My 90/10 Rule—How I'm so effective
The story of how I accidentally stumbled upon the Pareto Principle, with my own unique twist
The Pareto Principle says that “80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes” which is nice and all but I didn’t learn about this until more than a decade after I reverse-engineered this idea on my own.
My 90/10 rule:
Try to get 90% of the results with only 10% of the effort.
That may seem absurd or aspirational, and it doesn’t always work, but more often than not, it does.
Backstory
I got my IT career started in late 2006 and early 2007, just in time for the Great Recession (yay!) but after I got settled in and back on my feet, I realized that a ton of people in the technology space would rather work hard than smart. What I mean by that is that most people seem to prefer to do things the mundane, single-threaded, obvious way. If there’s a fire put it out. If a customer is complaining, blame the customer. There have been numerous times where I’ve seen fellow technologists say “Oh yeah, Windows is crap!” to which I respond “You just don’t know how to manage it properly.” This is a basic tenet of psychology: people externalize failures.
After a while, I realized that my IT instructor had been right. He’d been my teacher for my A+ and Net+ certification, a great big semi-retired tech guy who looked like Santa Clause. Here’s more or less what he said:
If you’re doing it right, you should be asleep at your desk most days. If you’re doing it wrong, running around with your head on fire, you’re not really solving problems.
That lesson stuck with me. What I discovered was that it was not a matter of working hard—running around exhaustively stamping out every fire reactively—it was a matter of removing fire hazards in the first place. Which led to my first, and greatest, principle of IT:
1. The best crisis is no crisis
Proactive work and reducing technical debt sounds like a lot of work… until you have to pull an all-nighter on a disaster that was 100% preventable. Then you realize “Oh wait, that would have literally taken me five minutes to prevent, if only I’d just done things right.”
Talk about work reduction. This is more like a 99:1 reduction of workload. All it requires is a few more principles:
2. Best practices are there for a reason
When I was young, I always wanted to figure things out for myself. I despised the tried-and-true way. I didn’t want to be spoon-fed the answer or even the method. I wanted to reverse engineer everything for myself, to have gone through the experience of figuring it out the hard way.
Needless to say, I spent a lot of time spinning my wheels in life. Eventually I learned “Sometimes, the old way is the best way.”
Eventually, I gave myself the nickname “Mr. Best Practices” because, well, I realized that a big reason that people work harder, not smarter, is because they ignore braindead simple recommendations from vendors and industry leaders.
I could go into other principles, but honestly these two are perhaps the most universal. My key point here is that the behaviors you think are essential might not be. Sometimes, getting the right result requires an entirely different set of behaviors. Instead of the break-fix firefighting approach that most people take to problems, I generally try to take a proactive/preventative approach.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Certainly, not all industries and projects work this way. Some things really do require sweat equity. Even so, there are countless stories of entrepreneurs spending countless hours doing unproductive things, and as a solopreneur, I’ve found that the 90/10 rule still serves well.
It’s all about the signal-to-noise ratio. There are some behaviors, activities, and decisions that just move the ball down the field faster. When I first got into the solo space, I worked myself to the bone doing things that didn’t really seem to help. Here’s an example: I do very little editing on my videos and they are all done in one take.
When I first got on YouTube I discovered that (1) I hated editing (2) it was extremely time consuming and (3) I could subvert most editing by simply getting better at speaking. This is just another example of how that 90/10 rule seems to be universal. To find your 10% effort leverage point, ask these questions:
What activities ACTUALLY move the needle?
Which activities don’t seem to matter that much?
Is there another way to do this?
What’s my biggest constraint right now?
What is the only true essential factor here?
These questions are just a starting point, but once you cultivate this mentality it becomes automatic. In Chinese philosophy they say that words are like the net you use to catch the fish—the actual valuable idea—and that once you have the fish, you no longer need the net.
Treat this article like a net, but the idea that the words are orbiting as the fish. The Chinese believe that words are always inadequate, always fall short of the subjective experience of knowing and understanding.
Now, if you want more like this, please join my Pathfinders community. I’ve just started adding custom GPT’s that serve as adjutants to help with the learning process.
Good stuff Dave. Your productivity has always mystified me. I thought you must eat plutonium for breakfast.
Great article David! Typo alert, "say that words ARE like the net"