Page 106 - Benjamin Franklin\'s The Way to Wealth: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation - PDFDrive.com

the job (typically the first and last 10%) will take up 80% of the time and
resources. Likewise a minority of 20% of your staff will do 80% of the
work, and 20% of your staff will require 80% of your time managing them
(rarely the same 20%, as it happens). The trick is to focus solely on the
20% that really counts and thereby achieve 80% of the work.

Wherever possible you should work with hard figures. Whether it’s
profit/loss, costs, time or headcount you can then draw up a ‘Pareto’ chart
of the resource in question and find which part of the picture is the one to
throw your energies at first. A simple Pareto analysis would list all the
known problems associated with a project and count which ones occur most
over a set time. Order them with the most frequent at the top and you may
find that seemingly trivial problems add up to a huge cumulative loss of
productivity. There’s your starting point.

HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU…
Don’t have any figures to tell you which 20% to focus on? Write a ten-
point to-do list of things you have to do. Now rank that list one to ten
in terms of importance, where one is least and ten is tops. Now forget
about points one to eight until nine and ten are done.