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Entrepreneur Tim Ferriss' new book, The 4 Hour Workweek , offers some extreme methods for doing more in less time. While some of his strategies are more applicable than others, one of my favorite points of the book was applying Parkinson's Law to your work life. Parkinson's Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline. If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials. If I give you a week to complete the same task, it's six days of making a mountain out of a molehill.
Parkinson's Law and The 4-Hour Workweek
The term "Pareto principle" can also refer to Pareto efficiency . The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule , the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity ) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Business-management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto , who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; he developed the principle by observing that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. [ 2 ] It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., "80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients". Mathematically, where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants, there must be a number k between 50 and 100 such that " k % is taken by (100 − k )% of the participants".
