The 80:20 rule, or my interpretation of minimalism

Have you sometimes wished that there be only one single pursuit in your life, nothing more, nothing less. Say you love playing football - how cool would it be if you could just keep playing, become better at it everyday, until you are the new Lionel Messi of this world! Nothing else matters to you, you are devoted in your pursuit to the point where it seems like insanity from the outside.

This thought fascinated me for quite a while. But when I started acting on it, I realised some fundamental issues with the approach.

Two things —

1) I do not have a single goal.

I am not this perfect being. I want to explore the world, I want to learn to code, I want to create an awesome company, I want to study physics, I want to play the guitar.

I tried to minimise these goals, prioritised and selected one and deferred the rest for later, but even then, there were always limits to it.

There are people I care about, who have their own goals, and those goals in some way become my goals as well. Again I tried to minimise the number of people I cared about, but there is a limit beyond which I do not wish to go. The circle of people influencing my choices can be small, but I do not want it to be non-existent.

2) Being 100% goal oriented does not work for me.

While the thought of constantly working with a goal in mind sounded good in theory, as I started applying it, I soon realised something to be missing.

As I started working towards my biggest goal in a 100% manner, I planned every single activity I did in the direction of that goal. But the problem was that I am not a perfect planner, far from it. So I ended up doing a lot of things which I thought were oriented towards my goal, but were actually not. But much worse, I started missing out on a lot of things which would actually help in my goal, just because I was blinded by my idea of what needed to be done.

Random conversation I had gave a brilliant new idea, random movie I saw gave great inspiration, random tweet I came across gave a huge opportunity, random people I met opened new doors. With 100% goal, I missed this randomness, and the impact was immense!

That’s when I sat down and devised my version of the 80:20 rule.

“Devote 80% of your time and energy fanatically to what you believe you should do. Let chaos/randomness/uncertainty/doubt take over the remaining 20%.”

(Disclaimer — The numbers only vaguely indicate the relative scale and are not to be taken literally. I could have called it 75:25 or 85:15 or even 70:30. I do not measure 80% with a clock!)

Some examples to explain further-

1. I try to let my goals (creating my business, growing a relationship, fostering friendships, maintaining good health) take over my actions 80% of my time. Remaining 20% I wish to spend going to new places, reading books, cooking, having random conversations with friends, building seemingly useless stuff, watching movies etc.
2. In a typical work cycle, I devote 20% time to think and plan my actions, then 80% of the time is devoted to mindlessly act on what I plan. I believe mindlessness is very important when you act, but that’s another blog post in itself, for some other time :).
3. Whenever I am stuck with assigning priorities, I identify the most important thing in the list and assign it 80% importance, the rest have to fit in the remaining 20%.

Having a rule always has a great benefit, it simplifies choices, removes indecision. Apart from that, the beauty of this particular rule is that it allows you to be rigid and flexible, both at the same time. You are focussed without being blind, stubborn without being closed to change.

With this rule in place, suddenly minimalism is a lot less confusing to me. While I am still experimenting with this theory, the results seem to be promising.

Let me know your opinion on this, would love feedback.