Accelerate Productivity with the Pareto Planner Technique

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Understanding the Pareto principle is like unlocking a great time hack. It’s a technique that helps many organisations identify key causes of lack of progress or time-related problems while opening up more options for long-term success. With the Pareto planner time technique, it’s all about using resources efficiently, making quick decisions with smart intent, boosting productivity and solving problems.

The Pareto planner comes with an obvious structure that helps you to stay organised and productive while offering you additional information and features to improve your life. The Pareto planner is a time management system that helps you become mindful of how you spend your energy and time, and empowers you to focus on what matters.

 

 

The Pareto planner concept


The Pareto principle, or 80/20 rule, is a cause-and-effect management principle stating that 80% of output comes from 20% of input.

The Pareto planner technique means that you can maximise efficiency by focusing your efforts on positive measures that yield greater benefits.

Yet this does not mean that other actions have no consequence.

The essence of the Pareto planner technique is to prioritise resource use by allocating more energy and resources to high-priority business items, resulting in a greater result or impact. The Pareto planner helps you to eliminate chaos and reroute resources to priority areas.

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Pareto planner elements

Understanding the Pareto planner technique


The Pareto planner technique comes with structural settings that help you reflect, focus and spend your energy in positive ways that improve your life. A planner is more interactive than a simple diary. It prevents you from taking on too much, thereby eliminating the consequences of work overload.

The Pareto planner technique comes with benefits, including keeping you on track with the most important aspects of your day. Planners help you manage time but the Pareto planner helps you stay on top of things, achieve goals, be more organised, increase productivity, and build good habits to bring positive energy to your work-life balance.

Tracking your time is one such good habit. Many employees waste essential productive hours a week that can be used for better time management.

TimeTrack Timesheet takes the guesswork out of time tracking by providing a seamless and intuitive interface that provides much-needed clarity on where and how employees are spending their time. With this information at hand, managers can empower workers to foster better time management habits.

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TimeTrack Timesheet

The Pareto planner settings support effective goal-setting and process-tracking for achieving your desired goals. The planner gives you clarity on what needs to be done to get to the next step, while also allowing the space for creativity.

Make the Pareto planner method work for you


The Pareto planner concept means that 20% of your actions accounts for 80% of your results. By implication, if you have a list of ten items to complete, two of the items on the list will be worth as much as or more than the other eight items. So, how does the Pareto planner method enhance time management?

Rethink the task list

A to-do list comprises important and unimportant items, at least some of which have no urgency. The Pareto planner method helps you set your task list based on priorities while considering the worth of the efforts involved in each task.

List and rank your items based on priority and potential results. This will give you clarity on the tasks with greater impact and the requirements for implementing them. You can also divide resources and time amongst different tasks using a weekly action plan to help you boost efficiency and productivity.

Evaluate your tasks

Identify the 20% of tasks that will produce 80% of the results. Does performing these tasks help you achieve your goals? Evaluate your task, goals, and pay attention to the 20% of activities that will help you maximise time.

Mark your productive time

Create a time slot when you are focused, energetic and alert. Whether night or day, determine your most productive time and prioritise the most important tasks to carry out when your energy is at its peak.

Eliminate distractions

From your task list, identify sources of distraction and eliminate them. Be ruthless in culling tasks that hold no value. Distractions could come from phone calls, email notifications, office gossip, co-worker conversations — whatever the source, if it’s not necessary, get rid of them.

Set goals and prioritise

Set your goals and priorities based on importance, but be sure to specify the purpose and the results you intend to achieve. Place your top two or three tasks first and focus on executing them. When implementing a task is slow or difficult, try the Eisenhower Decision Matrix.

Conceptualise

Decide on the task that will bring in the bulk of the results you desire. Focus all your energy when working on important but complex tasks.

Streamline the things you focus on

Determine which tasks have the greatest impact and prioritise these, but also identify low-value actions that waste time. Get rid of activities that steal valuable time in your schedule.

Schedule

After streamlining your behaviour, adopt a daily schedule that translates the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule, into chunks of time. If you have a priority task you must attend to, block out the task. You must be wary of a heavy workload and stay within your limits.

Use effective tools

Most companies waste time on manual processes and even more time in failing to track employees’ use of time. TimeTrack Attendance Tracking helps managers track the length and frequency of employee breaks, thereby ensuring an insightful and informed report on time usage. You can also use this information to create winning staff engagement goals.

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TimeTrack Attendance Tracking

Ramp up efficiency with the Pareto planner


The Pareto planner helps you to eliminate chaos, focus on important tasks and ignore the myriad of less important busy work. Remember: efficiency is about improved decision-making and productivity.

Source data

Tracking data is important. The data you may track include efforts, resources, costs, challenges or deficiencies. A good way to track these is to use key performance indicators.

Visualise data

Chart the numbers using a histogram chart to illustrate the data. The emphasis is on the important few while ignoring the trivial many.

Identify areas of action

Identify elements you can combine to make up 80% of the results you desire. Use the earlier data to determine the area of prioritisation.

Conclusion


The Pareto planner is designed to help you view your weekly or daily schedule in terms of the specific value of each action and the prioritisation that will set you apart for greater productivity and efficiency.