Foresight is 80/20: A Principle for Helping BCBAs Bring Value Everyday
If you want to get ahead in ABA—or in any field—you have to ultimately do one thing.
You have to bring value.
Great. So what does that mean for our purposes today?
It means the professional that routinely selects the most high value tasks and performs them at a high frequency is getting ahead.
Which means, as BCBAs and Clinical Leaders, we have to hone our ability to quickly select the most valuable tasks available to us at any given time—and get after them.
This revelation hit home for me when I realized my daily to-do list, packed with 20-30 tasks, often left me feeling overwhelmed and unproductive. I usually found myself going home with half of my list unchecked, a glaring symbol of my perceived ineffectiveness. It felt like a relentless cycle of unfinished business and late nights.
Perfectionists like me hate leaving tasks incomplete, so this was pretty disheartening. My to-do list morphed into a "to-don’t" list, highlighting what I couldn’t accomplish rather than what I could.
Then it dawned on me: I am never going to get through all of these tasks in a given day or week…ever.
And then the ultimate epiphany: Not all of these tasks are of equal importance and value. So the trick isn’t to do them all, it’s to get really good at figuring out which ones are the most valuable.
The Transformative Power of the 80/20 Rule
Enter the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle. This principle, which posits that 80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts, revolutionized my approach to task management. The pattern of the 80/20 rule is pervasive across various aspects of life:
Travel: 20% of roads get us to 80% of our destinations.
Nutrition: 20% of the foods we eat provide 80% of our nourishment.
Relationships: 20% of our relationships account for 80% of our emotional fulfillment.
Applied to my to-do list, the 80/20 rule revealed that a small fraction of tasks held the majority of importance. With 20 tasks on my list, only four or five were truly essential. This realization shifted my focus to what really mattered, easing my anxiety and boosting my productivity.
Practical Strategies for Implementing the 80/20 Rule
Here’s how I integrated the 80/20 rule into my daily routine, along with some practical tips that worked for me:
Creating a Task Bank:
I maintained a comprehensive task bank, listing all potential tasks and adding new ones as they arose.
Each evening, I extracted the top-priority tasks based on the 80/20 rule to form my next day’s to-do list.
Individual Learner To-Do Lists:
Creating separate to-do lists for each learner helped me prioritize tasks specific to the clients I’d see that day.
While flexibility was necessary, this approach kept me organized and focused.
The Vacation Test:
When reviewing my task bank, I asked myself, “If I were going on a two-week vacation tomorrow, which tasks would need to be completed?”
This question helped me identify truly critical tasks.
Consulting with Supervisors:
Regular discussions with my supervisor provided clarity on priorities, ensuring alignment with broader organizational goals.
This feedback helped me adjust my plans as needed, enhancing my efficiency.
“Long-Boring-Ugly” Test:
When looking at this task bank, I started to ask myself several other questions about my to-do list on which tasks require the most time, patience, and/or concentration: “Which of these tasks are going to take me forever to finish/will be the most boring/test my competence and professionalism? Which am I avoiding more than others?”
If there are tasks that fall under the above categories, this is a clue that they might be pretty valuable. Completing them creates and maintains valuable productive momentum and a general feeling of value and fulfillment. All other tasks are reinforcing compared to these “long-boring-ugly” ones (Premack anyone?).
What methods are you using these days to help you prioritize?