Make PARETO your best buddy…

Today, because of the ongoing trend in corporate downsizings, those employees who survive the cutbacks inherit massive workloads which once were done by other employees. Work is now being mercilessly piled onto those survivors.

Fear, stress and anxiety among the survivors motivates them to want to do 100% of everything and to do so in ways that exceed management expectations. This attitude among remaining employees is a sure-fire formula for major worker health issues. To protect one’s health and still exceed management expectations under conditions of growing workloads, it is incumbent upon the employee to work smarter. How can employees step up to the challenge and still have a so-called life?

Combine the Pareto Principle with GEMO and apply that combo to accomplish the most-important outputs required from massive workloads.

You can check my END NOTE to learn more about the Pareto Principle for your workload. In short, “Pareto-ing” everything is one sure step to success.

The PARETO Principle aims at the most significant, not everything.

In addition, add to your repertoire the concept of GEMO, an attitude more than hard science.

If you force yourself to do 100% “just to be safe”, then you failed to apply GEMO and failed at understanding the usefulness of the Pareto Principle.

GEMO = GOOD ENOUGH! MOVE ON!   The Pareto Principle can be useful in determining what constitutes GEMO. But learning to stop and use your own common sense can be equally effective, and quicker, and will get better with experience.

To use the common sense approach to using GEMO stop yourself after accomplishing parts of a task to determine how much more must be done in order to derive SUFFICIENT, not optimum, advantage.  Is 30% completion sufficient? 50%?  60%?  75%? What more, if anything, constitutes SUFFICIENT?

When you reached “sufficient” or “good enough”, move on!

Direct your efforts to outputs and results that matter most, using Pareto, and test your efforts and actions, almost constantly, for GEMO.

END NOTE

I’ve written about PARETO in previous Nuggets which are well worth revisiting. To Nuggets, about putting Pareto to work, are presented here for your convenience: