Day 14: Ignore 80% of everything

Every post in this series is aiming to be around 300 words and written in 30 mins.

The 80/20 rule, or the Pareto principle is widely known.

Spend 80% of your time on your top 20% of customers, 20% of the problem will take 80% of the effort to solve etc.

Today I realised that I’m focusing too much on too many things, thus not getting the true value of the last 20% of the things I care about. So I’m going to try something new:

Focusing 80% of my time on the 20% of things I care the most about, but leaving 20% to still dabble in other stuff.

So my 80% is going to be taken up with:

1. Songwriting — Getting better at production, songs, and increasing output by improving my process
2. Personal development — Always putting at least an hour aside each day to learn more stuff, prioritize physical movement and mindfulness practice.
3. Product ownership, planning, strategy stuff — Developing and nurturing the product and innovation work I am doing. This is where I can apply most of my knowledge, and has many overlaps. This includes regular work stuff.
4. Family — Gotta maintain those relationships

Thats it.

If things dont fall into one of these buckets I’m going to assign an hour a day to “free exploration” where I have to schedule anything else.

Lets see how this goes!