If you are like most people, then you don’t structure your days much. Instead of actively planning how you are going to spend your time, you are more likely to merely react to impulses and directions you receive from your environment. You respond to emails, answer phone calls, and consider memos. 

It depends on your profession how much autonomy you have about your work. So, if your task is to patrol a large corporate parking lot for eight hours straight, then you simply follow a routine someone else designed for you. If you are a receptionist, you follow a certain set of rules as well, and may be closely observed, too. In many jobs, though, you won’t get micromanaged a lot. As long as you get your stuff done, your superiors will be happy. How you do it is your choice. The same is obviously true for entrepreneurs, artists, and freelancers. In the end, only your results matter. 

Yet, perceptions about what brings results can be misleading. There are superfluous emails, pointless business meetings, irrelevant phone conversations, and there are plenty of small tasks that seem important but actually aren’t. Yet, they take up enormous amounts of your time while their actual effect on the bottom line ranges from unsubstantial to negative. 

This is yet another example of what is know as the Pareto principle. It is often referred to as the 80–20 rule, meaning that about 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. If there only was a way to safely identify those 20%! The problem is that as long as you do something, no matter how substantial or trivial it is, you feel as if you are being productive, even if you aren’t. Thus, it’s necessary to reflect over your actions. 

Talking about the working life quickly gets boring, so lets just mentally wander down the street and enter a gym. And what do we see there? Plenty of people who put in a lot of effort for often little results. If you want to look like Frank Zane in his prime, your workouts will obviously have to be rather long and focus on muscle groups everybody else can ignore. You’d simply have to account for the fact that the remaining 20% of the effects come from 80% of the effort. 

Your regular Joe in the gym, though, could get better results by focussing on main exercises such as squats, dead lifts, and bench presses. Those are the three main exercises anyway. If you just do those, you’ll be done in less than half an hour, and with better results. The same applies to any area I can think of. Are you studying for an exam? Then make sure you know the main topics very well because the bulk of your results will come from them. It’s just not the case that everything is equally important, even if some of your overly studious classmates think so. 

So, focus on the 20%, forget about most of the busywork, and get more out of your life in your remaining time.