Not everyone will share this exact goal or supporting activities, but hopefully you’ll stipulate that they apply to many people. Let’s now step back and apply our strategy’s filtering logic to the example of Facebook in the context of this personal goal. This service, of course, offers any number of benefits to your social life. To name a few that are often mentioned: It allows you to catch up with people you haven’t seen in a while, it allows you to maintain lightweight contact with people you know but don’t run into regularly, it allows you to more easily monitor important events in people’s lives (such as whether or not they’re married or what their new baby looks like), and it allows you to stumble onto online communities or groups that match your interests.
These are real benefits that Facebook undeniably offers, but none of these benefits provide a significant positive impact to the two key activities we listed, both of which are offline and effort intensive. Our strategy, therefore, would return a perhaps surprising but clear conclusion: Of course Facebook offers benefits to your social life, but none are important enough to what really matters to you in this area to justify giving it access to your time and attention.*
To be clear, I’m not arguing that everyone should stop using Facebook. I’m instead showing that for this specific (representative) case study, the strategy proposed here would suggest dropping this service. I can imagine, however, other plausible scenarios that would lead to the opposite conclusion. Consider, for example, a college freshman. For someone in this situation, it might be more important to establish new friendships than to support existing relationships. The activities this student identifies for supporting his goal of a thriving social life, therefore, might include something like, “attend lots of events and socialize with lots of different people.” If this is a key activity, and you’re on a college campus, then a tool like Facebook would have a substantially positive impact and should be used.
To give another example, consider someone in the military who’s deployed overseas. For this hypothetical soldier, keeping in frequent lightweight touch with friends and family left back home is a plausible priority, and one that might once again be best supported through social networks.
What should be clear from these examples is that this strategy, if applied as described, will lead many people who currently use tools like Facebook or Twitter to abandon them—but not everyone. You might, at this point, complain about the arbitrariness of allowing only a small number of activities to dominate your decisions about such tools. As we established previously, for example, Facebook has many benefits to your social life; why would one abandon it just because it doesn’t happen to help the small number of activities that we judged most important? What’s key to understand here, however, is that this radical reduction of priorities is not arbitrary, but is instead motivated by an idea that has arisen repeatedly in any number of different fields, from client profitability to social equality to prevention of crashes in computer programs.
The Law of the Vital Few*: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.
For example, it might be the case that 80 percent of a business’s profits come from just 20 percent of its clients, 80 percent of a nation’s wealth is held by its richest 20 percent of citizens, or 80 percent of computer software crashes come from just 20 percent of the identified bugs. There’s a formal mathematical underpinning to this phenomenon (an 80/20 split is roughly what you would expect when describing a power law distribution over impact—a type of distribution that shows up often when measuring quantities in the real world), but it’s probably most useful when applied heuristically as a reminder that, in many cases, contributions to an outcome are not evenly distributed.
Moving forward, let’s assume that this law holds for the important goals in your life. As we noted, many different activities can contribute to your achieving these goals. The law of the vital few, however, reminds us that the most important 20 percent or so of these activities provide the bulk of the benefit. Assuming that you could probably list somewhere between ten and fifteen distinct and potentially beneficial activities for each of your life goals, this law says that it’s the top two or three such activities—the number that this strategy asks you to focus on—that make most of the difference in whether or not you succeed with the goal.
Even if you accept this result, however, you still might argue that you shouldn’t ignore the other 80 percent of possible beneficial activities. It’s true that these less important activities don’t contribute nearly as much to your goal as your top one or two, but they can provide some benefit, so why not keep them in the mix? As long as you don’t ignore the more important activities, it seems like it can’t hurt to also support some of the less important alternatives.
This argument, however, misses the key point that all activities, regardless of their importance, consume your same limited store of time and attention. If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you’re taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It’s a zero-sum game. And because your time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high-impact activities than when invested in low-impact activities, the more of it you shift to the latter, the lower your overall benefit.
The business world understands this math. This is why it’s not uncommon to see a company fire unproductive clients. If 80 percent of their profits come from 20 percent of their clients, then they make more money by redirecting the energy from low-revenue clients to better service the small number of lucrative contracts—each hour spent on the latter returns more revenue than each hour spent on the former. The same holds true for your professional and personal goals. By taking the time consumed by low-impact activities—like finding old friends on Facebook—and reinvesting in high-impact activities—like taking a good friend out to lunch—you end up more successful in your goal. To abandon a network tool using this logic, therefore, is not to miss out on its potential small benefits, but is instead to get more out of the activities you already know to yield large benefits.
To return to where we started, for Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, and George Packer, Twitter doesn’t support the 20 percent of activities that generate the bulk of the success in their writing careers. Even though in isolation this service might return some minor benefits, when their careers are viewed as a whole, they’re likely more successful not using Twitter, and redirecting that time to more fruitful activities, than if they added it into their schedule as one more thing to manage. You should take this same care in deciding which tools you allow to claim your own limited time and attention.
Quit Social Media