The Pareto principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule (or the principle of factor sparsity if you are that way inclined) is very important. It basically means that 80% of effect comes from 20% of causes. While it is traditionally applied to business and economics, it can have very useful applications in your day-to-day life. For instance, 80% of the mess in our homes happens to take place in 20% of our rooms (usually the kitchen and living room because of the amount of activity that takes place in them). Also, you could say that 80% of our reading time is spent on 20% of our books (we all have our favourites that we like to revisit every so often, after all). Knowing that, what do you do with the 80% of books you hardly look at?

It’s worth noting that the Pareto principle is not an actual mathematical formula and it isn’t scientifically accurate so there is no need to get your calculator out and start doing your sums. You probably won’t have exactly 20% of your clutter taking up exactly 80% of your space, sometimes it might be a 90/10 split, 73/27 split or even 79/10 split (one common statistic used is how 1% of films produce 80% of yearly profits). It’s not so much the numbers but what they imply. There are many natural occurrences where clumping together of factors seems to occur on a very regular basis (whether it be simply the amount of clutter compared to space or on a larger scale the total earnings spread over a population). In terms of clutter you will typically have a situation where a small group of distinct items (such as old televisions, bags or boxes of memorabilia) take up the largest bulk of your space in a room and also take up the longest time to process.

The Pareto principle is very useful to keep in mind as you de-clutter and cut back on stuff like your clothes, magazines and other products. For instance, knowing that you only use 20% of your make-up 80% of the time means you can be a bit less picky about what items you choose to keep and how much you throw away. No longer do all those lipsticks seem indispensable. Likewise, knowing which rooms take the most effort to clean means you can juggle the amount of time you spend on them and manage your time and energy better. The bathroom and kitchen can get twice as much of your attention because they are the rooms that are used the most, whereas the hallway can be a secondary concern. There is no point focusing on it when the gains are minimal in comparison. I will be discussing more practical implementations of this principle when I look at individual rooms in the next chapter.