with my free audio training, The Flow Guide: 9 Essential Elements of Happiness in Life + Work
3: Use the 80/20 Principle + Create a Success List
“…As fast as we were growing, we were still not acknowledged by the top people in our industry. I challenged our group to brainstorm 100 ways to turn this situation around. It took us all day to come up with the list. The next morning, we narrowed the list down to ten ideas, and from there we chose just one big idea. The one that we decided on was that I would write a book on how to become an elite performer in our industry. It worked. Eight years later that one book had not only become a national bestseller, but also had morphed into a series of books with total sales of over a million copies. In an industry of about a million people, one thing changed our image forever.”
— Gary Keller, The One Thing
In case you’re not familiar with Gary Keller (author of The One Thing), he’s the founder of Keller-Williams Real Estate, the largest real estate franchise in the US. The quote above lays out how he dug into the 80/20 Principle to take Keller-Williams to the top of their industry.
Keller tells us we don’t need a To-Do List, we need a Success List — a list purposely designed around your highest-leverage activities…
But how do you find those high-leverage actions?
By using the good ol’ 80/20 principle.
How The 80/20 Principle Works
If you haven’t heard of the 80/20 principle (aka Pareto’s Principle), it’s pretty simple: the 80/20 principle says that the MINORITY of your effort leads to the MAJORITY of your results…
- 20% of your customers usually account for 80% of your profits.
- 20% of your investments usually account for 80% of your returns.
- 20% of your habits usually result in 80% of your success.
It’s not necessarily about the exact numbers (80%; 20%) as much as it’s about the simple truth behind them, which is this: a SMALL percentage of what you do accounts for a LARGE percentage of the results you experience.
Create a Success List
So what are those handful of things you can extract from your to-do list that would have the BIGGEST impact on your results? Figure out those high-leverage activities, and you’ve just turned your to-do list into a Success List.
And once you’re done doing that, take your Success List and whittle that down even further – taking the 20% of the 20% of the 20% until you’ve got it down to the vital few.
Let me bring this home with an example…
Let’s say you’re an entrepreneur focused on growing your business.
You might spend your days answering emails, managing social media, endlessly tweaking your site, and working on product development.
But if you apply the 80/20 Principle, you may realize that only one or two activities actually drive the majority of your revenue—for instance, closing sales calls with potential customers.
Instead of spreading yourself thin across low-value tasks, a more productive and effective use of your time would be to prioritize booking and closing more calls—because that’s where the real impact happens.
You can outsource social media, automate emails, and delegate administrative work so you can focus on your ONE Thing: generating revenue through sales conversations.
Actionable insights
- Turn your To-Do List into a Success List. Instead of a long list of tasks, create a “Success List” of actions purely dedicated to your highest leverage activities. Here’s how to do it:
- Your goal is to find the top 20% of your tasks that can drive 80% of the results you want.
- Look at each of the tasks on your current to-do list and ask yourself one of the following questions:
- “Which task(s) on this list, if completed, would make everything else easier or unnecessary?”
- “Which task(s) on this list, if completed, would drive the most results or have the greatest positive impact?”
- Narrow your focus. Once you’ve identified your high-impact tasks, drill down even further.
- Apply the 80/20 principle again and again until you’ve whittled your focus down to the ONE thing you can do right now (or the 1-3 things you can do today or this week) that will yield the greatest results.
- Relentlessly prioritize. Dedicate your time and energy to the tasks that matter most.
- Delete, defer, or delegate any tasks that don’t significantly contribute to your primary goals.