Find the 20% of activities driving 80% of my results
Runs a Pareto analysis to show the few activities, customers, or products producing most of your results, and what to cut or double down on.
The prompt
Help me find the 20% of activities driving 80% of the results.
What I'm measuring results by: [revenue, profit, leads, closed deals, customer outcomes, hours saved]
Data: [PASTE a list of activities, customers, products, channels, or tasks with the result each produced, and the effort or cost each takes if known]
Time period: [e.g. last 12 months]
Decision I want to make: [e.g. "where to focus my team's time next quarter"]
Steps:
1. Rank the items by result, largest first, and calculate each item's share and the cumulative share.
2. Identify the vital few: the smallest group that produces about 80% of the result. Report the actual split (it may be 70/30 or 90/10, not exactly 80/20).
3. If effort or cost is given, calculate result per unit of effort and find the high-effort, low-result items.
4. Check the analysis for traps: one-off large items skewing the picture, items that enable others (e.g. a low-revenue product that brings in big customers), and results that are lagging from past effort.
5. Group everything into: double down, maintain, fix, or stop.
Return:
1. A ranked table: Item | Result | % of total | Cumulative % | Effort or cost | Result per unit of effort | Group.
2. The vital few in one sentence with the real split.
3. What I could stop or reduce, and the time or money it frees.
4. Caveats and what to check before acting.
5. Instructions to build the same Pareto chart in Excel.
Use my numbers only and show the calculations. Don't invent effort figures; if missing, mark [NEED EFFORT DATA].
Highlighted [brackets] are blanks to replace with your own details.
Fill in the blanks and use this promptMore Data & Analysis prompts
What to fill in
- e.g. last 12 months
- e.g. "where to focus my team's time next quarter"
- NEED EFFORT DATA
How this prompt is built
This prompt follows the Few-Shot structure (Few-shot prompting). A few-shot prompt includes one or more worked examples of the input and the output you want, so the model can copy the pattern instead of guessing it.
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