Most of what you do on LinkedIn is a waste of time
Not all of it. Just most of it.
The Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule) says that 20% of your efforts produce 80% of your results. On LinkedIn, the ratio is probably worse. Maybe 10% of what you do actually matters. The rest is noise you've convinced yourself is productive.
Scrolling the feed. Liking random posts. Accepting every connection request. Posting content that gets 15 likes and zero business outcomes. All of it feels like you're doing something. None of it moves the needle.
The professionals who actually get results on LinkedIn figured out their 20% and ignore everything else. Here's how to find yours.
Your LinkedIn 20% falls into three categories
1. A handful of key relationships
Look at your LinkedIn network. You probably have hundreds or thousands of connections. How many have actually led to a conversation, an opportunity, or a deal?
For most people, the answer is fewer than 50. Often fewer than 20. These are your high-value connections, the people who respond to your messages, share your content, introduce you to others, or create real business opportunities.
Everyone else is background noise. They pad your connection count but contribute nothing to your goals.
The fix: Identify your top 20 to 30 connections. The people who actually matter. Engage with their content consistently. Prioritize their posts over everything else in your feed. Build depth with a few, not breadth with many.
2. One or two content formats that work
If you've posted on LinkedIn before, look at your last 20 posts. Sort them by engagement. You'll notice a clear pattern: 2 to 4 posts dramatically outperformed the rest.
Maybe personal stories work for you. Maybe step-by-step how-tos. Maybe contrarian takes on industry topics. Whatever it is, that's your format. The one your audience responds to.
Most people ignore this data. They keep experimenting with different formats, chasing trends, trying whatever's popular this week. That's the 80%: endless experimentation that produces mediocre results.
The fix: Double down on what works. If your audience loves tactical how-to posts, write more tactical how-to posts. Stop experimenting for the sake of experimenting. The data already told you what to do.
3. Strategic engagement over random activity
Not all LinkedIn activity is equal. One thoughtful comment on a decision-maker's post is worth more than 50 random likes. One DM to a warm lead is worth more than accepting 20 connection requests from strangers.
The 80% activity on LinkedIn looks like: scrolling the feed aimlessly, liking posts out of obligation, posting for the sake of "consistency," engaging with whoever happens to appear in your feed.
The 20% activity looks like: commenting on posts from people who matter to your goals, creating content that your target audience specifically finds valuable, having real conversations via DMs, building relationships with a focused group of connections.
How to find your specific 20%
Stop guessing. Look at the data.
Audit your posts. Which 2 to 3 posts in the last 3 months got the most engagement? What format were they? What topic? What time did you post them? That's your content 20%.
Audit your connections. Which 10 to 15 people have actually led to real conversations, opportunities, or business in the last year? Those are your relationship 20%.
Audit your time. For one week, track how you spend time on LinkedIn. How many minutes scrolling vs. commenting vs. creating vs. in DMs? You'll probably find that 80%+ of your time goes to low-value activities.
The audit takes 30 minutes. The clarity it gives you is worth months of unfocused LinkedIn activity.
The 80/20 LinkedIn routine
Once you've identified your 20%, build a routine around it. This should take 10 to 15 minutes per day, not more.
Daily (10 minutes):
Check posts from your top connections. Leave 2 to 3 thoughtful comments. Reply to any messages or comments on your own posts.
Weekly (30 minutes):
Write one piece of content in the format that works for your audience. Schedule it. Done.
Monthly (15 minutes):
Review what worked. Which posts performed? Which connections led to conversations? Adjust your 20% list if needed.
That's it. Ten minutes a day, plus one content session per week. Everything else (the scrolling, the random engagement, the endless feed) is the 80% you can safely ignore.
Why this is so hard to do
Because LinkedIn is designed to keep you in the 80%.
The feed shows you random content to keep you scrolling. Notifications pull you back for low-value interactions. The "post every day" advice makes you feel guilty for doing less. Vanity metrics (likes, impressions, follower count) make you think random activity is working.
Breaking out of the 80% requires discipline. It means closing LinkedIn after your 10-minute routine, even when there's more to scroll. It means ignoring posts that don't serve your goals, even if they're interesting. It means measuring conversations and opportunities instead of likes and impressions.
How MyFeedIn makes the 80/20 rule effortless
The hardest part of the 80/20 approach is filtering out the 80% of noise on LinkedIn. The default feed mixes your high-value connections with random content, ads, and engagement bait.
MyFeedIn eliminates the 80% automatically. Create a custom feed with only your top 20%, the connections, prospects, and industry voices that actually drive results. Open that feed instead of LinkedIn's default. See only the posts that matter. Engage strategically. Close the app.
No willpower needed. No algorithm to fight. Just a focused feed built around the 20% that actually produces results.
Stop doing everything on LinkedIn. Start doing the right things.