Contemporary · Decision-Making · X (Twitter) thread

80/20 Strategic Planning

Justin Mecham · 2025

"Most underperformance isn't from doing too little — it's from spending time on the wrong 80% of tasks, so applying the Pareto principle deliberately to planning (identifying and prioritizing the 20% of actions that drive most results) outperforms simply working harder or longer."

The idea

You're not doing too little. You're doing too many of the wrong things — and 'busy' has never been the same thing as 'productive.'

Why it works

The takeaway — recall it first

The Eisenhower Matrix

"Tasks fall into four categories along two independent axes — urgent versus not urgent, important versus not important — and most people's schedules are dominated by the urgent-but-unimportant quadrant, which crowds out the important-but-not-urgent work that actually compounds."

Attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower · FrameworkContinue→