Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist, and philosopher born in 1848.

He introduced the concept of Pareto efficiency and helped develop the field of microeconomics. The Pareto principle was named after him. And was built on observations such as 80% of the land in Italy was owned by about 20% of the population.

The Pareto principle (80/20 rule) implies (roughly) 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

The 80/20 rule can help both organisations and individuals. The rule can raise your personal effectiveness leading to greater happiness and can increase profitability & effectiveness of organisations. The key is to understand where & when it should or can be used.

So (roughly) 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This number can change slightly. Sometimes it’s 70/30 & even 90/10. But whatever the ratio (the point is) a small number of causes have a disproportionately large effect on the outcome.

It’s not a gimmick it really works. And to help you, here’s a list of  ideas on how you could use Pareto’s 80/20 rule in both your personal & business world. So go head, see for yourself & try it…

Diet

If you have an unhealthy diet & you change the top 20% of the foods you eat & drink to healthy products, you’ll see huge results. As these will account for around 80% of everything you consume.

Fitness

Rather than catching up on your favourite TV programs 100% of the free time you have. Use 20% of this time to do a workout. You don’t need a personal trainer. It could be following a video work out, a brisk walk, swimming or even jogging.

The point is, using 20% of this TV catch up time to work on your fitness, will produce fitness improvements of around 80%.

Food shopping

List down everything you need (not want) to purchase & I bet it’s only around 20% of the stuff you normally buy. Ditch the rest and save yourself a packet.

Marketing

If you don’t already. You must measure your marketing results. If your doing this for the first time, you’ll be astonished to find that most of your sales (80%) will come from about 20% of the campaigns you run.

And once you find this out. You can stop doing the other 80% that don’t work, spend all the money on the 20% & start to grow your business.

Blogging

If your like me you’ll probably blog about many different subjects. But have you ever taken the time to measure which blog topics get the most interaction. Yes, the betting is 20% of the blogs you write are achieving 80% of the likes, comments & shares. So stop doing the others and do more like these.

Dating

Dodgy ground I know. But if you go on lots of dates with all types of personalities. Have a look at the ones that you really get on with. And maybe these account for 20% of the total dates you’ve been on? If this is the case and you are serious about finding the right partner, choose your future dates on the personalities you like.

Products

If you sell a number of products, it’s time to measure which sell the best. As I’m pretty sure around 80% of your sales will come from just 20% of your products.

Armed with this information, you can either market the less selling products in a different way or just get rid of them completely. And spend your energy & resources increasing sales on your best selling products.

Customers

Yes this applies too. Measure your customers, as 80% of your business will come from 20% of your customers. Analyse what you are doing differently with the 20% of customers who are producing great results. And increase your profits by applying the same principles to other 80%.

Office & home printing

80% of the cost associated with printing documents, photographs, leaflets etc comes from the cost of the consumables (cartridges). So why not eliminate much of this cost by getting a home or small organisation managed print service. Larger organisations can benefit too, through a photocopier print solution.

Other areas where people have used the Pareto rule…

• 20% of criminals commit 80% of crimes
• 20% of drivers cause 80% of all traffic accidents
• 80% of pollution originates from 20% of all factories
• 20% of employees are responsible for 80% of the results
• 20% of students have grades 80% or higher
• 20% of software development effort account for 80% of the program’s functionality
• 80% of the quality failures originate from 20% of the tasks

You don’t have to be perfect & your work doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, it’s often not going to be perfect. So instead of chasing the impossible standard of perfection, focus on getting to good enough, which will get you to the next step. And have a look in your life (personal & business) where you may be able to apply the Pareto principle.