Also known as the 80/20 rule, 80:20 rule or Pareto's rule.

The basic idea of the Pareto Principle is that most of the consequences of a situation or action are caused by only a few of the component parts -  80% of consequences stem from 20% of causes.

Originally Signor Pareto came to discover that 80 percent of land in Italy was owned by just 20 per cent of the population. He then saw a similarly unequal distribution in many other circumstances.

The most obvious benefit from this understanding is that if you concentrate your energies on those actions which create disproportionately large benefits, you gain much more than if you distribute your efforts equally across all tasks. To do this you need to analyse which actions are the productive ones and do more of them.

Note that although the numbers 80 and 20 have a simple relationship and may be the values which happen to apply in a particular situation, they are not absolute. The ratio could just as well be 64 to 36 or 92 to 8. The essential point is that some causes have effects which are much greater or much less than others.

In the world of sales, there is no question that the thing which is most likely to create sales success is talking to prospects, both new ones and old customers. To have a good indicator of your sales effectiveness, measure how much of your time is spent doing this. For most salespeople it will be a only small part of every day despite maybe feeling that you are working hard.

The problem is that a long list of distractions seduce us away from the simple and vital need to make these contacts. The easiest way to get a fix on the scale of the problem would be to have a time-and-motion study made of your working month. If this were done and your activities were categorised and the time spent on each one measured, you would almost certainly see a dismally low amount of time applied to important actions and the bulk of your hours and days spent on activities which contribute little or nothing directly to achieving your goals.

To illustrate this point at my Selling for Engineers seminars I sometimes ask the participants, 'How many miles do you drive a year?' The answer if often 40,000. Then I inquire, 'What would you say your average speed is?' Typically they answer, '40 miles per hour', or less. It then takes an elementary calculation to see that with these values, 1,000 hours a year, which is on average about 20 hours a week or about half of every working day is spent behind the steering wheel; a location where you are not directly creating sales. With 50% of the week gone, and a plethora of other interruptions and other non-essentials stealing more of your core productive time it's only too easy to be ineffective.

I'm not preaching at you here; I'm in no position to, since all of us are afflicted to some extent with the challenge of avoiding the distractions and getting on with the important. But what you can't escape is that the successful people are the ones who pursue their objectives with focused energy.

If you want to be one of this minority, the achievers, look at what makes up your day and identify the 'thieves of time'. Reduce these low-value activities and apply some of the freed-up time to productive actions.

If you enjoyed this article, take a look at my book.

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