How To 80/20 Your Household

The Pareto principle says that 20% of the effort is responsible for 80% of the output.

This means, for example, that 20% of a company's customers generate 80% of its sales, 20% of your marketing activities are responsible for 80% of your success or that 80% of the information in a book is contained in 20% of its content.

For most of us, these examples might be rather uninteresting in everyday life, unless you have a company or are preparing for an exam.

But the Pareto principle applies universally. It can be used for almost everything. This means that there should be plenty of practical applications for the Pareto law in our everyday lives.

In our daily lives, we all have to struggle with keeping an eye on our household as well as work and other obligations.

Nobody wants to live in a dirty, untidy apartment, but keeping an apartment in order is not so easy.

Exceptional situation - When a visitor comes

We all know this situation: friends or family members have announced their visit, and your apartment looks like a bomb has hit it. The appointment is in two hours. What are you doing?

You can't possibly clean and tidy your whole apartment until the visitor arrives. So you need to focus on what's important. But in this case, what is the important thing?

Put yourself in your visitor's shoes. What is the first thing he sees when he walks in? What corners of your apartment will he even see during his visit? In which room will you spend most of your time, so that he will perceive the most there?

If you approach things this way, you will quickly realize that the entrance area, bathroom, kitchen, and living room are the critical areas.

The bedroom, the children's room, your study, and the storage room can, therefore, be neglected. Just close the appropriate doors. No guest will enter any of these rooms without being asked.

You probably won't spend most of your time in the kitchen. So here it is enough to keep things superficially tidy and clean.

All you have to do is put away the dirty dishes, sweep the floor, and put away any stuff lying around. If there is dust or stains on the work surfaces or cupboard doors, take care of them.

There is no need to clear out the fridge and clean it from the inside. You don't have to clean all the surfaces if they are not noticeably dirty.

In the bathroom, the toilet should look clean, and the floor should also be swept. Hang up some fresh towels and put away any magazines lying around.

The living room is the most critical, as you will spend most of your time there together.

But again, less is more. As long as there is no dirt on the floor, no dust visible on the furniture, and you clear away everything that has no fixed place, you are on the safe side.

As a rule, you can do without cleaning the windows, washing the curtains, or sweeping under the furniture.

So it boils down to three points in all rooms:

1. remove visible dirt from the floors

2. remove visible dust deposits on furniture

3. clear away the stuff lying around

With this, you have eliminated all immediately visible problems. Nobody knows what it looks like in your drawers, in the storage room, or your basement.

In everyday life

In the long run, of course, it will not always be enough to activate the emergency protocol for unexpected visits. The windows have to be cleaned at some point, and you have to do the laundry and also clean under the sofa and the cupboards.

Nevertheless, not everything has to be done every day. Every job has an ideal repetition cycle. Cleaning windows every day is entirely unnecessary. Sweeping the floors every day, on the other hand, is a good idea, because this is where dirt collects fastest and is immediately visible.

It is also not necessary to clean the tiles in the bathroom or to cover the beds every day.

So when it comes to keeping the household at an acceptable level in everyday life, it is sufficient to do the work during the week that would be most visible if it were postponed.

Everything else can be postponed to the weekend, and you don't have to do most of the work every weekend.

But whether it's daily tasks or tasks that only need to be done once in a while, you can apply the 80/20 rule to each job.

Look at each of your 20% tasks individually and ask yourself: Which 20% of this task leads to 80% of the result?

Practical example: The living room floor

Let us take the sweeping of the living room as an example. Do you really have to clean the entire floor area every day, or are there areas where dirt collects particularly quickly?

The first thing that comes to mind is the coffee table. We sit at this table in the evening, eat there, and crumble around with bread and other food. I have to sweep under this table every day.

One meter further on, between the coffee table and the TV, hardly any dirt collects.

On closer inspection, we quickly realize that the critical spots in every room are where we either eat or where we often walk along with street shoes.

Then there are the corners. That's where we collect dust and cat hairs. Because we have two cats, we can observe very well into which corners the dirt is preferably blown. In every flat, there are air currents which transport the dust quite reliably to certain places and deposit it there.

If you identify these collection points in each room, you will know which places you have to sweep daily. You will find that these are barely 20% of the total floor area.

Only if you don't clean this 20% regularly can the dirt spread out from there over the entire surface.

Find the most important 20% for each job

As the example of the living room floor has shown, it is best to start by observing. How quickly and in which places does the area in question become dirty?

Where does disorder develop most quickly, and why is this so?

What steps are necessary to get the job done perfectly? What happens if you omit one of these steps? Identify work steps whose omission hardly makes a visible difference.

You may find it rather laborious to analyze every single task in the household in this way. But you will quickly save this time once you have organized your entire home according to the 80/20 method.

Not only will you save 80% of the work in, but also 80% of the time you would otherwise spend on cleaning and tidying up during the week.

To permanently save 80% of the time for the unloved household, it is worthwhile to invest the extra time once and analyze everything. Don't you think the same way?