Habit #3 – Put First Things First

Everything you do in life is a choice. Every choice has its consequences. Some consequences are good, and some are bad.

You could choose to spend your time on important things or unimportant things. The consequences of each are either achieving your goals or not achieving them.

Picture a fishbowl that is half full of pebbles. You are told to add 3 large rocks and make them fit into the fishbowl. Depending on the size of the rocks, you may not be able to make them fit.
Consider the small pebbles to be all the unimportant things that you spend your time on, and the large rocks to be the really important things. That means if you spend your time first on all the unimportant things, your time will be used up, and you will have no time left over for the really important things.

Therefore, the correct approach is to empty the fishbowl, put the large rocks in first, and then pour the pebbles in, and you will probably see that they all fit.
It is very important to identify what are the large rocks in your life. If you take care of the large rocks first, there will be plenty of time left over for the pebbles.

A man named Wilfredo Pareto once wondered why certain people of equal ability produced such different results. His findings are now famous and are used all over the world, known as the "Pareto Principle", also called the "80/20 Rule".
Pareto found that the relationship between effort and results were not linear. In other words, 80% of all results come from a certain 20% of all efforts.

Therefore, perfectionists who insist on 100% results will have to give 80% more of their time to finish the final 20% of the results. This is not very efficient, and is also described in "The Law of Diminishing Returns", which says that once adequacy is achieved, the opportunity for further improvements may be there, but the benefit of further refinement is not always there. Those who ignore the 80/20 Rule are usually late getting things done, and they say there is never enough time to pursue more important goals.

In summary, the 80/20 Rule can allow you to do up to 5 times more things than the 100% rule, and all of them could be done with adequate results.

Another phrase that fits this concept is "Adequacy is sufficient, all else may be a poor use of time", another way of stating the law of diminishing returns, or extra effort with little extra benefit.

If you are not sure how important something is, ask yourself "What’s the worst thing that can happen if I do not do this?" If you cannot think of a good answer, it may not be worth doing. Instead, spend your time pursuing your most important goals.