365QOD- Day1014

Parkinson’s Pareto

“Combining two ideas makes it orders of magnitude more powerful”- my thought

Recently I read an interview of Time Ferriss by Derek Sivers that was done back in 2008.  The post I wrote about Parkinson’s Law was inspired by that interview.  Today’s post is no different.

In many past posts I have talked about the 80/20 principle that Vilfredo Pareto originated. 20% of my activities contribute to 80% of my success.  The vital few are hard to identify while moving through the noise.

Tim Ferriss offers advice on how to combine these two ideas, “With the 80/20 principle, you’re limiting your tasks to the critical few versus the trivial many to decrease the amount of time required.  Then with Parkinson’s Law, you’re constraining the time allocated to force yourself to focus on the critical few”

Brilliant strategy! Limit yourself to the vital 20% of the tasks and give yourself a time limit to get them done.  Simple idea on paper but I think that the challenge is the getting clear as to what is the 20% and what is not critically important.  But once you are clear then the combination become like adding 1+1 and getting 3 as the result.

Today’s question is:

“Can you limit yourself to the vital 20% of your tasks and give yourself a time limit?”