If you are like me, you don’t like to work for nothing and you don’t like to waste your time. However, in the world, we live in, where we have hundreds of different projects and things to do, wasting our time become normal things, and you probably don’t even know that you are wasting your time.

More often than not, we will work on a project for several hours with little or no result. And if you look at your work you will see that the major result that you have, come from half of the time you’ve spent working on it.
This is call the

20/80 rule:

The rule says that 20% of your work will be done in 80% percents of the time it takes to your project and that 80% of your work will be done in 20% of that time! It’s obvious that this is one of the most important rules if you don’t want to waste your time on something that will result with no result.

I absolutely love that rule, because it saves me a lot of time, almost 80% of my time! So, imagine you are working on a report or a project at your job, and normally it takes you 10 hours to do that kind of work. Well, if you decide to use that technique, you will be able to do that work in about 2 hours! 2 hours instead of 10, this is a lot of extra time.

Imagine how your boss would be impressed if it takes you about 2 hours to do a project while it takes 10 hours for your colleagues and the best part is that everyone can do it, because we are doing it all the time. The only thing you have to do to make this work is to notice this rule, and you will be saving time like you’ve never saved before.

So, how it works

First, we all know that sometime we are very productive while other times we don’t feel like working at all, and we will look at the screen for hours surfing the internet. Instead of wasting your precious time like that while you clearly see that you don’t make any progress you should make the most of your productive time.

Next time you work on a project write where your time is going. By doing this you will probably see that the first hour you’ve worked a lot and after that really productive hour, you did almost nothing for an hour or two. Then after your break you did another 30 minutes of very productive work, and it was it.
If you write how much work, you do at a given time you will see some pretty interesting thing that you would have seen otherwise.

So, next time you are working on a project, and you know that you are not productive anymore instead of fighting that feeling go for a walk and come back 20 minutes later and continue to work. That way, you will save a ton of time.