Using the 80/20 Rule to Manage Your Workload

Back at school, a friend’s father told us that ‘the smartest students get Cs’. Why? Because they exert the exact amount of effort required to pass – and nothing more.

Sadly, he was talking to a group of overachievers who were too busy studying to listen. And that says it all, doesn’t it? By sixteen years young, we already believed the only acceptable standard is perfection.

Fast forward 20+ years, and we still struggle to determine how much is enough… Until perfection is impossible. When a Powrsuit Member found herself on the brink of burnout, working harder wasn’t an option. As a solo team member, she had no more hours and no one to share her unsustainable workload with. So, she got strategic. If she couldn’t delegate work, could she reduce its quality without any negative impacts?

Turns out she could, and she did.

The 80/20 rule

You’ve probably heard of the 80/20 rule. Also known as the Pareto Principle, it’s the idea that 80% of results come from just 20% of the effort.

Once you understand the 80/20 rule, you start to see it everywhere: Most relationship squabbles are caused by the same few issues. In any committee, a few members do most of the work. With hundreds of restaurants to choose from, many of us return to our favourites. We smash out a draft in mere minutes, then spend hours formatting, editing, tidying and tweaking.

The problem for us overachievers is that if a small proportion of our efforts generate the majority of results, then the majority of our efforts are essentially useless. That is not a good time dividend.

So, what if we put the 80/20 principle to work to maximise results and minimise pain? By prioritising the most valuable tasks and ditching the rest, we can achieve a good enough result in a fraction of the time. And ‘good enough’ is often nowhere near perfection.

Quality is a continuum

If you’re a Powrsuiter, you likely have high standards for everything you do. Everything. 

But not all work is equal. A strategically important project justifies a disproportionate effort, but your everyday updates, emails, and reports usually don’t. Your team doesn’t expect a polished 20-slide Powerpoint – in fact, they’d prefer a 30-second Loom video.

So, before kicking off a new piece of work, spend a few minutes defining Good Enough (AKA the minimum quality standard). Ask yourself: Does the outcome justify a full day’s effort? An hour? Ten minutes?

Whatever your answer, that’s the total time you should dedicate to the job.

Putting theory into practice

Powrsuit is a typical startup. In a tiny team with big ambitions, there’s never enough time, money or people to deliver everything we want. Perfection is the enemy of progress so we have a strong philosophy: invest no more effort than we absolutely need to.

By intentionally minimising energy where we can, we free up a lot of time to focus on strategically important work like our Membership Network, where we do put in 110%. Some ways we’ve put the 80/20 principle into practice:

• Our planning process is a Google doc and 30-minute meeting. As we identify to-dos, we dump them in one long list, and then each Monday, we agree on top priorities for the week and assign responsibility. No complex project management tools, no endless meetings, no task creep. 
  
• We edit our social posts to remove (most 😉) typos but often reuse templates instead of starting from scratch. Turns out, the less polished our Instagram posts are, the more love they get – how’s that for an 80/20 win!
  
• We send each other very rough, unformatted drafts of emails, plans, newsletters, podcasts, and mini-masterclasses for initial feedback before investing time to polish them. Quick, early feedback saves long journeys into rabbit holes and a tonne of rework.
  
• We outsource our monkey work to AI (email edits, data analysis, subject line analysis etc). All our content comes directly from our brains, but the robots can really help with brain blocks and grammar checks.

Leave burnout in 2024

As you kick off another year of work, challenge yourself to ditch unnecessary overachievement and create more space to focus on the important stuff.

Just imagine what you could do with all that spare time.