tailored to YOU, I developed a braindead system for you to figure out your crucial 20% of tasks.

Super simple, promise.

Pick one of your 3 priorities (which you determined in yesterday’s email)

Now ask this question:

If I could only do one task to make progress, what would it be?

Example:

Get in shape? → Go to the gym

Grow an audience? → Write good content

Get into a relationship? → speak to more girls (ups)

Now, one task isn’t much alone.

And probably won’t get you far at all.

But it answers a very important question:

What is my #1 priority task?

Think about it.

You got that down?

Fantastic.

Next question:

If I could only add 2 more tasks to reach my goal, which would they be?

The idea is the same:

Find the next best high-leverage tasks to do.

Example:

Get in shape? → go to the gym + eat clean, do cardio

Grow an audience? → Write good content + build a network of friends, learn crucial skills (writing, branding)

Get into a relationship → speak to more girls + speak to more girls, speak to more girls (I’ve been told this is all it takes)

Technically- these are BIG TASKS.

Which you can break down into smaller tasks, which then add up to more tasks, but essentially-

3 tasks are the 20% of tasks you have to focus on.

And by asking yourself two simple questions, you figured out all the important stuff you have to do.

Less checking notifications, more building and creating.

Just ask these two questions for every priority you set yourself.

Focus more on needle movers.

And less on all the rest.

As a side note for the productivity bros reading this:

Check if you are actually doing your needle-moving tasks.

96% of people forget about what’s important after a while.

Just look at your to dos quickly :)

Here are your action steps:

• Look at all your priorities

• Ask yourself: If I could only do one task to reach my goal, what would it be?

• Ask yourself: If I could do only 2 more tasks to reach my goal, which would they be?

And there you go.

You identified the 80/20 for all of your priorities (so you reach your goals faster)

The hard part actually isn’t identifying your needle-moving tasks.

(Btw: Ask somebody these 2 questions about your situation if you’re not sure about the answers yourself)

Still makes it nonetheless insanely important to do.

The hard part is executing on them.

I bet you’ve guessed it already…

In my next Email, I’ll cover how to use the BEST productivity hack ever invented to get those needle-moving tasks done.

Thank you for reading.

See you soon,

Henri