Spend More Time on What Matters (beta)

The 80/20 Rule - which was first conceived of by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto in 1896 when he noticed that 20% of Italy's people owned 80% of its land - suggests that one-fifth of our work produces 4x the value of the other four-fifths combined. This would imply that a small portion of our work is 16x more valuable than the bulk of our work.

Is this true? While it's hard to say, a recent study of 39 companies found that people rated 67% of their work as either "easily off-loaded" or "tiresome." If your goal is to save time, you'll want to master the skills of identifying 'high-value work' (i.e, what matters) and allocating as much of your time to it as possible.

In this course, you'll learn the following skills to make this possible:

• Use hypothesis-first planning to methodologically direct your efforts to greatest value work
• Avoid 'rabbit trails,' dead-ends, and U-turns by understanding the critical path concept & when to invest in different types of work
• Minimize doing irrelevant work by anticipating change, using Lean Startup techniques, and using 4 strategies to deal with uncertainty
• Make your conversations productive using answer-first communication techniques

If most of your day is filled with tasks that seem easy to delegate or tiresome, you're likely spending the bulk of your time in the 80% of tasks that produce little value. By learning just a handful of skills, you can begin trading in those low-value tasks for the work that matters.