By Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, The Productivity Pro®

Are you a good time manager? You get a lot done. You are fairly efficient. You know how to make lists and check things off. Yet, if you're such a hard worker and know how to get a lot accomplished each day, why do you often feel like you're spinning your wheels? Why is it that when all is said and done, and a week … a month … a year goes by, you feel frustrated by all that work left undone? Why is it that all the things you should have done aren't done while all the things you shouldn't have done are? Simply put, you're not prioritizing correctly.

When faced with a long list of things to do and given a short block of time to complete them, you more than likely look at your list and determine which tasks you can knock out right away. You decide to start that important project "in a little while." Then you go to lunch, and afterward you're either too tired or a crisis pops up that demands your attention. When all is said and done, you really got nothing important accomplished that day. Weeks later, you feel defeated for having accomplished so little. Sound familiar?

The 80/20 Rule

Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) suggested that 20% of the Italian population owned 80% of the wealth. Similar observations by others led to the conclusion that the results and the causes of those results are unequally distributed. Pareto's Law, more commonly referred to as the 80/20 Rule, has these interesting implications:

• 20% of your activities produce 80% of your value as an employee.
• 20% of an organization's employees produce 80% of its results.
• 20% of your product line accounts for 80% of your sales.
• 20% of your customers account for 80% of your revenue.
• 20% of your clothes are worn 80% of the time.

Maybe the breakdown is not always this precise; perhaps it's 75/25 or 85/15, but the rule generally holds true in many different applications. The 20% of your activities that produce 80% of your results are known as the "critical few." The 80% of your activities that only produce 20% of your results are known as the "trivial many." So if you have 10 things to do, only 2 are really important.

Identify your critical 20%

You must try to identify the 20% of your activities and behaviors that are the most important to productivity and concentrate on improving those.

To do this, focus on the priorities of tasks and plan to accomplish them in order of importance. If you don't, there is a severe danger that the trivial, time-consuming activities of the day will push the "critical few" entirely off the calendar. In other words, to leverage your time, give less attention to activities that are urgent but unimportant and devote more time to those things that are important but not necessarily urgent. If left alone long enough, important things left undone inevitably become crises.

Remember, the dilemma is not a shortage of time — it is a problem of priorities. Would a 30-hour day solve your time problems? Not really. Soon, your 30-hour day would be just as full with no fewer frustrations. You would still have a list of things that you never got around to and a pile of unfinished books and projects.

Do you have a "someday" pile at work? How about a "decide later" pile? Even if you did have more time, these would still exist because of habits you've developed. It's more complex than not having enough time or not managing your time effectively. Instead, it becomes a lesson in managing priorities and being disciplined.

There will always be more things to do than time to do them. Sometimes you must forgo something you would like to do in favor of something that has to be done to accomplish your objectives. Don't fail to plan. If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.

Determine your priorities by using following matrix. The intersection of value (importance) and deadline (urgency) will determine the priority of your tasks. Here are some sample activities and their priorities:

If left undone long enough, quadrant 2 items inevitably become crises. Successful people spend a good majority of their time every day in quadrant 2 doing things that are not crises. With increased long-term focus, the number of quadrant 1 items would be reduced. Quadrant 3 items are largely time wasters and must be managed and controlled better. Quadrant 4 items can virtually disappear through self-discipline until such time as the priority changes.

About the author   Laura Stack is the president of The Productivity Pro®, Inc., an international consulting firm in Denver, Colorado, that specializes in productivity improvement in high-stress organizations. Laura holds an MBA in Organizational Management (University of Colorado, 1991) and is an expert on integrating advances in business productivity with the retention of key employees. Laura is the author of the best-selling book Leave the Office Earlier (Broadway Books, 2004).