Living the 80/20 Way

Work Less, Worry Less, Succeed More, Enjoy More

by Richard Koch (14100)

By doing less, you can actually end up achieving more.

The key is to make sure you’re doing less of what adds only marginal value (most likely 80 percent of your current tasks) and focus instead on doing better whatever generates the majority of the value you add (the other 20 percent). To find the time to do this, don’t even try doing your marginal value tasks. Instead, focus on your key tasks and completely drop everything else.

In practice, the best way to ahieve this is to work backwards from where you want to end up.

First, describe your destination — something personally motivating that cuts through all the irrelevancies and spells out where you want to end up in terms of personal development, career, money, relationships and quality of life. Define what you really want.

Next, figure out your 80/20 route possibilties. Usually there will be a number of options for reaching your specified destination. Your 80/20 route will be many times more productive than all the other options, and it will be easier for you to do.

Finally, get into action. Do the very few things that will hel pyou achieve more with less effort than you ever thought possible. It is only when you actually take action rather than merely knowing what you should be doing that changes will start to occur.

Living the 80/20 Way

How to Influence Using Social Match

(16414) Dave Lakhani says:

The concept of social matching means we determine what is correct by finding out what other people have decided previously when facing the same decision. If you can present your audience with examples of what other people have done in the past, you can get them to take some action.

Keep in mind, however, that the examples you use must be relevant to the discussions at hand. People are influenced more by what the people they admire are doing than they ever are by what other groups do. There has to be a match between the people who are modeling the behavior you want and their needs or interests. When the two groups are aligned adequately, you are in effect giving the people you’re trying to influence implicit permission to mimic the decisions already made by the people they admire.

This concept lies at the heart of the social phenomena of the “in crowd” — the people everyone else wants to be like for one reason or another. If you can show that the people the other party admires has already decided to use this product, you give them permission to do the same. This can be used advantageously in a number of different areas.