80-20 Productivity Booster

Using the Eisenhower 80/20 Rule to Boost Productivity

It has since been established that about 80% of tasks you have to do can be completed in 20% of your disposable time. The remaining 20% of tasks will take up 80% of your time. This rule has come to be indispensible in sorting and prioritizing tasks into order of importance. Naturally, tasks that fall under the first category should be assigned a higher priority.

The 80/20 rule has also been applied to productivity. It is assumed that 80% of productivity can be achieved by doing 20% of the necessary tasks. Definitely, since productivity is the main aim of time management, then we should prioritize tasks in the order of their importance.

Similar to the 80/20 rule is the Eisenhower method which evaluates all tasks using the benchmarks of important/unimportant and urgent/not urgent and put in their respective categories accordingly. After such a categorization, to boost productivity, one simply has to drop the tasks in unimportant/not urgent quadrants, focusing instead on tasks that are in important/urgent, doing them immediately. All tasks in unimportant/not urgent are delegated to someone else, and tasks in important/ urgent get the personal treatment and we set an end date for them and personally do them immediately. Former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was an advocate of this method. The entire process is detailed in a quote credited to him: “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”

It is important that I give a word of caution here. Although to-do lists are quite popular in productivity management, it is not guaranteed to increase your productivity. An amazing percentage of people who spend time creating to-do lists, about thirty percent of those that create to-do lists spend far more time creating and adjusting their to do list than they spend actually doing the tasks in the list. This is ironic as it is sad. Procrastinating by prolonging the planning session helps you evade the tasks you should be doing by giving you the false impression that you are actually getting prepared for them. As is the case in many other situations, there is the risk of analysis paralysis in time management.

To be truly successful, the user must not only recognize this fact but also deal with it by setting a time limit for the planning stage itself. If productivity is the objective of creating a list or considering either Eisenhower or the 80/20 rule, then we must adhere to the rule to be successful. There is a risk of becoming a slave to our list. Sometimes a list can become obsolete just after creating it. Feelings of guilt can make someone persist on performing all those tasks. This in itself is anti-productive, since you end up spending time on tasks that are not really important, at the expense of current important tasks.

So flexibility is important. One cannot be too much of a stickler for the details. So for instance, instead of listing routine items in your list, it is more beneficial to just do them. If you really have to track a routine item, create a chart and that will do this. This will help you avoid the monotony of simply listing everything.

The Eisenhower 80/20 rule is supposed to be a tool and not a master. Use it, do not let it use you.