Pareto’s Law
In anything we do, there’s always ~20% of activities that will deliver 80% of our desired results.
It’s easy to be wrapped up in ‘busy’ work without ever getting anything done. Pareto’s Law is a useful mental model to be more effective, rather than just be efficient.
MORE IDEAS FROM THE ARTICLE
Before making a decision, considers how you’ll feel about this decision in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years.
It’s easy to make short-term decisions that may be beneficial 10 minutes or 10 months from now, but these types of decisions usually don’t benefit us in the long-term. What’s harder is to make decisions that may not appear attractive or impactful in the short-term, but over time can have a positive impact in your life.
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. So try placing artificial time limitations.
If we’re given three hours to complete a task that normally would take an hour, we’ll find a way to fill those three hours. However, when we’re down to the final thirty minutes, we’re suddenly feeling the pressure to get things done.
RELATED IDEAS
There are no set or fixed good or bad decisions.
The same good decisions become bad decisions if they lead to failure, otherwise, they are lauded.
Inconsequential decisions are the perfect training ground to develop judgment.
A common occurrence of heuristics in which we use an initial starting point as an anchor that is then adjusted to yield a final estimate or value.
Example: estimating the value of an object based on the common price of similar objects.