Yes, that’s right folks!

My blog and I are jumping on the World Cup bandwagon of extrapolating tenuous points from current events in the hope of sounding relevant and (God forbid) ‘cutting edge’.

Except this one is actually relevant and a good point. And I think it will help you.

I was casually watching the football a few nights ago. The match was being shown on ITV here in England, a commercial channel which broadcasts ad breaks. In this case, the breaks happened twice during half-time of the match.

An ad came on for one of the sponsors. I can tell you now that I don’t remember who or what the ad was for, so it wasn’t effective. What was effective was the message it came with.

It showed a man holding a football, a solitary figure walking towards the penalty spot to take a penalty. The voiceover simply said:

‘Taking a penalty requires 12 yards of skill….. And 46 yards of courage.’

Twelve yards is the distance from the penalty spot where the ball is placed, to the mouth of the goal. Forty-six yards is the distance from the halfway line, where the players stand when a match ends in penalties, to the penalty spot. The player has to walk those 46 yards on his own, all the while thinking through the penalty he’s about to take. When 60,000 people are watching you, that’s a pretty long walk…

It made me think of a principle that applies to virtually every aspect of our lives. It was invented by Joseph M Juran and named after an Italian economist: The Pareto Principle.

Basically, the principle states that 80% of the work creates 20% of the results and vice versa. This means that 20% of the things we do, create 80% of our results. This is powerful when you think about the implications.

A way of seeing it working in your life (and ultimately harnessing its power), is to stop creating ‘to do’ lists and instead, create 80/20 lists. Put your ‘things to do’ into two categories. Split the page across the middle and at the top write 20% and at the bottom 80%. Don’t worry about it too much, as you’ll get better at pin-pointing the stuff that constitutes your 20% soon enough.

Write the stuff that makes up your 20% at the top and make that your priority. Each day, look through the list and see what is giving you most of your results and focus on that.

For example, you might be getting great results from article writing. You may also be doing SEO and using Twitter to sell the same products. If article writing is where the money is, that’s what you need to be doing. The SEO and Twitter can go onto the 80% part of the list to be done once the 20% is finished. Sounds simple, but are you doing it?

Of course, this approach requires you to be testing and measuring your results. Without that, you won’t know what your results are and where they’re coming from. I didn’t do this for a long time and it cost me a lot in wasted effort.

So, go and create your 80/20 list. You’ll be surprised how it changes the way you think and therefore the way you work.

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