Episode 106 - The 80/20 Rule for Work and Home: Let Most of It Go

Welcome to Episode 106 of the Time for Living Podcast!

TRANSCRIPT

show notes

What if most of what fills your day isn't moving anything you care about? And what if that's actually good news?

A small slice of what you do drives most of what matters. The rest quietly takes the room your dreams need. This episode is for the ambitious woman who's busy from the moment she wakes up, ticks off loads of little things, and still goes to bed feeling like nothing moved.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• How the 80/20 rule shows up at work and at home

• The one question that tells your vital few apart from the filler: if I skipped this for a week, would anything I care about actually suffer?

• The simple Name, Notice, Release model, and the three ways to release a task: drop it, shrink it, or hand it off

• Why the time you free up has to be pointed at your dream, or the next bit of filler moves straight in

• A first look at the app I'm building for myself, and what it's showing me about my own week

Resources:

Ready to take action? Grab the free Anchor Map at timeforliving.co/anchormap. It shows where your pockets of time really land, so the time you free up has somewhere to go.

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timeforlivingco/

• Email: hello@timeforliving.co

Final Thought:

You don't need more hours. You need to stop feeding the filler.

TRANSCRIPT - The 80/20 Rule for Work and Home: Let Most of It Go

INTRODUCTION

Okay, so I want to pick up right where we left off. At the end of the last episode, I asked you to write down the areas of your life, add fifteen minutes to your dream, and then name one "more" you could let go of to make room for it. And if you did it, I'd bet I know which part was hardest. It wasn't the fifteen minutes. It was the letting go.

Because how are you supposed to know what to let go of, when everything on your list feels like it matters? That's what today's about. It's the eighty twenty rule, for work and for home, and I think it's the piece that was missing last time.

And if you didn't hear that episode, don't worry, you don't need it for this one.

So think about yesterday for a second. You were probably busy from the moment you got up. Work, the house, the kids, the messages, the form that had to go back to school, the thing you promised someone you'd sort out. By the time you sat down at night, you were tired in that bone-deep way. And if someone had asked you what actually moved forward yesterday, the real answer might have been, well, not much. Not because you weren't working. You were working the whole time.

And the strange thing is, you probably ticked plenty off. If you scrolled back through your day, there'd be loads of little things done. Emails answered. Lunches made. The washing on, then off, then folded, then somehow back on again. It just doesn't add up to anything you can point at.

And somewhere under all of it is your dream. Still sitting at zero.

You weren't idle. You were just busy with the wrong slice.

Something I'm Building for Me

Before I get into the rule itself, I want to tell you about something I'm working on at the moment, because it's where all of this has been showing up for me lately.

I'm building an app. For me. You've heard me say it so many times on this show: it's not the app, it's the system. And that's still true. But what I really want is an app that works for my system. For the way my brain actually works.

I'm hoping that maybe one day it'll be for you too. That would be my dream. But right now I can't build it for you, because I have to build it and use it for me first. That's just how my brain works.

And I'll tell you, it's challenging. It's really bringing up the issues we keep repeating, the same ones, over and over. And so much of what keeps coming up is the menial stuff. The small, repetitive tasks that eat up time and don't really need me at all. That's the kind of thing AI can help with, by doing those menial tasks quickly so I don't have to.

And that's exactly why it's been on my mind for today. Because the same small things on repeat, taking up time without moving anything, that's the eighty twenty rule, sitting right there in my own week.

How the 80/20 Rule Works at Work and at Home

So here's the rule in one breath. A small slice of what you do drives most of what matters. Roughly twenty percent of your effort brings about eighty percent of your results. The numbers aren't exact, and they don't need to be. It's an old idea, and it's stuck around this long because it keeps turning out to be true.

Let's make it real at work first. Think back over your last working week, whatever work looks like for you. When you look back, what actually made the difference? Usually it's one or two things. The conversation that cleared up a problem. The piece of work you finally finished. The one follow-up that got you a yes.

And the rest? Answering every message the second it came in. The meeting that could have been a two-line email. Re-reading the same document for the fourth time. Those things kept you responsive. They didn't move much.

It's the same at home. There's a handful of things that keep the house running. Clean clothes for school. A rough plan for the week's meals. A quick look at the calendar so nobody misses the dentist. Those are your vital few at home.

