Pareto rules OK?

If you had a graph with "effort" along the horizontal axis and "result" up the vertical one, what would you expect? Probably that the ensuing line would be a straight rising diagonal - that is, twice the effort would produce twice the result, five times the effort, five times the result and so on. But almost certainly this wouldn't be so - what you would get would be an initially steeply rising line which then more or less flattens out and the point at which it starts to flatten out would be where "effort" was about 20% and "result" about 80%. This is known as the Pareto Principle, and states that in most areas of human endeavour, 80% of output comes from 20% of input. It is also known as The Law of Diminishing Returns, which says that there comes a point at which putting more resources in produces less and less of an improvement in whatever it is you are trying to achieve. So what relevance has this to everyday life? Well, for example, it tells you that if you're cleaning your house, or weeding your garden, you can do around 80% of it in 20% of the time it would take you to do the whole job. If you look in your wardrobe, you will probably find that you wear 20% of your clothes 80% of the time, and the same proportions almost certainly extend to your use of things like your record or book collection. What you do with this information is of course another matter, but it's food for thought, isn't it?