The 80/20 Principle
– Richard Koch

How anyone can be more effective with less effort by learning how to identify and leverage the 80/20 principle–the well-known, unpublicized secret that 80 percent of all our results in business and in life stem from a mere 20 percent of our efforts.

The 80/20 principle is one of the great secrets of highly effective people and organizations.

Did you know, for example, that 20 percent of customers account for 80 percent of revenues? That 20 percent of our time accounts for 80 percent of the work we accomplish? The 80/20 Principle shows how we can achieve much more with much less effort, time, and resources, simply by identifying and focusing our efforts on the 20 percent that really counts. Although the 80/20 principle has long influenced today’s business world, author Richard Koch reveals how the principle works and shows how we can use it in a systematic and practical way to vastly increase our effectiveness, and improve our careers and our companies.

The unspoken corollary to the 80/20 principle is that little of what we spend our time on actually counts. But by concentrating on those things that do, we can unlock the enormous potential of the magic 20 percent, and transform our effectiveness in our jobs, our careers, our businesses, and our lives. [From: Amazon.com]

“Those who seize the day become seriously rich.” 

In The 80/20 Principle, Richard Koch thoroughly examines Pareto’s Law – the observation that, in any given context, “a minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually leads to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards.” This inherent nonlinearity is present in all aspects of life, and by paying attention to your efforts and results, you can identify major opportunities for improvement in every aspect of your life and business.

By identifying the critical 20% of causes and focusing time and resources on optimizing them, it is possible to realize enormous gains in productivity in relatively short order. While Pareto’s Law is typically used for sales, customer, or inventory analysis, The 80/20 Principle examines personal and management applications as well, including priority setting and work/life balance.

Focusing on the 20% of efforts that create 80% of results isn’t always easy, but it can revolutionize your business and the quality of your life. [From: Personalmba.com]

“It may be that you will be happiest in the rat race; perhaps, like me, you are basically a rat.” 

There is a way to relax, enjoy life, put loved ones first, express yourself to the max, and also achieve your dreams. Happiness, Richard Koch says, flows from doing less, not striving more. No surprise there, perhaps. But he also asserts that achievement and
success can come from doing less. There is a free lunch after all. And the taste is out of this world. In this new book, Living the 80/20 Way, Richard Koch focuses exclusively on how to succeed personally as well as professionally, to make a good life as well as a living-while doing less. The key, he says, is to work out the few things that are really important, and the few methods that will give us what we really want, and to act on them, while ignoring the mass of trivia that normally engulfs our lives. It sounds simple, and it is…but nobody has explained the idea before in such a convincing way, nor based it so persuasively on a
proven phenomenon. [From: Zepho.com]

“The 80/20 Principle can and should be used by every intelligent person in their daily life...It can multiply the profitability of corporations and the effectiveness of any organization. It even holds the key to raising the quality and quantity of public services while cutting their cost… The 80/20 Principle asserts that a minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually lead to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards. Taken literally, for example, 80 percent of what you achieve in your job comes from 20 percent of the time spent. Thus for all practical purposes, four fifths of the effort—a dominant part of it—is largely irrelevant.” [A Review From The Publisher on Barnesandnoble.com]