Then there's everything else. Re-tidying the living room for the third time before lunch. The extra trip to the shops for one thing. Ironing things nobody will ever notice. The standard you're holding yourself to that nobody actually asked for.

Think about your wardrobe for a minute. Most of us have a wardrobe full of clothes, and if you're anything like me, you wear the same handful of things most weeks. The jeans that fit. The jumper you always reach for. The two tops that go with everything. That's maybe a fifth of what's in there.

The rest just hangs there. And it isn't harmless, is it? You push it aside every morning to get to the things you actually wear. You fold it, you move it from one shelf to another, you feel a bit guilty about it. It takes up all the room.

Your week works the same way. The vital few are the clothes you actually wear. The rest is everything you push past every single day to get to them.

So how do you tell which is which? There's one question I come back to all the time. If I skipped this for a week, would anything I care about actually suffer? Not would someone raise an eyebrow. Not would it feel a bit uncomfortable. Would something that matters to me, or to the people I love, really be worse off?

You'll be surprised how often the answer is no. The living room would be a bit messier. Someone would wait a few hours for a reply. The birthday card would be shop-bought instead of handmade. And life would carry on, completely fine.

And there's a reason the filler is so easy to keep doing. It feels good. Every little task you tick off gives you a tiny hit of done. The vital few are often slower and a bit scarier. The big piece of work. The hard conversation. The first page of your dream. Those don't give you that quick tick. So without really meaning to, we reach for the easy, finishable stuff, and the day fills up with it.

And here's the part I think matters most. That other eighty percent isn't something you chose. Nobody sits down on a Sunday night and thinks, I'd love to spend six hours this week on things that don't matter. It just builds up. A habit here, a yes there, a standard that crept up when you weren't looking. And it grows to fill whatever room you've got. Give it an extra hour and it'll happily take that too.

That's why there's never any room left over for your dream. It isn't that your dream doesn't matter. It's that the filler got there first.

The filler doesn't ask for your time. It just takes whatever's left.

This Isn't About Squeezing More In

Now, I want to be careful here, because the eighty twenty rule gets talked about in a really cold way. Do more in less time. Cut anything that isn't efficient. Optimise everything. And that's not what I mean at all. I'm not asking you to optimise your family. This isn't a productivity contest.

So let me say what's true first. Some of that eighty percent is love, and it stays. Reading one more story at bedtime because they asked so nicely. Sitting on the edge of the bath chatting while they splash about. Calling your mum just because. None of that drives a result, and none of it is filler. If you measured your life purely by output, you'd cut the very best bits.

So the measure isn't what's productive. The measure is what moves the life you actually want to live. That's how you tell the vital few from the rest.

Vital isn't what's productive. Vital is what moves the life you actually want.

And I want to say this next part really clearly, because I know how it can land. If you look at your week and see a lot of filler, please don't take that as proof you've been getting it wrong. You haven't been lazy. You haven't been undisciplined. If effort was the answer, your full days would have fixed this a long time ago. You've been working hard the entire time. You've just been doing all of it, because nobody ever told you that you were allowed not to.

I know this one from the inside. Back when I was working a job all day and then coming home to work on our business at night, I treated every single task like it mattered equally. Every email got the same urgency. Every request got a yes. And I was exhausted, and I couldn't have told you which of those things actually counted. It wasn't that I didn't care enough. I cared about everything, all the time, at exactly the same volume.

And one more thing this isn't about. It isn't about clearing everything out overnight. You don't have to get rid of the whole eighty percent by Friday. Most of it doesn't need to disappear. It can shrink, or it can wait, or it can go to somebody else.

Name the Few, Release the Rest

So how do you actually use this? It's simple enough to fit on the back of an envelope. Name, notice, release.

First, name your vital few. At work and at home, what are the one or two things that actually move something you care about? Not what's loudest. Not what's most urgent. What matters.

And I'd love for your dream to be on that list. Whatever it is for you. The course you keep looking at. Getting strong again. The little side project. Finally clearing out the spare room so it can be a studio. It probably doesn't feel urgent, because nobody else is waiting on it. Nobody's going to send you a reminder about it. But if it matters to the life you want to live, then by this measure it's one of your vital few, even if it's only getting fifteen minutes a week right now.

