Listen to this post: You can download the MP3 file, subscribe in iTunes, or listen with Stitcher. I’ve written previously about the inefficiency of context-switching and how Kanban can regulate the flow of tasks. To give you a sense of my day, last week I started regulating tasks following Kanban principles. To the right of my desk, I have a whiteboard where I wrote the three tasks I wanted to accomplish that day. During the day, other tasks kept getting added to my plate, so I noted them by writing them on the same whiteboard below a horizontal line. By the end of the day, my whiteboard looked like a jumble of notes written by someone who is scattered-brained: I didn’t act on each of these incoming tasks but rather noted them only and later, at the end of the day, entered them in an issue tracking system to tackle later. By doing this, I was attempting to regulate the flow of tasks. However, as you can see, at this rate I’m only getting more and more buried in work. Limiting the flow of tasks may help me avoid burnout, but it’s clearly not cutting through the pile of to-do items here. I’m only getting more and more behind. That’s why I started reading Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Work Week. What stood out most to me in Ferriss’ ideas is to apply the 80-20 rule, or Pareto’s Law, to all aspects of my life. Ferriss says: Pareto’s Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs. Alternative ways to phrase this, depending on the context, include: 80% of the consequences flow from 20% of the causes. 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort and time. 80% of the company profits come from 20% of the products and customers. 80% of all stock market gains are realized by 20% of the investors and 20% of an individual portfolio. Let’s apply this to the goal of handling two major projects at once. Suppose you have 10 tasks to complete for Project A, and another 10 to complete with Project B. Identify the 20% that is responsible for the 80% – that is, identify the two most important tasks from each project that actually matter to customers, and tackle those. This means you only have 4 tasks to complete total, instead of 20. Now juggling two projects suddenly seems much more practical. If the 80-20 rule really holds true, this approach might let me actually tackle both projects in a semi-feasible way. Ferriss explains that a lot of people will keep busy all day by completing a list of trivial tasks without actually focusing on those tasks that truly matter. He says, Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness–lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective–doing less–is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest…. It’s easy to get caught in a flood of minutiae, and the key to not feeling rushed is remembering that *lack of time is actually lack of priorities. Previously, when I had a list of 20 tasks to complete, I would often pick tasks that I thought I could easily finish, since this accomplishment would give me momentum and energy to keep moving through the list. But focusing on more trivial tasks isn’t the right approach. Ferriss says, “Doing something well does not make it important. … What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.” No matter what project management approach you use, or what software tools you employ, it doesn’t matter if you’re focusing on the wrong tasks. Ferriss says that about 95% of his customer base was taking up almost all of his time but producing very little in terms of revenue. Instead, the top revenue was coming from just 3% of his customers. So he fired 95% of his customers and focused his attention on the top 3%. In short, he applied the 80-20 rule with his customers. To focus on those 80-20 tasks, Ferris says to limit your day to tackli