Pareto principle 2.0
Everyone knows the 80-20 rule (aka Pareto principle). If you never heard of it, I urge you to read about it. It is very useful and oh so true. I use it all the time and recently found that although true, the principle had to be expanded into a new, broader principle. Of course, everyone knows that the numbers can be switched so that 20% of your time will allow you to create 80% of your project and the remaining 20% will require 80% of your time. So far so good.
However, and please forgive me if this not new as I haven’t done any research on updated Pareto principles, I believe that the 80-20 principle can be expanded in a few more phases. First the 90-10 rule where the remaining 10% of your project will require 90% of your work. Second, “the ultimate 100-0 rule” where no matter how hard you work on your project, you won’t be improving anything anymore. You basically can’t bring any value anymore. The 100-0 rule is very close to Peter’s principle but applied to a project rather than an individual.
Anyhow, I thought this could bring a smile to some…
I read a lot about the 80-20 principle and I understood it differently. The goal is not to reach the 100%-0% but it’s to work 20% of your time to achieve 80% of your potential.
The remaining 80% of your time should be used to do something else you really like : sport, reading, knitting… whatever you want.
I suggest you to read “The 80/20 Principle” by Richard Koch. This book changed my life…
well i think it’s a bit simplified, it’s more like an exponential curve.
In fact, as far as I know, this law can be applied to any sauce. I like to use it for projects but it can also be applied to people – my favorite :) In which, 80% of people are idiots and 20% are smart (I’m not sure where I stand though..!)
It can certainly be used for productivity as you mentioned where the goal is to do 80% of your work while taking only 20% of the time. I have to admit that I haven’t had much success there. My wife complains when I don’t finish washing the dishes for example. Explaining the fact that I washed 80% of the dishes in 20% of the time will only make matters worse :)