Then, notice the filler. Once you've named the few, the rest gets very easy to see. It's everything that fills the day without moving anything.

And then release one piece of it, on purpose. There are three ways to do that, and you only need one.

You can drop it. Some things can just stop, and nobody will notice. The afternoon re-tidy. The second trip to the shops. The newsletter you've been meaning to read for eight months.

You can shrink it. Good enough instead of perfect. The five-minute tidy instead of the full reset. The two-line reply instead of the essay.

Or you can hand it off. To your partner, to the kids, to a friend you swap favours with, or to a tool that can do the menial part for you. Your kids can put their own clean laundry away. It won't be folded the way you'd fold it. That's fine.

And I know releasing things can feel uncomfortable at first. There's a little voice that says, but what will people think? What if someone notices the shop-bought cake at the bake sale? What if my colleague wonders why I didn't reply straight away? I get it. I've had that voice too. But most of the time, nobody notices at all. And the people who do notice usually care far less than you'd expect. The only person holding you to most of those standards is you. Which means you're also the person who gets to let them go.

Every one of those gives you time back. And this is the bit I'd love you to really take in. The room you've been looking for is already inside your week. It's there right now, buried under the eighty percent. You don't need more hours. You need to stop feeding the filler.

But, and this matters, the time you free up has to go somewhere. Because if you let go of twenty minutes of filler and don't point those minutes at anything, the next bit of filler will move straight in. It always does.

So this is where the last episode comes back in. The fifteen minutes you circled for your dream? This is where they come from. Not from a bigger life or an emptier calendar. From the things you've decided to let go of.

Here's how it works for me, day to day. I build Time For Living inside school hours, in fifteen-minute blocks. And before I sit down, I already know the one or two things that block is for. Everything else waits. Some of it waits until tomorrow, and some of it waits forever, and I'm fine with that. When the school day ends, my work day ends. And that only works because I've stopped pretending every task is equally important.

What you let go of is where your dream finally fits.

Picture what that could look like for you. Say you stop re-tidying the living room every afternoon, and you just do one quick tidy before bed instead. That's probably twenty minutes back on most days. And say on three of those afternoons, you spend fifteen of those minutes on your dream. By the end of the week, that's three sessions. Three pages of the story you keep saying you'll write. Three runs. Three evenings with the paintbrushes out. The living room is still fine. Nobody noticed. And your dream got time for the first time in months.

Or take work. Say instead of answering every message the moment it lands, you check twice a day, once mid-morning and once before you finish. Nothing falls apart. But suddenly there's a clear stretch in your day where you can do the one piece of work that actually matters, and you finish your day having done it, instead of finishing your day having answered forty messages and wondering where the time went. Fewer late nights catching up. More of you left over when you walk through the door.

That's the whole idea. You're not adding anything. You're taking a little away, and pointing what's left at something you chose.

Let One Thing Go This Week

So here's the one thing I'd love you to do this week.

Grab a piece of paper, or open the notes app on your phone, and make two columns. Work, and home. Under each one, jot down what filled your past week. Don't overthink it. Just the things that took your time.

Then circle the one or two in each column that actually moved something you care about. Those are your vital few.

And last, pick one thing that isn't circled. Just one. Decide whether you'll drop it, shrink it, or hand it off this week. Then give that time to your dream's fifteen minutes.

When you've circled your few and chosen the one thing you're letting go of, you're done.

If it would help to see where that freed-up time could actually go in your real day, this is exactly what the Anchor Map walks you through. It's free, you name the dream you want more room for, it shows you where your pockets of time really land, and it has you plant one 15-minute anchor in your actual day. About five minutes, at timeforliving.co/anchormap.

Most of your day wasn't moving anything. That's the good news. It means there's room.

You don't need a quieter life or a longer day to start on your dream. You need to stop giving your best hours to things that were never going to move anything. Let a little of it go, and the day that's left feels lighter, and more like yours. More evenings where you're actually present with the people you love, instead of halfway through the next job. And finally, a real place in your week for the dream that's been waiting so patiently.

Next week, I want to talk about the to-do list itself. Because "buy a new fridge" looks like one quick job, but it's really a whole chain of little tasks hiding behind one line. When your list makes everything look smaller than it is, you end up blaming yourself, and next week we'll look at how to make your list tell the truth.

Thanks for being here. I'll see you next week.