This sounds like “apply the 80⁄20 rule to everything,” which I think is extremely useful advice.
Advice along the lines of “if you’re going to do it, do it right” or “why half-ass two things if you can whole-ass one thing” strikes me as among the most perniciously bad advice we give in American culture—and we give it a lot.
Life is short and prioritization is real. Are you doing things to impress people, or to get things done (yes it is necessary to impress people some of the time, but getting a lot of stuff done, including finding time for joy, can be impressive).
When I helped run a neuroscience research lab, half of my job was reminding detail-oriented scientists “the perfect is the enemy of the good!” and applying the 80⁄20 rule discerningly to think about what work would produce progress most efficiently. It was constantly surprising to me how useful this was, at least in that setting.
Hey, I actually had to Google the 80⁄20 rule because it wasn’t too familiar to me.
80% of the output comes from 20% of the input.
I like applying this idea to my example a lot. Doing a job 20% of the way will have high yield results, after that… the effort to result tradeoff begins to fall off and you get less for your effort.
This sounds like “apply the 80⁄20 rule to everything,” which I think is extremely useful advice.
Advice along the lines of “if you’re going to do it, do it right” or “why half-ass two things if you can whole-ass one thing” strikes me as among the most perniciously bad advice we give in American culture—and we give it a lot.
Life is short and prioritization is real. Are you doing things to impress people, or to get things done (yes it is necessary to impress people some of the time, but getting a lot of stuff done, including finding time for joy, can be impressive).
When I helped run a neuroscience research lab, half of my job was reminding detail-oriented scientists “the perfect is the enemy of the good!” and applying the 80⁄20 rule discerningly to think about what work would produce progress most efficiently. It was constantly surprising to me how useful this was, at least in that setting.
Hey, I actually had to Google the 80⁄20 rule because it wasn’t too familiar to me.
80% of the output comes from 20% of the input.
I like applying this idea to my example a lot. Doing a job 20% of the way will have high yield results, after that… the effort to result tradeoff begins to fall off and you get less for your effort.
Thanks for the insight