Heather Eldred » The Simplicity Project https://heathereldred.com Executive with a Life * Living Alaskan * Living With Purpose & Passion Mon, 09 Mar 2015 01:14:43 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.38 The 80/20 Principal https://heathereldred.com/the-8020-principal/ https://heathereldred.com/the-8020-principal/#comments Wed, 11 Sep 2013 01:35:26 +0000 http://heathereldred.com/?p=108 One of the biggest challenges people face is how to balance work, family, friends, spirituality, obligations and play.  As you become more successful, learning how to do this juggling act is even more critical.  Let’s face it, most C-level business execs are not happy people.  They are stressed, unhealthy and increasingly frazzled keeping up in the ever increasing frenzy of the “rat race”.  Even if they have time to stop and realize that they are these things, most figure it is just part of the job or don’t really know how to do un-do it.  Historically, achieving the ‘American Dream’ has involved working your ass off, making sacrifices and ultimately choosing career as a priority over the rest of the areas of your life.  I’m living proof that there is a better way. I’m an executive of a large company and I work 32 hours a week.  I’ve come a long way from 60 hour a week burn out, plugged in 24/7.  While it has been work in progress (and still is), the principal below started me moving in the right direction.  Ironically I researched the principal in order to become more successful in running the business and ultimately became more successful in running myself. The 80/20 principal is my go-to theory on how to live a balanced life. What is the 80/20 principal? The 80/20 Rule means that in anything a few (20 percent) are vital and many (80 percent) are trivial. In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country, observing that twenty percent of the people owned eighty percent of the wealth.  Pareto’s Principle or Pareto’s Law, as it is sometimes called, can be a very effective tool to help you manage your business and life effectively. The main premise behind the theory is that if you focus on the 20 percent that matters (and only pay minor attention to the 80 percent that is trivial), you can do a lot less and achieve the highest results. Before I even knew anything about this theory, I started unconsciously applying this is my business life.   I remember being a fresh analyst and working with a guy that had multiple MBAs and seemed brilliant (just ask him!).  He worked 12-15 hour days for weeks, developing a rate development model that he would later need to defend in court.  He spent so much time on the minutiae and then ran out of time and spent very little time on the two variables that greatly impacted the resulting rates.  I remember thinking (although I was new and really didn’t know much about the subject matter) that there was something wrong with this picture.  Sure enough, in court, he got torn apart on the two major variables and very little time was spent all the elements that he had spent so much time on (because they really didn’t have much impact on the overall result!). After that, I started looking at my business cases from a view of […]

The post The 80/20 Principal appeared first on Heather Eldred.

]]> https://heathereldred.com/the-8020-principal/feed/ 0