Change your life and live by the 80/20 principle

How many of you have heard about the 80/20 rule? Does the Pareto principle sounds more familiar?

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about it relating to sports and habits:

“The Pareto principle has been applied to training, where roughly 20% of the exercises and habits have 80% of the impact and the trainee should not focus so much on a varied training.^[13] This does not necessarily mean eating healthy or going to the gym are not important, just that they are not as significant as the key activities.”

What does it mean in your daily life? You’re probably spending 80% of your time with the 20% most important people around you.  In business 80% of your incomes will be from 20% of your clients. This can be spending 80% of your energy on the stuff that’s not important (the 20%).

We are awesome to procrastinate and waste time irrelevant things. We are good at trying to get attention from the non-important people instead of putting 80% of our love in the 20% very important to you. We easily get stuck in the details instead of getting the job done. For every situation, you can find an example to relate.

How can you apply the 80/20 rule in your life?

My personal trick is asking myself the following questions: “Does this is important to me or not? Am I overthinking in the process?” If the answer’s yes, I’m out of track

First you need to set your priorities. Then you should highlight the most important ones. Think at the ones that will produce the biggest results or positive impact in your life. Those are the ones you should put your energy in.

Here’s some tips to apply the 80/20 principle to stay fit and healthy:

• Focus on the best bang for your buck exercises. This way your training will be short and effective. (Feel free to ask for details)
• Go for high reward meals (the easy prep packed with healthy stuff). Try to eat clean 80% of the time. Awesome if you can do more, but probably is not worth it.
• Know your weakness and be one step ahead to avoid them.
• Focus on quality time with the ones you love. Remember that 80% of your happiness will come from the 20% you cherish the most!
• Set goals and manage your time to reflect what you want to accomplish.

If you can accomplish 80% of all the things you want in your life, you would you be willing to say that you would have done a lot? I think so and living by the Pareto principle is a good way to spend your energy on what is really important to you. Why not giving it a try?

Cheers,

PP Jutras