The Pareto Principle - 80% of results come from 20% of the work

People talk about the Pareto principle in all sorts of contexts like work, money, or stress. And although it works across lots of topics, I'm going to spend 2008 focusing it on my work. (Sort of a New Year's resolution goal for myself.)

For reference, the Pareto principle says that 80% of effects come from 20% of causes. Applying this to work, that means that 80% of the results come from 20% of the work you do right? Maybe...but does that mean that you don't have to do all the other work too? It could if you know how to pick the right 20% to focus on. This is obviously the hard part.

Everyone in the workforce knows how hard it is to maintain a healthy balance between work and personal life. Projects get pushed on you unexpectedly, meetings consume your time, and emails destroy your productivity. But if you just pick the right ones, you could still get nearly the same results without wasting time on the less important stuff. I'm not saying people should blow off everything else, but just prioritize things aggressively based on the impact of the results.

Here are some things to ask yourself when deciding what to do. Remember, it's all about the results.

• What's the purpose or agenda for this meeting? Will decisions be made or is it purely sharing information? What's the result?


• Do I need to attend the meeting? Am I presenting at the meeting?


• What other results could I achieve if I don't attend this meeting?


• Will this help me/my department/the company in a measurable way?


• Will anyone care if this doesn't get done?


• What will this change? How big of an impact will it have?


• Is someone counting on me for this deliverable or information?


• What are the consequences of this not getting done?


• Who will notice these results?


• Is there an easier way to get the same results?

So stopping killing yourself trying to do it all and just pick the most important stuff. Spend the rest of the time enjoying your life.

Killing Bureaucracy at Work

Last week while sitting in one of many meetings, the presenter started talking about "restructuring" this meeting for 2008. This is normally a 1 hour, weekly, cross-functional meeting where people from various teams share status updates. It already sounds boring and bureaucratic right? Well it's going to get even worse this year. The meeting is breaking into 7 sub-teams plus a "steering committee." Each of these teams will no doubt have their own meetings.

So we just went from consuming 10 hours of a week (1 hour times 10 meeting attendees) to monopolizing more of people's time that they could otherwise spend being productive.

As this was announced, I hope nobody saw me roll my eyes and scribble in my notes, "This is bureaucracy at it's finest." But why is bureaucracy so bad and what can we do about it?

Jack Welch happened to cover that topic in the December 24th, 2007 issue of BusinessWeek.

"It sucks the life out of a business. It turns normal people, granted a smidgen of authority, into rule-bound technocrats and twists candid conversation about real issues into jargon...

Make people uncomfortable about scheduling formal presentations, especially if they involve slides in a darkened room. That practice is a total bureaucracy enabler. It makes idea transfer to one-way and ceremonial! What you want instead is an organization where ideas flow freely up, down, and sideways, along halls, in elevators."

So the next time you're thinking of giving a PowerPoint presentation, do everyone a favor and ask yourself "Why?" Instead, focus your efforts on more informal, frequent, and open sharing of ideas.

Full article - BusinessWeek.com - Death to Bureaucracy

Will Blogs Give an Accurate Picture of Society?

An article at Lifehack.org titled, "How to use your blog to make 2008 your best year ever"got me thinking about the usefulness of blogs on a personal level. The post sums up a lot of the reasons I enjoy blogging but thinking about the future I wonder how blogs will be representative of society.

In many ways, I feel that blogs are a much more accurate description of people, events, thoughts, and attitudes than some other biased source like the news or magazines. With that in mind, I hope the companies running blog services are committed to retaining blog content for a long time.

When historians look back on society 200 or 300 years from now, blogs will paint a very vivid picture of people's attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors in a very raw form. I'd argue this is a more accurate description of our current world than textbooks or news archives could provide. (Of course, news archives are good at chronicling major events.) Look at it from today's perspective, anthropologists get extremely excited when they find old journals or notebooks from ancient people and blogs are just a modern form of that.

Make the Most Out of Luck in Your Career

One of my favorite sites, ZenHabits.net, had a great article about "How to make the most out of luck in your career and life." For those of you that don't believe in luck, take a look and see what you think. Even if things happen by random chance, you still need to be able to recognize these opportunities and act on them.

One of my favorite tips from the article is:

Always keep your options open. Goals are good. But single-minded devotion to a goal can often blind one to other opportunities. It’s also a mistake to cling to a path you hate out of a sense of obligation. If you enter law school and discover you hate it, quit. Don’t endure years of misery because you feel it’s expected of you. “Refuse to serve a life sentence of misery,” the authors write. You have more options than you think. But you may need to open your eyes to see them

Another good tip is keeping yourself open to new things and new ideas. Don't be afraid to say "Yes" to unplanned events. Chances are, you'll experience something new and might get lucky.

How To Make The Most Out Of Luck In Your Career And Life - ZenHabits.net

Why You Should Under-Promise and Over-Deliver

I apologize that I can't find the article anywhere online, but the November 19th, 2007 edition of BusinessWeek includes a story titled, "Mickey's Management Mojo" that I think is fitting for ThePoorMansMBA.com.

Essentially, the article talked about how Disney Land has a habit of under-promising and over-delivering. For example, they might have a sign that says the wait to ride Space Mountain is 45 minutes long. But when customers get on the ride after only 25 minutes, they're really happy. If the sign said 25 minutes and it took 40 would they be happy? What about if it said 25 minutes and it took 25 minutes?

Even though this is "one of the oldest tricks in the book," it's still an effective management technique. This often requires negotiation skills too. Try it at work on some simple action item that someone's given you. If they haven't already given you a due date, or even if they have, ask if you can have more time to work on it. Do this up front though, not the day before it's due because that's simply rude. Usually, they'll be ok with a longer timeframe if you give them enough notice.

But then surprise them by completing the task by the original due date. And if you can, go the extra mile on the task to really impress them. This will leave both of you feeling great about the work accomplished. It may seem somewhat manipulative to under promise and over deliver but having a buffer like this for due dates or the scope of a project can be really handy when you get some other last minute requests.

On the contrary, nobody likes the type of people who over-promise and can't deliver. Even those who are able to over-promise and still deliver set themselves up for problems and stress by spreading themselves too thin. Over-promising and under-delivering is a recipe for frustration, disappointment, and a bad reputation. But by effectively setting expectations you can turn that same amount of work into over-delivery simply by under-promising from the start.

Going back to basics is always a good idea

I'm a big fan of solving tough problems by going back to the basics. It's a tried and true method of getting things done. Some people try to pass themselves off as insanely smart by the way they talk and the complexity of the solutions they come up with. But I remember a saying I learned in engineering school, "Good engineers solve big problems with complex solutions you could never understand. Great engineers apply such simple solutions that you can't believe you didn't figure them out yourself."

This is true and is part of the reason why the subtitle of this blog includes "Focus on Fundamentals." You can't go wrong if you go back to the most basic building blocks of a theory.

A recent article about Google's datacenters also points out the power of relying on fundamental concepts. This time trusting that basic heat transfer theory will break new ground in datacenter design -- which is essentially a big heat transfer problem.

What we did at Google is essentially throw out the book on how to build data centers, and went back to basic heat transfer theory, went back to basic electrical theory, and essentially threw away everything that wasn't strictly necessary in sort of a minimalist design. Essentially the integrated circuit industry concept is step and repeat.

So the next time you think you're in over your head, don't try to wow the boss with a complicated solution. Instead, wow him or her with a simple solution that leaves them wondering why they hadn't come up with it. You'll gain respect and have less chance of screwing up.