Seems legit.

80% of profits come form 20% of employees, 80% of customer service complaints come from 20% of customers, 80% of your grades come from 20% of the work you do?

The more I thought about this the more it actually started to make sense. I know Barabasi said that applying the 80/20 rule to just about anything would be a “gross overstatement”, it does seem to fit for a lot of common, non-businness, situations.

The pessimist in me would infer from this that 4/5 of all my efforts would be largely irrelevant, yet it seems that this is not entirely untrue. If I take my academic work for example, for most classes 80% of my final mark comes from only about 20% of my time spent working for that class, whether that be essays or other assignments. Of all the work I do, only 20% will be marked towards my final grade. But does that mean that the other 80% of the work I did for that class becomes irrelevant?

What about all the readings and notes I took? I spent way more time in the semester reading and going to class or lectures than I did on my assignments. But without those readings and notes, would I have been able to complete my assignments? Doesn’t that mean that more of my efforts have contributed to my results, if indirectly?

Would this apply to business oriented models of the 80/20 rule? Would that 20% of the workforce have been able to produce that 80% of the profits for a company without the help of another percentage of the workforce?…