How To Get More Done – The 3 Laws of Productivity

Rule #1: The 80/20 Principle

Have you heard of the 80/20 principle? Sometimes called Pareto’s Law, it was discovered in the 1800’s by an Italian engineer named Vilfredo Pareto who observed that about 20% of his pea plants produced 80% of the peas. Drawing correlations in other domains like land ownership and productivity, corporate america and productivity guru’s have transmuted this concept into a buzzword meaning “focus on the few things that give you disproportional results”.

The reality is that that a majority of your results or outputs come from a minority of your efforts or inputs. This law magnifies over time as you begin to understand what things to focus on, and follows a similar thread of the age old saying “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer”.

Rule #2: Parkinson’s Law

There’s a reason things take longer than expected..

1) Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
2) A task will increase in complexity the more time we give it.

This in essence is Parkinson’s Law. Therefore, to counteract this phenomena we need to actively restrict the time we allot for certain actions and try to keep it as simple as possible. It may not even fill the extra time with more work, but just stress and tension about having to get it done.

Procrastination is the real killer, but we can keep that pressure to get things done and stop procrastination before it starts by actively restricting timelines.