Productivity Hack: Stop Multitasking!

Why do so many people misunderstand the Pareto principle, a least you have demonstrated one of reasons why the misapplication of it causes so much bad advice. Most people try to use it in the “I will get 80% of the result here for 20% of the effort so I can do loads of cool stuff really quickly and pick up reasonable skills and ability in lots of stuff in a fifth of the time and effort”.

Of course even if the rule applies to a given situation in that way it says Nothing about where that 20% would lie. So as your example correctly points out doing 20% of workout capacity will not give 80% of the fitness gain but that the LAST 20% is what provides most of the gain.

You do realise that the 80/20 is only an example, in fact real analysis of many situations can turn up anything 50/30 for example there are a lot of examples that do fall in 80/20 however including the original land ownership example which is why is has that catchy ratio.  I suspect that most people who mis-apply it don’t even realise that the two numbers are measuring different things so they don’t have to add up to 100. 80/30 for example.

In fact if 90% of the muscle gain is from the last two reps then would this not be a 90/20 rule? Many of your readers and some fellow bloggers who misuse Pareto may have slipped into lazily thinking that 2 out of 10 reps is 20% so that is what fits the 80/20 I bet, which is of course nonsense all that path leads to is that 20% of the reps = 20% of the reps (what a surprise). In fact I strongly suspect that your example would be more like 95/20 with the 20 being at the end so the the message is “get off your lazy ass and work, stop thinking about short-cuts”.

Regarding the multi-tasking that is a simplification, you seem like you are keen on brain stuff, you mentioned visualisation somewhere (very powerful). There is a lot more research that weakens some of the implications in your post. At the furthest end for example brain scans on grandmaster chess players have shown that they use both hemispheres of their brain simultaneously, multi-tasking to far outstrip simply very good chess players who only use one hemisphere to analyse the board (now that is cool). Whilst that may be seen as an extreme form of focus there are examples where the two hemi-spheres can be trained to multi-task two different tasks, where an average person would mostly be using one hemi-sphere at a time to achieve one thing.  Other research has shown that you can multi-task successfully dependant on the tasks and how you approach them.

In my opinion the vast majority of life hack type blogs are complete drivel because they derive conclusions from very shaky grounds and purely personal experience, I don’t know where the Pareto principle applies here though and I say nothing about your blog (this is the first post I read). I am impressed that you used a Pareto example that runs contrary to the usual misinformed rubbish though, thank you for that!