Two days ago, I was listening to a podcast sponsored by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program on the Art of Teaching Entrepreneurship. The speaker is Tina Seelig, a professor in Stanford University and the author of one of the best selling book, “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20”.

In her podcast lecture, she talks about what distinguishes entrepreneurs from your average person.
She said that entrepreneurs have a knack for challenge themselves by looking at opportunities in everyday circumstances. They are in a constant lookout for things that will challenge their creativity.

Creativity for us designers is a given. We just have to always be creative. In fact, day in and day out, we tend to scribble ideas, create countless designs and offer various design concepts to our clients. Sad to say, creative people tend to go overboard with designing ideas that we sometimes: 1) fail to maximize our time; 2) design things too perfectly for one client that we forget we have other clients to take care of; 3) miss our deadline because we have so much on our plate.

I plead guilty in some of these examples. I tried to search for a solution that could help me maximize my time well and luckily I found the answer from an Italian economist who lived 100 years ago. Vilfredo Pareto.


What is the Pareto Principle?

Perhaps, many of us have heard, read, experienced the Pareto Principle. It is often mentioned in many books on entrepreneurship, business and management. I will try to review some of its basic ideas and how it can be useful to us in the creative field whether we are working for ourselves as freelancers or working for someone else.

The principle basis of the Pareto Principle is that “80 percent of the effect comes from 20 percent of the causes”. It was originally suggested by Joseph Juran, who named it after the famous Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, who made the observation that in his home country over 80 percent of all land was only owned by 20 percent of the population.

The numbers need not be 80/20 exactly. The Pareto Principle's main key point is that most things in life such as effort, reward or output are not distributed evenly. For example, we can have 20% of our clients create 80% of our revenue or even 100% of our revenue.

Pareto Principle Benefits

I do not aim to persuade you to use the Pareto Principle. However, from my experience, there are many interesting benefits and advantages when you apply the 80/20 principle in your various work activities.

• You create more balance – The principle reveals the way it really is. What, or who, is getting too much, or too little, of your time and attention? Are the 20% of people who create 80% of the value overlooked? They may be if they don't make as much 'noise' as the 80% who only produce 20%. Use the Pareto Principle to re-address the balance.

• You become more efficient - Applying 80-20 thinking means you do more of what works and less of what doesn't. Learn how to prioritize work to identify, and then focus on, the ?vital few? for maximum benefit.

For example, in which 20% of your room or house do you spend 80% of your time? Focus on making that room or little corner a pleasure to live and work in. I often and myself working best in this awesome couch we have at my ?at that faces the Auckland harbor. It becomes way better during sunny weather.

• You're much more effective – Just starting a task or project is the most effective thing you can do. As time goes on, you reach a point of diminishing returns in terms of results for your efforts.


Practical Application

Take a look at your last 12 hours of work activity. Create a breakdown of how many hours you spend in one major task. Lets take my case for example:

Task 1 -- Wrote freelance articles -- three hours
Task 2 -- Read and Researched on freelance articles -- one hour
Task 3 -- Web development and design -- three hours
Task 4 -- Surfed the internet and other websites -- three hours

Now, monetarily, the four hours of freelance writing and research resulted in 80 percent of my income compared to my web or design activities.

So, perhaps a better application of my task would be instead of only spending 40% of my time on writing, I need to spend around 80% for writing and the remainder for on web design, videography and other activities.

In others, try focusing on the 20% that would dramatically improve your income rather than spending 80% of your time on something that just delivers 20% of what you earn.

The point of the Pareto Principle is simple. Just recognize that most things in life are not distributed evenly. Make decisions on allocating time, resources and effort.

For example: If you are a writer, instead of one hour on rough draft for an article you are writing, spend 10 minutes on 6 outlines for an article or blog and pick the best topic.

For web design, instead of investing three hours on a website, spend 30 minutes and create 6 different template layouts.

If you are researching on something, rather than spending three hours to read three articles, spend 5 minutes glancing through 12 articles and then spend an hour on each on the two best ones.

This may or may not be applicable but the point is to realize that you have the option to focus on the important 20%.

When you are seeking top quality, you need all 100%. When you are trying to optimize your bang for the buck, focus on the critical 20%. It is a time saver. See what activities generate the most result and give them your appropriate attention.


Try This!

The 20% – Identification

In anything that you do, there is the 20% that will give you the greatest return. Using the ?keywords driving traffic to your site? example, it is true that a small pool of keywords will drive the majority of organic search traffic to your site. How are you going to take advantage of this? You need to first identify these keywords and know what they are. Use an analytics package to determine which keywords are driving 80% of your organic traffic.

In most cases, the number of keywords will be close to 20% of total keywords. (Google Analytics works fine for this.)


The 80% – Maximization

Next, now that we have knowledge of what exactly the 20% contains, we want to maximize the results of this group. For instance in networking, spend more time with your 20% group to maximize results. Give more attention to your clients that spend the most money. Provide extra benefits and exposure for your top advertisers. You get the point. Going back to the organic keywords example, use the top 20% of your keywords to optimize your site for the search engines. Buy some PPC ads with those keywords and anything else you can do to maximize your return. Focusing on the 20% will actually make your 80% even bigger.

You can do so much more in less time by focusing on what works. Sure, sometimes you may want to venture out and see what other options you may have. This is what the identification stage is for. Just never forget this principle and always pay attention to the vital few that provide the most return.

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A Word of Caution

The Pareto Principle often gets cited as a convenient shorthand for cutting down on time- wasting activity, spending, or even marketing, and for focusing on what is truly important. However, it MAY not be very useful if you are already working effectively. Sometimes, we can fall into the trap of looking at things from a monetary perspective and neglect the important long term relationship such as client interaction, effective customer support and reading blogs, journals, or books.

What I am saying instead of using the Parteo Principle as a hard-and-fast rule, use it as a reminder to keep tab of what you are doing over the course of the day and then work on the time where you think your time is being spent ineffectively.


About the Author
Giancarlo Gallegos is a writer, communications designer, photographer, entrepreneur, and a post production professional based in New Zealand. He is the official photographer for a little pink pig’s travel blog called The Adventures of Spider Pig. You can view his work on giancarlogallegos.com. In his spare time he travels, cooks, drinks coffee and mind maps new ideas.