Pareto Path

How many great ideas have you had in your life?

Ideas that spark your imagination, make you excited, makes you feel that wonderful rush of “what if THIS happened?!”

How many of those ideas have you pursued?

Why so few?

This article will help you in pursuing the things you wish to, and will show you that it’s actually much more simple and easy than you might think.

There’s a single process that you will repeat, again and again, that will get you to your outcome of actually living out your ideas and seeing what their true reality is like.

This is that process.

The Three Pillars Process

Step One: Identify What Your Ideal Outcome Is.

Been dreaming of that side-hustle that’s going to pay for your coffee each month?  Or that side-gig that would cover the costs of your food-shopping each month?

Well, whatever it is, whatever your outcome is, convert it from “Well I kinda would like to have X” to “my clear target is to make £200 per month by selling my knitting patterns on my website”, or whatever your thing is.

Step Two: The Next Three Steps

Now’s the fun bit. Identify the first 3 actions you need to take that are small and can be completed in under 10 minutes, per task.

Let’s stick with the knitting patterns example. Step one might be to go on to GoDaddy and decide on a name for your website. Step two could be to buy the domain name and choose the template you want to have for your website, or the theme. Step three might be to open a “shop” on the website and upload x3 of your designs.

All of this can, and has, been achieved in under 30 minutes.

Step Three: Parkinson’s Law and Pareto Cycle

Now that we’ve done the hardest parts: identifying a clear goal and beginning the process, it’s important that we don’t faff around and waste time. Instead of spending 5 hours reviewing the different types of themes on WordPress, we want to focus on the things that actually move us towards our goals.

This is where Parkinson’s Law and Pareto come in.

Parkinson’s Law is something you’ve done hundreds of times but didn’t know that you had. Remember that time that you thought you had an hour left to get ready before going out, and actually it turns out you only had 10 minutes. Remember how you managed to get ready in 10 minutes instead of the supposed 1 hour you “needed”?

That’s Parkinson’s Law: that time will expand to “fill” the deadline you are working with. So if you have 30 days to finish a project, you’ll not do anything for 28 days and finish the whole thing in the last 48 hours. But if you only get given 1 day to do the exact same project, then you’ll finish it on time because of the deadline pressure.

Then comes the Pareto. You wear the 20% of the clothes you own 80% of the time. Most businesses’ profits (80%) come from 20% of their clients, and conversely, 20% of their clients cause 80% of the businesses problems.  20% of the country’s landmass (capital cities) contain 80% of the population (just think New York or London).

And, more pertinent for us, 20% of the actions you take concerning your work result in 80% of the outcomes.

So what we do is fuse Parkinson’s and Pareto by identifying the 20% of actions that cause 80% of the results, and then applying a deadline to the completion to get you to your ideal outcome in 6 months instead of 5 years.

To continue our example: you might choose to analyse the last week’s worth of content and, to your surprise, find that 20% of your YouTube videos are producing 80% of the views (Pareto), and decide to produce x5 variations of those videos in 48 hours (Parkinson’s).

Then, repeat until complete.

Good luck!

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I hope this has been of value, you can let me know in the comments. And remember AFQ: Always Follow Quality. 

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