Accelerate your work or hobby with Pareto Principle

This post explains how you can leverage the Pareto Principle in the Resultivity app. I have tried it myself and I have got some good results. It turned out to be quite helpful in situations where I simply cannot do everything and have to prioritize. In this case, the solution is not about new features — all the components are already there. The difference is simply in a way of using contexts.

Let’s take a quick step back. First of all, the Pareto Principle is widely known. Effectively, it is an observation that only 20% of our tasks give us 80% of our results.

This method is a classic example of a simple and beautiful idea that is difficult to put into practice.

I’ll start with my own experience. I have two big contexts — my everyday work and the Resultivity project. Either of these can absorb all my time in a given day. But even if I spend my whole day within a single context, I might not see any significant progress.

I knew that I need to prioritize, and I have long known about the Pareto Principle. However, most of my attempts to apply the Pareto Principle without any tooling have failed.

Once in a while, when in a difficult situation, I asked myself, “Is this a task from the category of 80% or 20% of the result?”. It helped, but it was not consistent and most of the time, I was not aware of my priorities either at work or with Resultivity.

Starting in May, I decided to try something different. I integrated Pareto into my daily work using Resultivity and Microsoft To-Do.

I started by dividing my biggest contexts into two groups:

Interestingly, this simple step enforced another important one. My new contexts became incompatible with my To-Do list and it pushed me to clean up my tasks and change the way I plan them. I had to create the same 80/20 task lists in my To-Do list and thoughtfully distribute tasks from the old ones.

It was easier said than done. It felt quite unusual for several days and I had to reorganize my new task lists a couple of times, but it was clearly a good problem to have.

Overall, after just a few days, I was able to fine-tune my new approach and even managed to maintain priorities in the first month. As a result, in May, it was clearly visible that I was able to prioritize time at work well. Based on my own feelings, it also seems to me that my work in May was more productive than usual.

Another reassuring stat is that Work80 accumulated most of the distracted and idle boxes. All those represent the most tedious and ambiguous tasks that taxed my willpower. Seems like I suffered the most in the right direction :)

With Resultivity, the end balance was not that perfect, but it’s a hobby — there is always a lot to tackle but with less time to spend. Most importantly, the approach helps even in this case. The awareness did push me to make some better decisions.

So, if you have a context that eats up most of your time and you often don’t feel satisfied even after a productive day, the Pareto Principle will definitely help you. Once you get it set up, there is no overhead; it simply automates the awareness. It naturally pushes you to assess the priority of any new task that you add to your To-Do list. The flexibility is that other contexts can continue to be used as usual.

Also, some other issues also got sorted along the way. I was always puzzled by how to track “work” when I sit at a meeting. Personally, I was always careful to equate “conscious attendance of a meeting” to “focused work” on some task with a specific result. But when I created the Work20 context, meetings fit perfectly. Meetings are indeed focused work, but at the same time, most of them do not get me closer to my goals.

A small detail: Try to split your context within the app in such a way that the first few letters are different. Over time, you get used to selecting a context after a quick glance before reading the number 80 or 20 at the end. One solution is to have numbers first.

Try it yourself and tell us how it worked out for you. Should we make the integration simpler in Resultivity?

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