Renaldi Adrian

In 1896, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by just 20% of the population. This observation revealed that wealth distribution in Italy was far from equal. Later, Pareto also noticed something similar in his own garden—20% of his plants were producing 80% of the fruit. What was going on?

In any complex or large system, a minority of the inputs produces the majority of the output. This pattern is now commonly called the Paretor Principle or 80/20 rule.

Richard Koch, author of The 80/20 Principle mentioned:

Typically, causes, inputs, or effort divide into two categories: (1) the majority, that have little impact, and (2) a small minority, that have a major, dominan impact.

Based on these observations, it shows that most things in life are not distributed evenly. You can find this in many areas of life:

• Communication: You spend over 80 percent of your time communicating with less than 20 eprcent of your contacts.
• Revenue: 20 percent of subscription from app made 80 percent of the total revenue, defeating the 80 percent subscription from web.
• Team contribution: Out of 80 percent of the output within the team is contributed from 20 percent of the team member.

In my experience, the distribution isn’t always a strict 80/20 rule sometimes, it can go way more extreme than this. For example, one of my notable experience was discovering that 3% of the “power customer” are actually generating 55% of the revenue.

The Pareto Principle isn’t just only applied to group-people dynamics, it also applies to your daily routine. Think about your workday—when you finally arrive at the office, during a typical 9-to-5 schedule, you might notice that your most focused hours are between 10:00 to 12:00 or perhaps 14:00 to 16:00. While this may varies from person to person, it’s another example of the Pareto Principle in action, where a small portion of your time often accounts for the majority of your productivity.

Focus on what has the most impact and giving you the highest output in your daily life. By prioritizing the 20% of activities that contribute to 80% of the results, you can achieve more while doing less effort.

From my experience as a software engineer and a lead developer, minimizing unnecessary meetings is one of the key. Not all meetings are productive, so it’s important to set a clear agenda and make sure each meeting has a defined purpose beyond simply “catching up.” By doing this, you’ll free up more time to do more meaningful work and help you save energy to focus on tasks that will give you the most output.