How to apply the 80/20 rule to your Steemit Life

Did you know that you can apply one of the most powerful business principle to your Steemit life, and literally watch your profits and reach grow?

It's a principle that I've applied in most areas of my business and personal life, and of course, over my 4 month old Steemit career.

But first, a little back story.

Like way back.

Like 120 years ago.

Vilfredo Pareto and his Observation of Nature

Pareto first wrote about an interesting observation he made, way back in 1985. He was the first to coin the term 80/20 rule, but as time goes by, some would also know it as the Pareto Principle.

Pareto, an Italian economist, first observe a few interesting phenomenons.

• 20% of the land owners own 80% of the land.
• 20% of his pea pots in his garden contains 80% of the peas.
• 80% of the income in Italy is received by only 20% of the population.

Since the publish of his paper, many have taken his 80/20 rule and tested it across different industries, businesses and areas of life. Though the number sometimes vary between 90/10 and 70/30, generally, the rule has held on it's own over the decades.

For example:

• In a project, 20% of the people will do 80% of the work.
• In sales, 20% of the clients will generate 80% of the revenue.
• In a potluck, 20% of your party guests will bring 80% of the food.
• And in the same potluck, another 20% of your guests will eat 80% of the food!

Here's a short video that basically summarise what I just wrote in 90 seconds (should have started with that, huh?). Hey, that's 80/20 too!

https://youtu.be/zPoA6dzKmtg

Me and my 80/20 experiments

So when I first heard about this time/priority management law, I decided to take it to the test.

Sure enough, here are some of my conclusions:

Case Study 1:

For my main businesses (Plaseed.com and BDlabs.co), and also my previous community projects like KICKSTART.MY and Fuckupnights KL, email marketing brought in over 80% of my sales (the number was closer to 93% actually), and yet, I spend lesser than 20% of my time on it. On the same note, I spend 80% of my marketing budget on running Facebook ads, and that accounted to less than 30% of the sales.

Case Study 2:

Before I became a single dad, I worked really long hours, around the vicinity of 15 hours a day. When the divorce happened, I knew I had to be the sole provider for my kid, and also be the main care taker. The 15-hour work days just couldn't work.

So I looked at that 15 hours and started realising that 80% of the work could be outsourced, delegated or eliminated. I then only focus on 20% of the tasks that bring in money fast, usually within 30 days. At one point until last year, I managed to cut my "work" time to under 90 minutes a day.

Side note: I then realised cutting down time for the sake of cutting down time is useless, because after my 90 minute day, I went on to spend my time on foolish endeavours, which caused me to go into debt. I realised too that I'm workaholic by nature, so for this year, aside from building communities around Steemit, I took on a few more projects to fill my days after the 90 minutes.

Case Study 3:

In terms of Steemit, I also discovered that there are times of the day where I can put in minimal effort to complete a post. But on other times, I just found that I was too easily distracted by other things. Using the 80/20 rule again, I carve out slots in my daily calendar for different, broken down tasks such as:

• Researching for my content
• The actual writing of the content
• Commenting, connections and community building
• Bid botting (used to, but stopped since 2 weeks ago)

So after these 3 separate case studies, here are some strategies to help you get started on applying the 80/20 in our Steemit career.

Time to 80/20 your Steemit Career

I discovered that one of the best ways to apply 80/20 in your Steemit life, is by a series of questions.

Here goes:

1. What time of the day do you find yourself most creative?

2. What areas of interests can you write most easily on? Almost like effortlessly?

3. What topics that you can research on quickly, because of the existing knowledge you already have? And on that note, which platforms are the easiest to research on?

4. Comparing reading an article/book, listening to a podcast, and watching a video, in the shortest time, which activity can give you the best overview of any topic?

5. What are the tags that you spend the most time commenting on?

6. What types of contents you find yourself most at ease with? Stories, non-fiction, factual, poetry, art, video, audio recordings?

7. Which day of the week do you do most of your researching writing on?

8. Which part of post formatting takes most of your time?

9. If photo sourcing is one of the factors, ask yourself how long do you spend on finding the right photos, and if subscribing to a stock photo site will help. (I do, and it cuts down so much of my time picking and editng photos)

10. If you have a library of books, what type of books you have most of? Which section of the book store you spend most of you time browsing?

11. What tags generate the most upvotes, comments and payout for you? You can use Steem.supply to check this.

    Go to Steem.supply/@steemitID > Content Insights > Top 20 Performing Tags

12. While you're at Steem.supply, take the opportunity to check on other Steemians in the same content category as you too.

As you answer the question, you'll start noticing a pattern forming as well, and some conclusive data would probably be on:

• Best time to research for your posts
• Best channel to research your contents
• Best time to write your posts
• Best sources to get your images
• Best tags in terms of engagement and profitability
• Best topics/tags/categories
• Best place to focus and write your contents
• Best music (classical, nature sounds, white noise etc)

What's Next? Consolidate, Strategies and Test

1. From your answers, start by removing "unproductive" activities and factors.
2. If you need help, rank them from best to worst in terms of supporting you in your Steemit career. Then just remove the bottom 80%.
3. Now that you have the top 20% left, set a time limit to test your new strategy on your focus. 21 days is recommended for a simple final check, to see if things are heading in a positive way. In between the 21 days, have 3 to 7 milestone checks on your progress. Just gather the data, but don't act on it yet. Acting too early may cause results that are premature.
4. If you wanna go the extra mile, from the 20%, see if you can find another 20% from it. It doesn't apply all the time, but it's good to know which gives you more results, so that if ever you find yourself rushing for time, you'll know which of the top 20% can you work on first.

So there you have it. Do share some of your results in the comments below, especially the one on best writing time. I'm also experimenting writing across different times, so would love to use yours as a test.

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Wait, why's Mav posting on Steemit nowadays?

Well, unlike other blogging and social media platform, Steemit is the only platform that allows me to earn cryptocurrency when I engage with it. Yup, one Steem is about USD7, and you, too, can earn Steem Dollars every time you:

• Create content (articles, blog posts, podcasts, videos, photos)
• Upvote (like) other people contents
• Comment on other people's posts
• Have discussions, share opinions etc!

Yup, basically it's the very same thing you're doing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc all along!

The only difference? For once you can earn a nice income on the side!

Sign up for a free Steemit account, and you can thank me by coming back and upvoting this article. And guess what, you will earn Steem too for doing that! #awesome