Introduction:
Richard Koch gets inspired in his book from Pareto principle which states that for many outcomes roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes. Richard believes that Pareto principle could be applied to different areas of life and helps you to enhance your daily effeciency of executing different tasks.
80/20 applied to computer science:
As a software engineer, we are using Pareto principle as a part of the job without actually naming it. Let me explain with conqurete examples:
- Enhancing 20 % of the top most used functionalities in a software will enhance the performance by 80 %.
- Fixing the most reccurent bugs that represent most likely 20% of the global number of bugs will eliminate 80% of the crashes and errors in the software.
80/20 applied to Business and sales:
- 20% of the products make the 80% of sales. The idea is to select that 20% out your product range and invest more resources on them.
- 20% of the customers contributes in 80% of the overall turnover of the business. So enhancing the relationship and investing more resources with these customers is the way to go.
- 20% of employees contributes to 80% of the work. It is a good idea to identify these employees, give them promotions from time to time and offer them more confort at work.
80/20 applied to Relationships:
20% of your relationships( friendships for example) contributes to 80% of your social happiness. So identify these relationships and invest more time with them.
20% of the activities that you do with family and friends contributes to 80% of the relationship strength and sustainbility. So indentify these activities and make more time for them.
80/20 applied to time management:
Identify the 20% of tasks that are important and can have the 80% impact if achieved and start doing them immediately.
80/20 applied to the quality of life:
Identify the 20% of the activities, tasks, things that contributes to 80% of your happiness and do them more often.
Conclusion:
80/20 principle is a very intersting principle and could dramatically enhance the effeciency of anything it is applied to. I want to draw your attention that is not always easy as it might seem to identify that 20% of the causes that contributes to 80% of the results. There is always a phase that would be less effecient before indentifying that 20% of causes. It might be a prototyping phase or simply another way of exploring different causes.
