have you ever noticed that you wear 20% of your clothes 80% of the time although
in a group 80% of the work is sometimes done by 20% of the team okay so that
last one might just be my personal experience but have you ever left an
exam thinking gee I revise so hard for this or for that but it didn't come up
today we'll be talking about how to achieve more with less how you can
achieve 80% of your results by focusing on 20% of the work hello there my name
is Khalid Zalmay and I work as a doctor in London thank you for joining me today
today we'll be talking about Pareto's principle or the 80/20 rule now this was
a game-changer for me and medical school not only did it allow me to manage my
time efficiently but also it allowed me to focus my energy on what I needed to
revise now in this spirit Pareto principle I want to give you the
opportunity to skip ahead to the part that is going to give you the 80% value
so if you wanted to get that just have a look at the time stamp that should be
popping up now but actually if you want to come and follow us on this journey
hopefully I can fill you in on a bit more about where this principle came
from and why it's so so important it was in the late 1800s that a chap called
peretta noticed that 80% of the land in Italy
actually was owned by 20% of the population he was an economist and he
later went on to publish this principle I wonder if he actually knew the impact
it would have on the world going forward for example if you look at businesses
what they do is they find the 20% of their customers who are making them the
majority of their revenue and their aim is to keep those customers happy and if
we look across to something else like tech developers have realized that the
majority of their bugs come from about 20% of their code so when the newest
game is coming out or a new app is coming out developers will focus on
20% of code to get the maximum effect from it I know at this point a lot of
you will be thinking well for college there are lots of other ratios you know
could it be in a 90/10 or a 95 5% to that you know why does it have to be
strictly 8020 I believe rather than a precise law of nature I see it more as
an observation and the observation for me is that a minority of the cause
actually accounts for the majority of the effect so the take home for me here
is that we shouldn't be bogged down with the arbitrary ratios and numbers but the
the concept is more important here and that's what we should be taken away in
medical school before I would start revising for an exam I would always look
back at previous papers and I would tally up the topics that come up and
what I found was that certain topics like cardiology respiratory
gastroenterology tend to come up again and again and they tend to take up a lot
more of the exam so rather than spreading myself thin and covering lots
of topics I would find the core 20% and make sure I understood all of the key
areas there and that way I could have the most impact with the time I had to
revise I would always make sure every morning I would prioritize my tasks so I
could focus on the most important first when I was fresh and actually found that
when I got the most important tasks done by the time it got to be afternoon I
would actually feel good about that and I would say well you know what I'm going
to carry on today and do more and often I would do far more than I would expect
now inversely if I had not really done some great tasks if I did some admin or
tasks that I didn't want to do or just donated then it would get to the
afternoon and I would feel rubbish and I would stop working so I think yeah one
of the take homes I would say is when you're waking up early in the morning
make sure you're doing your important tasks first the key areas you want to
get done for the day focus on those what's the point of
sitting down for ten hours straight reading a textbook are we really being
productive or is it more just being busy I think what's more important is to
focus your revision time focus on what exactly you need to learn and then go
and get those objectives and actually get those things done now how I began to
achieve that was through a few different techniques one of them was the Pomodoro
Technique the other one was through setting smart objectives now we'll get
onto both of these in later videos but they've really helped me become more
efficient with my use of time it's fair to say that the 8020 rule can be applied
to all aspect of your life but the tricky part is finding out what that 20%
is to you now I hope with the examples that I've given you'll be able to have a
look at finding out what that 20% will be to your situation the key take-home
message is to find what gives you the most value and to focus most of your
time on that area that's it folks thank you for watching this video and making
it to the end I guess if you made it this far I hope you've enjoyed the
content if you have give us a subscribe hit the bell so you hear about our next
videos and join the conversation in the comments tell us what is the 20% that
you will be focusing on