I’m rereading Richard Koch’s The 80/20 Principle again. I have no idea how many times I’ve read it, but in the age of AI and the speed of life these days it seems more relevant than ever.

And every time I come back to it, I find something I missed, forgot, and have failed to implement in some way.

If you’re not familiar with the book, the core idea is this: roughly 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your clients. 80% of your problems come from 20% of your people. The distribution shows up everywhere – in business, in nature, in your inbox, in your relationships – even in traffic (20% of intersections cause 80% of delays, etc.)

It was first observed by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto in 1897, who noticed that 80% of the land in England was owned by 20% of the population. He kept testing it in different contexts, different countries, different time periods. The shape of the distribution kept showing up.

Koch took that observation and his has spent his career asking: what do we do with it.

80/20 Is a Floor, Not a Ceiling

Koch is clear about this in the book: 80/20 is not a magic formula. It’s an empirical observation. And the actual ratio is often more extreme. It’s rarely exact, but close enough to be a pattern.

It might be 90/10. It might be 95/5. He’s seen 99/1 distributions — fewer than 1% of words used in common speech account for 80% of all usage. In 2011, Apple had just 4% market share in cellphones. But it captured more than 50% of the total profits across the entire cellphone industry.

Koch’s argument — and I think he’s right — is that the digital age has made this more extreme, not less. Networks amplify imbalance. The platforms, tools, and businesses that win tend to win disproportionately. The ones that lose tend to disappear entirely.

So if we’re thinking in 80/20 terms, we might actually be undershooting.

The real question now isn’t “which 20% matters most?”

It’s “which 5-10% matters most and is doing the actual heavy lifting?”

What This Looks Like at my company – Expio Marketing

We work with clients on digital marketing strategy, and this lens changes everything about how we approach a project.

Most businesses we talk to are spreading their time, budget, and attention across six or seven marketing channels. A little SEO here. Some social media there. A few Google ads. Maybe some email. Maybe some video. Maybe even some direct mail.

And when we dig into the data, almost every time, one or two of those channels are driving the vast majority of the leads and revenue. They all matter to some extent. But to what extent, in what order, and with what alignment and role in the marketing journey?

We want to avoid consuming resources, creating busywork, being tactics or trend focused, and producing noise.

The 80/20 question — or really the 90/10 question — is: what if we stopped doing the five things that aren’t working and went all-in on the one or two that are? Or, at least, what if we realigned how these channels are working together?

Not because the other channels are bad in theory. But because for this client, in this market, at this moment, they’re not the 20%. And pretending they are is costing real money.

This is harder than it sounds. Clients (and agencies) get attached to activity. Doing more things feels like doing more work. But Koch’s whole argument is that most activity is irrelevant to results. And the courage to cut is often worth more than the creativity to add.

So What Do You Do With the Other 80%?

This is the practical question most people don’t answer. Identifying the vital few is often difficult. Deciding what to do with everything else is often much harder.

A few approaches that actually work:

Eliminate it. The most underused option. If something isn’t producing results and isn’t legally or operationally required, stop doing it. Not “pause it.” Stop.

Delegate it. The 80% that’s low-value for you might be exactly the right work for someone else on your team. One person’s administrative drag is another person’s core competency.

Automate it. A lot of the 80% is repetitive, rule-based work that a system or AI can handle better than a human. If you’re doing the same task more than three times a week, it’s worth asking whether a tool or a template could do it instead.

Batch it. If you can’t eliminate, delegate, or automate — compress it. Do all the low-value work in a single block of time so it doesn’t bleed into the hours where you do your best thinking.

Accept it and do it last. Some 80% work just has to get done. Fine. Do it at the end of the day, at the end of the week, with whatever energy is left — not with your prime hours.

The goal isn’t to pretend the 80% doesn’t exist. It’s to stop treating it like it deserves the same attention as the 20%.

The next time you’re looking at your to-do list, your marketing plan, your client roster, or your calendar — ask yourself two questions:

Which 10% of this is actually driving 90% of the results?

And what would change if I treated everything else accordingly?

You can’t always eliminate the 80%. But you have enormous influence over how much of your best energy it gets.

Comment with questions or approaches that have worked for you!

See you next Saturday.