The brief history of the 80/20 rule is that in the 19th century and Italian economist, named Vilfredo Pareto, discovered that the distribution of wealth over the population was not linearly proportional, in fact it was distinctly non-linear. He discovered that approximately 80% of the wealth in Italy was held by just 20% of the population. He then did studies of other nations, for different periods of history and found the same conclusion. No matter what the epoch, or the economic conditions; the same non-linear result was found in roughly the same proportion. Later studies discovered non-linearity in many other groupings.

Now then, there are some things to be aware of here. This relationship occurs between two different items, e.g. input and output. It does not hold for just one set of items. Some people get confused with this, probably because the two figures add up to 100%, which many people wrongly assume is valid for just one item. Both items are 100% complete, but the effect of one item upon the other is disproportionate.

20% of the input from the left hand category creates 80% of the output in the left hand category.

I was amazed when I discovered this principle, but when I explained it other people and I got blank stares. So let’s take a look at some examples and interpret them for some useful conclusions:

• 80% of all crimes are committed by just 20% of all criminals. This means that if you want to drastically reduce crime, then you should focus more resources upon controlling or incarcerating the small group that creates the most problems.
• 80% of all divorces are carried out by just 20% of the population. This means that when you read divorce statistics saying that almost 50% of all marriages end in divorce that it doesn’t give you the whole picture. Some people get married and divorced many times over and so they shift the statistics overall. Actually, the majority of marriages succeed, however the statistics paint a bleak picture that can make people think twice about getting married and that will make taking the step of getting divorced seem a lot easier and almost normal.
• 80% of all traffic accidents are caused by 20% of motorists. This means that premiums should be raised for the few who do the most damage and lowered for the rest.

In a sense, it is a shame that the term 80/20 has stuck because not all non-linear relationships have those proportions. Sometimes it can be 90/20 or 70/10 or some other variation, but the principle exists all around us and you can measure it for yourself. After I read “The 80/20 Principle” by Richard Koch (a must have book for anyone truly interested and dedicated to improving personal productivity), I felt that my perception of the world had changed permanently for the better, but rather than take it on face value, I decided to test it.

At the time of reading it, I worked in a research laboratory in Switzerland and was responsible for running and maintaining laboratory facilities as well for experiments. When I started work at the facility, things were in a mess. We had a massive program of work to do and yet we were doing things very inefficiently. In order to make some radical time saving, I decided to do some time and motion studies and apply some non-linear analysis.

The results were a near perfect example of non-linear effects to 80/20 proportions. There were 20 start-up operations that had to be performed in order to commence a test. Some of these had a very short duration and some were very long. Just 4 of these operations (20%) took up 80% of the cumulative time taken to prepare for a test.

Prior to this kind of analysis, I might well have spent a lot of effort trying to shorten the duration of each of the 20 operations, but armed with non-linear analysis, it was clear that for the 16 items that took only 20% of the overall duration were not really worth bothering with. Even if I halved each of them (which was unlikely, time-consuming and expensive to do), I would have only cut the duration by 10%.

Armed with the analysis, I chose to focus on the 4 things that made the most difference. One of them was the result of a technical installation that was not properly finished and which consequently required considerable man-handling each time we did an experiment. By focusing on this one item and completing the installation properly, I eliminated 1 of the 4 major time consumers and, in this particular case, reduced the overall start-up duration by 25%. That was a result to be proud of and it didn’t stop there. I applied 80/20 analysis to as many measurable aspects as possible and made further massive savings. In the end, I doubled the productivity of the lab (admittedly, there were a lot of low hanging apples, but at least I had the good sense to identify them and pick them!).

I can’t emphasize enough the incredible effect that knowledge of non-linear relationships can have upon your ability to get things done. So much of what we do has a trivial effect upon our overall output and achievement. Once you know this, understand it and look out for it, you can create massive leverage in your ability to get things done. It’s the best tool out there to lift your efforts head and shoulders above the average effort.

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