Eat That Frog

 
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Chapter 3 - Apply the 80/20 Rule to Everything 
 
“We always have time enough, if we will but use it aright.” (Wolfgang 
Von Goethe) 
The 80/20 Rule is one of the most helpful of all concepts of time and 
life management. It is also called the Pareto Principle after its 
founder, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who first wrote about 
it in 1895. Pareto noticed that people in his society seemed to divide 
naturally into what he called the "vital few,” the top 20% in terms of 
money and influence, and the “trivial many,” the bottom 80%. 
He later discovered that virtually all economic activity was subject to 
this Pareto Principle as well.
For example, this rule says that 20% of your activities will account for 
80% of your results. 20% of your customers will account for 80% of 
your sales. 20% of your products or services will account for 80% of 
your profits. 20% of your tasks will account for 80% of the value of 
what you do, and so on. 
This means that if you have a list of ten items to do, two of those 
items will turn out to be worth as much or more than the other eight 
items put together. 
 
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Here is an interesting discovery. Each of these tasks may take the 
same amount of time to accomplish. But one or two of those tasks 
will contribute five or ten times the value as any of the others. 
Often, one item on a list of ten things that you have to do can be 
worth more than all the other nine items put together. This task is 
invariably the frog that you should eat first. 
Can you guess on which items the average person is most likely to 
procrastinate? The sad fact is that most people procrastinate on the 
top ten or twenty percent of items that are the most valuable and 
important, the “vital few.” They busy themselves instead with the 
least important 80%, the "trivial many" that contribute very little to 
results. 
You often see people who appear to be busy all day long but they 
seem to accomplish very little. This is almost always because they are 
busy doing things that are of low value while they procrastinate on 
the one or two activities that could make a real difference to their 
companies and to their careers. 
The most valuable tasks you can do each day are often the hardest 
and most complex. But the payoff and rewards for completing these 
tasks efficiently can be tremendous. For this reason, you must 
 
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adamantly refuse to work on tasks in the bottom 80% while you still 
have tasks in the top 20% left to be done. 
Before you begin work, always ask yourself, “Is this task in the top 
20% of my activities or in the bottom 80%?”
Rule: “Resist the temptation to clear up small things first.”
Remember, whatever you choose to do, over and over, eventually 
becomes a habit that is hard to break. If you choose to start your day 
on low value tasks, you soon develop the habit of always starting and 
working on low value tasks. This is not the kind of habit you want to 
develop, or keep.
The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the 
first place. Once you actually begin work on a valuable task, you 
seem to be naturally motivated to continue. There is a part of your 
mind that loves to be busy working on significant tasks that can 
really make a difference. Your job is to feed this part of your mind 
continually. 
Just thinking about starting and finishing an important task motivates 
you and helps you to overcome procrastination. The fact is that the 
amount of time required to complete an important job is often the 
same as the time required to do an unimportant job. The difference is 
 
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that you get a tremendous feeling of pride and satisfaction from the 
completion of something valuable and significant. However, when 
you complete a low value task, using the same amount of time and 
energy, you get little or no satisfaction at all. 
Time management is really life management, personal management. 
It is really taking control over the sequence of events. Time 
management is control over what you do next. And you are always 
free to choose the task that you will do next. Your ability to choose 
between the important and the unimportant is the key determinant of
your success in life and work. 
Effective, productive people discipline themselves to start on the 
most important task that is before them. They force themselves to eat 
that frog, whatever it is. As a result, they accomplish vastly more 
than the average person and are much happier as a result. This 
should be your way of working as well.