Here’s a few tidbits, gaggle of truisms that you might find useful.
The 80/20 rule.
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. (Check out the wikipedia article for more background).
Basically this means 80% of the audience opinion will come from 20% of the lecture. 20% of the comedy set jokes will generate 80% of the laughter.
So does this mean that we could perhaps drop 80% of what we do and trim our efforts down to the 20% that “get the job done”? Maybe…, but it is not certain. Some times the 80% is part of the process.
Many songs are 80% silence and 20% notes. What if we removed the silence and trimmed the song down to just the notes?
I suspect that in many situations a little “trim” is in order. But, let’s not be too quick to judge what is the 20% and what is the 80%.
Parkinson’s Law.
Parkinson’s law is the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. (wikipedia) Or, in other words, you can probably get the job done faster than you think. E.J. Gold refers to this as the busy desk syndrome. Meaning if you want to get something done fast put it on the desk of someone that is busy. A busy person has great throughput. A non-busy person might look like they would have more time available to do your task. But, Parkinson’s Law tells us that however few tasks they currently have the work they do for those tasks has expanded to fill available time. Continue reading →
